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Melancholy, madness and nature
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tradition of Scottish songs and ballads as the basis of many of his
lyrical poems, some of which – like Auld Lang Syne and My Love Is
Like a Red, Red Rose – have become universally known.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?
(Auld Lang Syne)
As fair art thou, my bonnie dear,
So deep in love am I;
And I will love thee still, my dear,
Till all the seas gang dry.
(My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose)
Burns lived close to the land, and to poverty, all his life. The image
of him perpetrated by Wordsworth, walking ‘in glory and joy’ behind
his plough, is as false as was Goldsmith’s Arcadia: the poets who
brought their own lived experience of the natural world to bear on
their writing use no exaggeration or glorification in the picture they
give of rural life. Burns, Crabbe, and, later, John Clare are peasant
poets of the land, in a way that the Romantic poets would never be.
There were, of course, many women poets at the time; but Charlotte
Smith stands above the rest. Her Sonnet Written at the Close of Spring
(1782) provides a link between James Thomson, early in the century,
and the Romantics – with their concerns of nature and time:
Ah! poor humanity! so frail, so fair,
Are the fond visions of thy early day,
Till tyrant passion, and corrosive care,
Bid all thy fairy colours fade away!
Another May new buds and flowers shall bring;
Ah? why has happiness – no second Spring?
Smith also wrote expressively in The Emigrants (1793) of her
disillusionment with the French Revolution. Her maturity and wit can
be seen in Thirty-Eight, a poem to a woman friend on reaching that
august age, which is not unlike Lord Byron’s thoughts on reaching 30!