THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

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vernacular and in Scots traditions. Burns’s first published volume, the Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, of
which 612 copies were published in the provincial town of Kilmarnock in 1786, found a responsive enough local and
national audience, attuned to the literary use of the vernacular by the pioneering work of the poet and editor of earlier
verse, Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), and by the verse of Robert Fergusson (1750-74). But, as Sir Walter Scott later
noted, Burns had ‘twenty times’ the abilities of his predecessors.
Burns’s poetry always remained close to its vital roots in the oral traditions of Scotland. His work as a collector,
editor, and adaptor of folk-songs and popular airs eventually received European acclaim, but his keen ear for Scots
vocabulary, idiom, and rhythm also enabled him to transform folk-song into a poetry of his own. What he
acknowledged in his Commonplace Book as a ‘degree of wild irregularity’ in the songs of Ayrshire also stimulated
him to imagine that ‘it might be possible for a Scotch Poet, with a nice, judicious ear, to set compositions to many of
our favourite airs’. Many of his most circulated songs were set to old tunes, notably ‘Scots wha hae' of 1793, and ‘O
whistle an’ I’ll come to you, my lad’ and ‘The Birks of Aberfeldy’, both published in the volumes of The Scots
Musical Museum (1787-1803). Burns’s aspirations as a distinctly national poet emerge most fully in his dialect
poems. His verse in ‘standard’ English, even his musings on Scottish history and patriotism, is flat compared to his
evocations of locality through the medium of local language. Much of his finest work is satirical or descriptive of the
hardness of rural work, the uprightness of ‘honest poverty’, and the raucousness of country amusements. ‘The Twa
Dogs’, which voices the opinions of two dogs — one (called Caesar) a rich man’s, the other (called Luath) a
ploughman's collie — concerning the respective lifestyles of their masters, stands in the tradition of Scots animal
poems which dates back to Henryson, but it gives the tradition a new edge by exploiting the revolutionary questioning
of class privilege:
Our Laird gets in his racked rents,
His coals, his kain [farm produce], and a’ his stents [dues];
He rises when he likes himsel’;
His flunkies answer at the bell:
He ca’s his coach; he ca’s his horse
He draws a bonny silken purse
As lang’s my tail ...
. . . .
Our whipper-in, wee blastit wonner [wonder]!
Poor worthless elf! it eats a dinner
Better than ony tenant man
His Honour has in a’ the lan’;
An’ what poor cot-folk pit their painch [stomach] in,
I own its past my comprehension.
In ‘The Holy Fair’ and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, however, the satire is directed at exposing the double-standards which
challenge the illusion of Presbyterian
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respectability and solemnity. ‘Holy Willie’, a Kirk Elder, is given a monologue expressive both of conventional
moralizing piety and of a real, if only barely admitted, relish for the sins of the flesh (the poem was not included in
published collections until after Burns’s death). Burns’s most celebrated long poem, the verse-tale ‘Tam o’ Shanter’
(1791), contrasts the vividly sketched, welcoming interior of an inn with the unfriendly terrors of Tam’s frenzied
escape from a witches’ coven. The contrast is rendered particularly striking by Burns’s drolly ironic narrative manner.
Wordsworth
Burns’s expression of human solidarity which could dispense with class distinction was substantially derived from his
intimate understanding of the rural community from which he sprang. No poet of the period so effectively extended
this grasp of rural communal relationships as did William Wordsworth (1770-1850). Wordsworth’s admiration for
Burns’s achievement is evident both in the pilgrimage he made to Ayrshire in 1803 in search of sites associated with