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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

4 — The Man on the Horse

4

The Man on the Horse

It may seem unexpected, or even eccentric, that I should devote an entire talk to the analysis of one poem by an eighteenth century Scottish poet: Robert Burns’s ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. But for me it is the natural thing to do, because I have loved his work all my life, and so, possessing a Fellowship that carries his name, would be curiously ungrateful if I failed to make a public gesture of filial affection towards him. The work of Burns, hidden from most modern readers by a screen of dialect – though the Scots tongue is not mere dialect, but a portion of the matrix from which modern English rose, and to which it can rightly go back to refresh itself – the work of Burns is nowadays not so much neglected as honourably put on the shelf. Part of the reason for this is the public image of Burns as a Scottish national poet, a kind of ancestor figure belonging to the Scots but not to the English.

To me, though I write and speak in English, he is much nearer than Shakespeare; and the reason I prefer the ranting dog of Kilmarnock to the swan of Avon is, on the face of it, easy to find. Before I was six years old, I knew ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ by heart, and parts of other poems by Burns, having received them orally from my father, without whom I would never have come to a knowledge or practice of poetry. And when a small white book, the first book of verse I remember seeing, was put into my hands, it was a selection from Burns, a tribal gift, the book by which I could communicate with the dead and myself understand the language of the daimon. It was also a kind of protective talisman. The society into which I had been born (and, indeed, modern Western society in general) carries like strychnine in its bones a strong unconscious residue of the doctrines and ethics of Calvinism. I use the two heavy volumes of Calvin’s Institutes as paperweights, and also to give the impression I am a learned man; and dipping into them as one might dip for crayfish in a very muddy creek, I find these words in Book II, chapter 2, section 8:

. . . this perversity in us never ceases, but constantly produces new fruits, in other words, those works of the flesh which we formerly described; just as a lighted furnace sends forth sparks and flame, or a fountain without ceasing pours out water. Hence, those who have defined Original Sin as the want of the original righteousness which we ought to have had, though they substantially comprehend the whole case, do not significantly page 193 enough express its power and energy. For our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil, that it can never be idle. Those who term it concupiscence use a word not very appropriate, provided it were added (this, however, many will by no means concede), that everything which is in man, from the intellect to the will, from the soul even to the flesh, is defiled and pervaded with this concupiscence; or, to express it more briefly, that the whole man is in himself nothing else than concupiscence . . .

In Burns’s poems the struggle of the natural man against that inhuman crystalline vision of the total depravity of the flesh and the rigid holiness of the elect was carried out with superb energy, precision and humour. In particular, the poem ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ could transmit to a child’s mind, as if in a sealed packet, a positive understanding of the crises of the adult; and while I intend to explore the symbolic levels of the poem in the light of adult knowledge, and in a manner which Burn himself might not have consciously approved or visualised, the original connection was made quite simply, when I received the story at an age when the reactions all belong to the heart, and one distinguishes, as it were, warmth from cold, light from darkness.

The accident of receiving the Robert Burns Fellowship was therefore welcome to me for a symbolic reason: I could accept it as if from the ironic ghost of Burns (too long loved and too well known for any misunderstanding) and keep in mind his warning against those who try to court the daimon through scholarship:

A set o’ dull conceited hashes
Confuse their brains in college classes;
They gang in stirks, and come out asses,
Plain truth to speak;
An’ syne they think to climb Parnassus
By dint o’ Greek . . .

Twenty years ago, as an ineducable dry-throated student walking the streets of Dunedin, making good and bad poems and fighting like a ferret against whatever seemed likely to paralyse me, I would often look to the statue of Burns, with his back to the big cathedral and his face to the Oban Hotel, for approval and consolation. Later I mentioned the same statue in a short story:

At noon I walked down the sixty-eight steps at the back of the Town Hall. The town knew me, the heir to Adam’s lost fortune whom the lawyers had given up hope of finding; and I knew the town. It opened its brass-buttoned coat for me to hide inside. Robert Burns, two hundred years dry on his tree stump above the Octagon, waited for the traffic to stop so that he could step down to the Oban Hotel, bang on the bar and order a bucket page 194 of gin and Harpic . . . But the clock struck twelve, scattering pigeons over the sun-roofed town, They roosted again on Robert Burns, clucking and dropping their dung on his ploughman’s collar . . .

The pigeons are a humorous image of the civic and domestic clutter which overpowers the natural man. Later again, I addressed Burns in a verse letter which draws some parallels between his experience and my own:

Letter to Robert Burns

King Robert, on your anvil stone
Above the lumbering Octagon,
To you I raise a brother’s horn
Led by the wandering unicorn
Of total insecurity.
Never let your dead eye look
Up from Highland Mary’s book
To the fat scrag-end of the Varsity.
Kilmarnock hag and dominie
Watch there the grey Leith water drum
With laughter from a bird’s beak
At what their learning has left out.
They tried to make my devil speak
With the iron boot of education
(Psychology, French, Latin) –
But though they drove the wedges in
Till the blood and marrow spouted out,
That spirit was dumb.

Robert, only a heart I bring,
No gold of words to grace a king.
Nor can a stranger lift that flail
That cracked the wall of Calvin’s jail
And earned you the lead garland of
A people’s moralising love,
Till any Scotsman with the shakes
Can pile on your head his mistakes
And petrify a boozaroo
Reciting Tam o’ Shanter through;
And there’s an old black frost that freezes
Apollo’s balls and the blood of Jesus
In this dry, narrow-gutted town.
Often enough I stumbled down
From Maori Hill to the railway station
page 195 (When Aussie gin was half the price)
Making my Easter meditation
In the wilderness of fire and ice
Where a Puritan gets his orientation.

King Robert with the horn of stone!
Perhaps your handcuffs were my own;
Your coffin-cradle was the blank
Medusa conscience of a drunk
That hankers for the purity
Of an imagined infancy,
And after riding seven whores
Approaches God upon all fours,
Crying, ‘O thou great Incubus,
Help me or turn me to a walrus!’
And in hangover weeps to see
A playing child or a walnut tree.
If, lying in the pub latrine,
You muttered, ‘Take me back to Jean.’
The reason for your mandrake groans Is
wrapped like wire around my bones.

Not too far from the Leith water
My mother saw the mandrake grow
And pulled it. A professor’s daughter
She told me some time after how
She had been frightened by a cow
So that the birth-sac broke too soon
And on the twenty-ninth of June
Prematurely I looked at the walls
And yelled. The Plunket nurse ran in
To scissor off my valued foreskin,
But one thing staggered that grimalkin:
Poets are born with three balls.

Biology, mythology,
Go underground when the bookmen preach,
And I must thank the lass who taught me
My catechism at Tunnel Beach;
For when the hogmagandie ended
And I lay thunder-struck and winded,
The snake-haired Muse came out of the sky
And showed her double axe to me.
page 196 Since then I die and do not die.
‘Jimmy,’ she said, ‘you are my ugliest son;
I’ll break you like a herring-bone.’

I fill my pipe with black tobacco
And watch a dead man’s ember glow. (CP 289)

Without plagiarism, the images are near enough to Burns’ own. The market town of Kilmarnock, with its grim cultured ladies and its schoolteachers, is transferred to Dunedin. The river Leith runs both in Scotland and here. The Plunket nurse (at Burns’s own nativity a midwife) is the same grimalkin, an old grey cat, who would keep a Scottish witch company and be identified with her. And the revelation of the double edge of life and death, coming out of hogmagandie, or fornication, would not be unfamiliar to him, though his own dangerous Muse, the young witch dancing among the open coffins in Kirk Alloway, is a less literary creature. The torture of the iron boot was inflicted by one of the Scottish kings on a wizard who was brought to his Court; and though at first the man would say nothing, after several applications he confessed that he and others had ridden on a hunt with the Queen of the night fairies (a close relative of Robert Graves’s white goddess) and so was very properly executed for the safety of the pious merchant and housewife.

Before I begin to explore the text of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, I want to mention an element that lies just under the surface of much of Burns’s poetry, and comes into the open in some of his ballads, including this one: I refer to his bawdry which belongs to the pub and the milking-shed – as, among ourselves, the same element survives in the conversation of manual workers and wherever the smoothing-iron or radio, TV and the press have not flattened the natural wrinkles of the mind. Its odour does not belong at all to the dull labour of pornography or the constructed literary joke:

Then lay her owre among the creels
An’ bar the door wi’ baith your heels;
The mair ye bang, the less she squeals,
And hey, for hogmagandie! . . .

The picture of the girl shoved down among the fishing-baskets is anti-romantic. But the detail is purely natural, a discovery, not a propagandist construction for a theory of libertinism. It springs not from boorish simplicity, but from the camaraderie of the male lodge – necessary if boys are ever to become men – and sets a tribal value on virility, implying an organic attitude towards sex as one of the chief areas of human freedom, associated with fertility, and salted with humour because of the humiliations man must bear page 197 because he too belongs to the animal kingdom. Burns is alone among the post-Reformation poets in his capacity for genuine bawdry.

Though he may never have read a line by his predecessor, William Dunbar, his use of bawdry is close to that which the pre-Reformation Scottish poet employed in his conversation satire, ‘The Two Married Women and the Widow’ – a way of indicating, or even discovering, the subconscious and semiconscious attitudes of the sexes to one another.

Today, because of the basic dualism of romantic or clinical versus obscene which has gripped the mind of Western man, the mode is no longer possible; it requires the support of some tribal or village matrix of thought and feeling which, to our disadvantage, we have to do without. The modern phenomenon of sex wholly separated from fertility has probably dealt it its death-blow. The dissociation is progressive. I can imagine a society in which the only sex reaction of the men would be to a TV image of a girl in an apron holding a can of soap powder, and their wives would react only to the smell of a certain brand of hair oil. The sexual act could even become superfluous: a triumph for the ancient ideals of Calvin. Yet the attempt to rediscover a natural mode goes on in modern literature, and can hardly be abandoned, because it signifies a deeper attempt to reintegrate the sexual impulse as part of a unified personal cosmos. Apart from national enthusiasm, this unfractured view of sex may be one of the elements in Burns’s work which has led his fellow-countrymen to regard him as a kind of tribal shaman, setting his book beside the Bible on their shelves; as if through him they could rediscover a lost folk heritage – he had dodged the thunderbolts of the God of Calvin, set up an ambiguous friendship with Calvin’s Devil, who is a nature god in disguise, and constructed a humanist shelter that his neighbours could scramble to share. If my view of it is near the truth, it would account for the exceptional love that many Scotsmen have felt towards Burns.

So I come to ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. When I recently consulted my father about the origins of the poem, he told me that Tam o’ Shanter was one of Burns’s drinking companions, Tam by name, and a tenant of Shanter farm; that while he was on a bout the village larrikins had clipped the tail of his mare, leaving the poor animal with a bare stump; and that when Burns was asked what he thought about it, he said that it had given him a new idea for a poem. Local people had wanted Burns to write about Kirk Alloway, a disused church in the district. He had found the job impossible. But now the block began to shift. Burns’s wife saw him leaping and striding on his own, in an open place, throughout a summer’s day, as the poem took possession of him; and by the end of that day the poem was, to all intents and purposes, a finished work.

Carlyle, another Scotsman, wrote of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ –

‘Tam o’ Shanter’ itself . . . is not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric; the heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead. He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into that dark, earnest, wondering page 198 age, when the tradition was believed, and when it took its rise . . . Externally it is all green and living; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly cohere; the strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imaginations between the Ayr public-house and the gate of Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay the idea of such a bridge is laughed at; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria, or many-coloured spectrum painted on ale-vapours, and the Farce alone has any reality . . .

Though Carlyle is no fool in other matters relating to Burns, I think his lenses are out of order here. Lockhart is nearer the mark in his Life of Burns, first published in 1828. He mentions Burns’s own opinion that the poem was his best; and quotes a Galloway version of the legend on which Burns based the dramatic structure of the poem:

. . . the ‘Cutty-Sark’ who attracted the special notice of the bold intruder on the Satanic ceremonial was no other than the pretty wife of a farmer residing in the same village with himself . . . The Galloway ‘Tam’ being thoroughly sobered by terror, crept to his bed the moment he reached home after his escape, and said nothing of what had happened to any of his family. He was awakened in the morning with the astounding intelligence that his horse had been found dead in the stable, and a woman’s hand clotted with blood, adhering to the tail. Presently it was reported that ‘Cutty-Sark’ had burnt her hand grievously overnight, and was ill in bed, but obstinately refused to let her wound be examined by the village leech. Hereupon Tam, disentangling the bloody hand from the hair of his defunct favourite’s tail, proceeded to the residence of the fair witch, and forcibly pulling her stump to view, showed his trophy, and narrated the whole circumstances of the adventure. The poor victim of the black art was constrained to confess her guilty practices in the presence of the priest and the laird, and was forthwith burned alive under their joint auspices, within water-mark, on the Solway Frith . . .

The material of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, then, comes not from the vagaries of an ale-house imagination, but superstition tragically held as truth by the popular mind. One has to consider Burns’s attitude towards superstition. It seems plain enough that he did not accept, as part of his own view of life, a belief in witches, ghosts, or open diabolic intervention in human affairs; but he lived among people who may in varying degrees have taken such things to be objectively real. Thus he was drawn to use superstitions as material in his poems, not simply because they were picturesque, but because they had a deep hold on the mind of the people, and were shared by him as part of an emotional climate which he needed to act and write at all. The pseudo-scientific view that events are either objectively real or have no reality at all was certainly not held by Burns; it would mean the death of all art. With some aid from psychology, one may hold the view that while superstitions do not refer to objective events, they do refer to permanent subjective realities in the page 199 subconscious mind of a man, or possibly even in the collective mind of the group to which he belongs – as the events of a dream, though not objectively real, may shed light on the nature of man. Art depends on some such power of double vision: one expresses through an artistic medium, at one and the same time, selected portions of objective reality and a subjective pattern which these are able to signify. This is precisely the power of the imagination of which Coleridge has spoken. And though ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is, on the face of it, a simple vivid ballad, its power to grip the imagination of the reader depends on subjective elements of which Burns himself was probably only obscurely aware. I intend, as well as I can, while examining the poem in detail, to discuss those elements and bring them to the light of conscious knowledge.

The poem begins in the market town of Ayr:

Whan chapman billies leave the street
An’ drouthy neibors meet,
As market days are wearin late
An’ folks begin to tak the gate,
While we sit bousin at the nappy
An’ gettin fou and unco happy . . .

I take a few slight liberties with the text, where it seems to me probable that Burns’s editors, or even Burns himself, had smoothed out a Scottish original. To do this, I imagine the text read by a Scottish voice. These are not large matters; I mention them because in the spoken Scots tongue consonants tend to drop away when they would hinder the speed of narration, and the Scots vowels have more resonance, like the ring of metal after it has been struck, and half the sensory power of the poem comes from this.

The ‘chapman billies’ are the pedlars who leave the streets of the town, while neighbours meet neighbours to sit drinking the strong ale. The images combine to give an impression of ordinary communal life, towards evening, when the powers of the soul take on a deceptive simplicity and calm. To be happy is to drink together; to be sad is to be old or solitary. In any ghost story, the force of the tale depends largely on the ordinariness of its beginning, when narrator and listener establish a common frame of reality, into which the non-objective elements will later be introduced suddenly or gradually, as if they also were objective. Thus right at the beginning of the poem Burns establishes the life of the common world as the foundation and background of his drama. But it is a world split down the middle:

We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps an’ styles,
That lie between us and our hame
Whar sits our sulky, sullen dame
page 200 Gatherin her brows like gatherin storm
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm . . .

The men and the women are at loggerheads. Gates, breaches in the fences, streams and stiles – these are the ordinary landmarks and dangers for the drunk man coming home at night – but they also indicate the melancholy dimension of distance between the independent male and his wife, who is also very much a mother figure, from whom his actual mode of being isolates him. Burns describes the domestic Penelope with humour and understanding. Though her life has turned her into a shrew, the force of her resentment betrays that it is a negative form of love. The gathering storm of her anger is obscurely connected with the storm that rises on Tam’s journey, an event which his lack of direction and control, and above all his lateness, his inability to leave the safe convivial shelter of the tribal pleasure-ground, has exposed him to, and in some manner provoked:

This truth fand honest Tam o’ Shanter
As he fra Ayr ae night did canter:
(Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses
For honest men and bonnie lasses) . . .

Here is the necessary statement of common virtue held by the narrator and the listener: a moral basis on which the poem rests. The adjectives might seem only a formal attribution of virtue, as in Vergil’s epic one meets pius Aeneas and fidus Achates, or a side compliment paid by Burns to his actual drinking companion, but they are more than that, for they imply a positive view of the town itself. We are told that ‘auld Ayr’ – old, and therefore able to connect the individual with the transmitted experience of the tribe – does not lack manly virtues and feminine graces. Towns, like rivers, are principles in Burns’s verse; they are often personified as protective communal powers. And the ‘honesty’ of the men implies, I think, a democratic straightness and warmth, just as the ‘bonnieness’ of the girls implies a sexually attracted grace and energy – all of which is easily guarded and contained by the personified town, a collective personality whose life-blood is tradition. So Burns has placed near the beginning of the poem the tribal womb or matrix from which the individual emerges on his dangerous journey towards self-knowledge. An objective picture of Tam is not lacking, however; it is supplied by his wife Kate in a diatribe which Burns ironically labels as ‘advice’:

Ah Tam! hadst thou but been sae wise
As taen thy ain wife Kate’s advice!
She tauld thee weel tha wast a skellum,
A bletherin, blusterin, drunken blellum;
page 201 That frae November till October
Ae market-day tha was na sober;
That ilka melder wi’ the miller
Tha sat as lang as tha had siller;
That ev’ry naig was ca’d a shoe on
The smith an’ thee gat roarin fou on;
That at the Lord’s house, even on Sunday,
Tha drank wi’ Kirkton Jean till Monday.
She prophesied that late or soon
Thou wad be found, deep drowned in Doon,
Or cotched wi’ warlocks in the mirk
By Alloway’s old haunted kirk . . .

Kate’s verbal attack on her husband belongs to the very ancient Scottish (and Irish) verse tradition of the rhymed curse – the Scots called it ‘flyting’ – that is scolding. For all its vigour, in Burns’s poem it has some of the anxious protective character of a mother’s admonition to a wayward child: negative, but concealing a fear for the safety of the loved one. Later, when Tam is being pursued by the witches – or, symbolically, the powers of the unconscious mind in revolt – Burns himself introduces her as a sorrowing maternal figure; and perhaps her diatribe is a realist, protective screen that shields Tam from the subjective realities he cannot control. The phrase ‘thy ain wife’ has special connotations in Burn’s writing; a joyful poem written after his marriage to Jean Armour has the refrain – ‘I hae a wife o’ my ain’ – signifying a possessive intimacy and tenderness. Thus I take it that in ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ the use of the phrase indicates a positive element concealed at the heart of a cat-and-dog ménage.

The rhymed curse allows an extension of the communal basis of the poem – it shows a succession of market-days, the miller grinding corn, the smith shoeing a horse, and an old woman getting drunk at a sermon – and in each of these places and times, Tam, the wandering ‘I’ of the poem, is present. The wife’s prophecy that Tam will be drowned is not fulfilled; but the prophecy that he will be caught by male witches in the dark beside Kirk Alloway (not female, because the overtly sexual elements have not yet reached the surface of the poem) point towards a later event.

Ah, gentle dames! It gars me greet
To think how mony counsels sweet,
How mony lengthened sage advices
The husband frae the wife despises . . .

After Kate’s diatribe, Burns injected a picture of himself weeping over the blindness and ingratitude of husbands towards their wives might seem page 202 a simple hammer-blow of irony, part of the traditional male protest against female shrewishness; yet in the later context of the poem it cannot be taken as wholly ironical. The wife’s prophecy is not idle; the husband does encounter spiritual dangers. The voice of the kitchen god has issued a true warning of the disasters that may come to those who walk outside his domain.

But to our tale: – Ae market night
Tam got planted unco right
Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely,
Wi’ reamin swats that drank divinely;
And at his elbow, Souter Johnie,
His ancient, trusty, drouthie cronie:
Tam lo’ed him like a very brither;
They had been fou for weeks thegither . . .

Again, it is the communal shelter, the tribal pleasure-ground; and the presence of the shoemaker provides Tam with a shadow self, the perfect friend who understands every affliction and the need to ward it off by a ritual act. It is like the brotherhood of identical twins in the womb together. The ‘reamin swats’ are the brimful glasses of foaming and frothing new ale; and ‘ream’ is also the Scottish word for cream, with the association of dairies and the new milk in the pail. I suggest that the divine drink is the milk of the earth mother herself. Burns, however, regards the friendship with a touch of irony – ‘They had been fou for weeks thegither’ – the drinking bout is the cause of Tam’s love, and it may end when the bout ends.

The night drave o wi’ sangs and clatter,
And aye the ale was growing better:
The Landlady and Tam grew gracious
Wi’ secret favours sweet and precious:
The Souter tauld his queerest stories,
The Landlord’s laugh was ready chorus:
The storm without might rair and rustle,
Tam did no mind the storm a whistle . . .

In this marvellously accurate picture of a communal drinking bout, Burns as narrator stands outside the event, observing it with deep irony and detachment. The Landlady’s favours are governed by policy – she wants her client’s money – and the illusion of sentimental love will lead Tam nowhere. The Landlord’s laugh is equally politic. A gathering tension is symbolised by the rising of the storm outside (its first mention in the poem) and the inevitability of change is shown subtly in the heavy vowel indicating the passage of Time like a plough – ‘The night drave on’ – while there is touch of page 203 menace in the light hollow sounds at the ends of the lines – ‘Queerest stories’, ‘ready chorus’, ‘rustle’ – ‘whistle’ . . . But Tam himself is safe for the meantime in the tribal womb and shelter:

Care, mad to see a man sae happy,
E’en drowned hisel amang the nappy.
As bees flee hame wi’ lades o’ treasure
The minutes winged their way wi’ pleasure:
Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,
O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious . . .

The personification of Care looks at first like a simple type of abstraction of eighteenth century poetry; but I think it is more than that. This portion of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is the one most commonly quoted by Scottish readers. I heard my father quote it recently, after an unexpected social visit had given him pleasure. Burns was no poet of the middle class, but a struggling peasant farmer, closely aware of the domestic, social and economic burdens that rested on his own back and the backs of his neighbours. This same Care is later signified by ‘a’ the ills o’ life’ – that is, sickness, poverty, domestic strife, social disadvantages, the death of those one cares for, the dread of one’s own death – a cold pressure never absent from the adult mind; and this burden is cast off for a moment, not just by intoxication, but by what it stands for – the Roman fraternitas, the Maori aroha, the appearance or reality of group love, a merging in the collective warmth of the tribe. Kings – that is, all who stand above the tribe – are excluded from this, because they have preferred individual security to collective love; and so Tam is indeed glorious, crowned with fraternitas. Care is like a jailor who commits suicide because his prisoner has escaped. And the flight of the bees, the image of fertility that Burns uses, signifies that the jail-break has been successful. Tam is joined to the fertile earth. Elsewhere Burns uses the same image to indicate the triumph of domestic love:

O blaw ye westlin winds, blaw saft
Amang the leafy trees!
Wi’ balmy gale, owre hill an’ dale
Bring hame the laden bees . . .

But the vision of fertility is about to end. The four comparisons by which Burns illustrates the brevity of pleasure stand out from the poem with an arctic beauty; and he has set them in italics, as it were, by using mainly an English idiom –

But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
page 204 Or like the borealis race
That flit ere you can mark their place;
Or like the rainbow’s lovely form
Vanishing amid the storm;
Or like the snow fa’s in the river
Ae moment white, then melts for ever . . .

I have made several changes in this key passage. I think the sound requires the Scottish ‘ae moment’ rather than ‘one moment’; but I have changed it chiefly because the English destroys what I am certain was the original intention – the image of the falling of a single flake among a multitude, to rest for the flicker of a second, and then vanish in the black water. I think an obtuse editor of Burns has mistaken a verb for a noun (in the Scottish, the verb ‘fa’s’ is in conjunction with the verb ‘melts’) and so placed his heel on the finest single poetic image, metaphor, comparison, that I know of. More boldly, I have shifted the snowflake comparison from second place to the last; partly because I got it that way from an oral tradition; partly because Burns frequently uses feminine rhymes to indicate the end of a passage of verse, because the falling rhyme gives a sense of finality; but chiefly because, after the images of earth and air, the water image comes naturally and has a greater force. I think it very likely that Burns’s editors or Burns himself shook the bag – most likely Burns’s editors, who took unheard of liberties with ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’, from the assumption that Burns was a boor with a touch of genius who needed tidying up, as condescending Australian editors tidied up and ruined much of Lawson.

The lights of aurora borealis are seen as creatures of the sky, signifying a spiritual lightness at the heart of winter; and the rainbow is an evident image of the spiritual element in sensory pleasure – an intuition known to the pagan and possible for the Catholic, but which, once grasped, shatters the universe of Calvin at a single blow. The poppies too have their significance. They are sensual flowers, growing tall and red among the corn, apparently without use, yet recalling the Scriptural words about the lilies of the field. By way of the opium poppy, they are also the flowers of death and oblivion. Burns’s view of pleasure is mediaeval: a great good, and a great grief, because temporary:

Nae man can tether Time nor Tide,
The hour approaches Tam maun ride –
That hour, o’ night’s black arch the key-stane,
That dreary hour he mounts his beast in;
An’ sic a night he taks the road in
As ne’er puir sinner was abroad in . . .

In a composite symbol Burns indicates the hands of the clock reaching midnight, and also the placing of a stone to complete the arch of the black page 205 night sky: the symbol has a depth beyond my full reach, but it signifies at least the force of reality that wakes a dreamer from his dream, and possibly the weight of death as the agent of God’s justice, that wakens a man out of his life. The further phrase, ‘puir sinner’, that Burns uses to indicate Everyman, though it is a half-humorous folk usage, makes this interpretation more probable. Certainly Tam is close to being Everyman; and the rough journey itself could signify the journey of life, undertaken as if in a dream.

The wind blew as ’twad blawn its last;
The rattlin showers rose on the blast;
The speedy gleams the darkness swallowed;
Loud, deep and lang the thunder bellowed;
That night a child might understand
The deil had business on his hand . . .

This is the first introduction in the poem of the Calvinist Devil, an equal antagonist to God in human affairs, who combines the habits of the Scriptural Satan with those of a nature spirit. The fact that he is the prince of the powers of the air makes it very suitable that he should give a sign of his presence by thunder, rain, wind and fire. Three elements – air, fire and water – are in revolt against the autonomy of man. But Tam is connected to the stable earth by his horse:

Weel mounted on his grey mare Meg
(A better never lifted leg)
Tam skelpit on thro’ dub and mire
Despising wind and rain and fire;
Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet,
Whiles crooning o’er an auld Scots sonnet,
Whiles glowering round wi’ prudent care
Lest bogles catch him unawares;
Kirk Alloway was drawin nigh
Whar ghaists an’ houlets nightly cry . . .

Horses are more than mere furniture in Burns’s verse. He loved his own horses – Rosinante and Jenny Geddes – and the myth of Pegasus has great vigour in his thought:

With Pegasus upon a day
Apollo weary flying,
Through frosty hills the journey lay,
On foot the way was plying.
page 206 Poor slipshod giddy Pegasus
Was but a sorry walker;
To Vulcan then Apollo goes
To get a frosty caulker . . .

He wrote this poem for John Taylor, a blacksmith at Wanlockhead, who later said he had never been paid better – with drink, with money and with verse. In it Burns identifies himself with Apollo, the god of art, and his own horse with Pegasus, the winged horse that a poet must learn to ride – a magical beast signifying the imagination itself which carries the conscious mind over ditches and hedges. Objectively, the roads were frosty, the horse was slipping. The ‘frosty caulker’ is a special shoe attached to grip the ground through its coating of ice. Subjectively, Burns lacked the iron-shod grip on the ground necessary to write well and got it from his contact with the blacksmith.

In ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ the case is somewhat different. The man on the horse moves at the centre of the poem, signifying not the power of poetry in particular, but the double union of conscious and subconscious faculties in the difficult journey of life. The man’s strength lies in his horse – it is she who joins him to the earth, she who carries him out of danger, she who suffers mutilation because of his rashness. The man is male, the horse female, signifying an active and a passive principle. I think the grey mare symbolises the personal subconscious in its entirety, seen as a protective and maternal power belonging to the earth – ‘grey’ because undistinguished, unobserved, and very ordinary. Tam is a countryman. He exhibits a broad common sanity, not shaken much by any event, relatively unaffected by the Calvinist ethic, recognising that drunkenness, tardiness, forgetfulness, carelessness with money, the ordinary sex reactions, are like the mud he travels through – unavoidable affliction rather than a sign of the reprobate. His wisdom is almost wholly subconscious; and that is where its great strength lies. In some ways the grey mare is his better half.

Kirk Alloway was drawin nigh
Whar ghaists an’ houlets nightly cry . . .

Kirk Alloway is the dangerous centre towards which his journey is taking him. The ruins of the old church might signify in some degree the ruins of the theocentric universe of pre-Reformation folk knowledge, remaining as a sign of danger and contradiction, to which the heart returns as if to a grave. Burns’s simultaneous mention of ghosts and owls makes more evident his balanced attitude towards superstition. The ghosts may be merely owls, heard and seen as ghosts by the superstitious; yet they may be actual ghosts, or at least occupy some middle ground between reality and nothingness. Thus, page 207 while Burns is not submerged in the folk mind, he is able to enter it and use its resources for the purposes of the poem.

By this time he was ’cross the foord
Whar in the snaw the chapman smoored;
An’ past the birks an’ meikle stane
Whar drunken Charlie brak’s neck-bane;
An’ thro’ the whins an’ by the cairn
Whar hunters fand the murdered bairn;
And near the thorn aboon the well
Whar Mungo’s mither hanged hersel . . .

As Lockhart points out, each of the calamities is taken directly from local events with which Burns was familiar. The man on the horse is entering the borders of the collective unconscious, uncovering the tribal calamities – death by accident, death by smothering snow, death by infanticide, death by suicide. The common factor in each is one of helplessness in the face of internal or external destruction. Two of the events are crimes (though infanticide was common when illegitimacy carried a heavy stigma, and suicide often implies mental disorder) and one has come from drunkenness. Burns recognises in them not chiefly the fault of those concerned; in sympathy with the tribe, he recognises instead the unanswerable weight of the human condition itself, which breeds a deep dread, compassion and catharsis. The calamities tell the man on the horse the nature of his journey: not to an ideal destination, but to an involvement in human evil, because the good and the evil are inextricably bound together. He is already moving out of the region of safety:

Before him Doon pours a’ his floods,
The doubling storm roars through the woods,
The lightnings flash fra pole to pole,
Near and more near the thunders roll,
When glimmerin thro’ the groaning trees
Kirk Alloway seemed in a bleeze.
Thro’ ilka bore the beams were glancing
And loud resounded mirth and dancing . . .

There is great turbulence as the man on the horse approaches the centre of the collective unconscious of the tribe. The light from Kirk Alloway is not natural light. In the objective structure of the poem its actual source is the candles held in the hands of disinterred corpses; but the associations go beyond this – the light of phosphorescence on rotting wood or flesh; the freezing unearthly quality of moonlight that petrifies what it touches, isolating and alienating. In superstition it is a light that belongs to the dead. Subjectively it page 208 is a light that flashes out in dreams and nightmares, when certain archetypes of the unconscious mind become active. The Scottish vowel ‘bleeze’ carries a different nuance of feeling from that of the English ‘blaze’, which would indicate the natural force of fire – the ‘bleeze’ from Kirk Alloway indicates the negative radiance that would surround a ghost.

Yet the beams of light flash out through the small holes in the church walls as they would from a dance held in a barn, and the noisy mirth is like that of a crowd of countrymen and women dancing together. Burns describes the unknown in terms of the already known. His creative power is moving to include the dangerous areas of the mind – fundamentally, the knowledge of sex and death – in a new pattern of integration:

Inspiring, bold John Barleycorn!
What dangers thou canst make us scorn!
Wi’ tippeny, we fear nae evil;
Wi’ usquabae, we’ll face the deevil!
The swats sae reamed in Tammie’s noddle,
Fair play, he cared na deils a boddle,
But Maggie stood, right sair astonished,
Till, by the heel and hand admonished,
She ventured forward on the light,
And, wow! Tam saw an unco sight! . . .

In the folk image of John Barleycorn an earth god is concealed – Dionysus the god of wine – and it is suitable that he should stand beside Tam and give him courage at the gates of the underworld. The Gaelic usquabae – whisky – means ‘water of life’; the Highlanders themselves often used the Latin term, aqua vitae. And in an old ballad, which Burns elsewhere modified, strong drink is the blood of the earth god, John Barleycorn, he allowing himself to be cut down and buried and crushed between two stones, in order that men should have his blood to drink. Without the help of this principle, Tam would not be bold enough to break into the arena of the unconscious mind. One notices that the wise grey mare, symbolising the personal subconscious, is loath to move forward; she has to be urged by the conscious will of the rider.

The dance is archaic, entirely Scottish in character, as suits the deeper levels of the folk mind. France, not England, signified to the Scots the formal qualities of civilisation; and Burns deliberately excludes the French manner of dance, which would impose order but remove energy:

Warlocks and witches in a dance:
Nae cotillion, brent new frae France,
But hornpipes, jigs, strathpeys and reels,
page 209 Put life and mettle in their heels.
A winnock-bunker in the east,
There sat auld Nick, in shape o’ beast,
A towzie tyke, black, grim and large;
To gie them music was his charge:
He screwed the pipes, and gart them skirl,
Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl . . .

The presiding deity of the dance shows that we have come to the arena of the animal unconscious. He is hardly at all the Devil of orthodox Christian theology, but a beast-man, resembling the shamans of prehistoric ritual who wore the head of the slaughtered animal as a mask: a massive archetype having under its control that half of knowledge which the Calvinist ethic regarded as evil. The Devil as a principle of death and fertility plays an important part in many of Burns’s poems. In ‘Address to the Deil’ he devotes to him some of his finest nature imagery:

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord
An’ float the jinglin icy boord,
Then, water-kelpies haunt the foord
By your direction,
And nighted traveller are allured
To their destruction . . .

Here the Devil is associated with the melting of the ice on the streams in springtime, and so with the human sexual impulse dissolving the winter of repression; but the danger remains that the traveller will be swallowed down by water monsters or led into bogs by the will-o’-the-wisp, signifying a false vision of beauty. This Devil is a power that overturns all human institutions:

Whyles, rangin like a roarin lion
For prey, a’ holes an’ corners tryin;
Whyles, on the strong-winged tempest flyin,
Tirlin the kirks;
Whyles, in the human bosom pryin,
Unseen thou lurks . . .

Here again he is partly the Devil of Christian theology – the one who waits round corners, the thief of the soul – but his energy is still that of a nature spirit, exhibited by the strong wind that tears off the roofs of churches, exposing them to the sky.

The animal Devil of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, sitting on a window-ledge in the old church and playing the bagpipes, is quite a formidable figure. He would page 210 certainly not lack the attributes of sex: at a later stage in the poem he is affected by the dance of the young witch. He represents anarchic energy; yet he has a social function, since he provides the music to which the dance goes on. In Dunbar’s ‘Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins’ there is no such warmth. His figures merely typify the varieties of human evil, and his Devil is the spirit of non-human evil who animates them; whereas Burns begins to resurrect first energy, and then beauty, banished to the underworld. The paraphernalia of the witches’ dance signify the tribe’s knowledge of their own destructive impulses, hidden from the light of day:

Coffins stood round like open presses
That shawed the dead in their last dresses;
And (by some eldritch cantraip sleight)
Each in its cauld hand held a light
By which heroic Tam was able
To note upon the haly table
A murderer’s banes in gibbet-airns,

Twa span-lang wee unchristened bairns,
A thief new-cutted fra a rape
(Wi’ his last gasp his gab did gape),
Five tomahawks wi’ bluid red-rusted,
Five scymitars wi’ murder crusted,
A garter, which a babe had strangled,
A knife, a father’s throat had mangled,
Wham his ain son o’ life bereft
(The grey hairs yet stack to the heft),
Wi’ mair o’ horrible and awfu’
Which e’en to name wad be unlawfu’ . . .

Murder, infanticide, parricide, execution for theft – this time the calamities carry a stronger weight of actual culpability. In each case it is the murder weapon or the body of the slain which is exhibited on the holy table thus made unholy. I think Burns may have had in mind a rejection of the Calvinist doctrine of the elect. The crimes of the community are a collective burden which cannot be set aside by the claim to personal holiness. This seems more likely because in the original inventory of crime Burns included the rotten hearts of presbyters laid in nooks around the church. He wisely cut out this polemical image.

The great warmth and tenderness which permeates the poem, even at is most horrific, shows itself in his view of the tribal dead. They are exposed in their coffins as in linen presses. The image is a homely one, belonging to the area of the kitchen god. These, after all, are the ancestors of the tribe, page 211 and though the physical horror of death plays a large part in the poem, the dead are not enemies but forgotten neighbours. With a piercing touch of pity, Burns exhibits them in their ‘last dresses’, the clothes they were buried in. Again, the ‘cauld hand’ of the corpse indicates equally dread of the coldness of death and compassion for the neighbour whose hand is now cold. A preoccupation with the physical detail of death seems to have had a strong grip on the Scottish folk mind. Without a trace of sentimental piety, Burns brings this to the surface of the poem, and most courageously includes the dead inside the tribal shelter of fraternitas. The knowledge of death does not prevent the dance from going on:

As Tammie glowered, amazed an’ curious,
The mirth and fun grew fast an’ furious;
The piper loud and louder blew,
The dancers quick and quicker flew,
They reeled, they set, they crossed, they cleekit,
Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,
And coost her duddies to the wark
And linket at it in her sark . . .

The warlocks are not mentioned. The dance is now an assemblage of old women. They have great energy, and the heat of the dance leads them to throw off their clothes, leaving only the bare sark, the shift. Though he wrote many romantic poems, Burns’s view of women is fundamentally unromantic, a mixture of the sexual and the sympathetic:

Ah Tam! Ah Tam! had they been queans
A’ plump an’ strappin in their teens!
Their sarks instead o’ creshie flannen
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen! –
Thir breeks o’ mine, my ainly pair,
That ance were plush o’ guid blue hair,
I wad hae gien them aff my burdies
For ae blink o’ the bonie burdies!
But withered beldams, auld an droll,
Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal,
Loupin an’ flingin on a crummock,
I wonder did no turn thy stomach . . .

Lockhart records that Burns’s wife saw him with the tears pouring down his face as he composed and recited this part of the poem, believing himself to be alone. If, as I think, the witches’ dance represents the dance of life itself, the vision of young women dancing symbolises that quality of innocent sexuality page 212 which haunted Burns and made a poet of him. The image of the fresh white underclothes of women, white as snow, handed down through generations seems to signify a hidden purity that is part of the tribe itself – innocently sensual or sensually innocent. The by-play on clothing allows Burns to make a sexual joke, by saying that he would strip off his only pair of trousers for such a sight of young women dancing. The trousers, though still usable, are worn smooth, indicating the still real but diminished sexuality of a man who is past his youth. But this dance of life is also, if not a dance of death, at least a dance in the jaws of the grave. The dancers are not young women but grim hags. They signify the decay of female sexuality into a malicious energy that belongs partly to the grave. The dance exhibits the inevitable loss of fertility and death of innocence. The bonnie lass conceals the potential hag, the witch who will harm and destroy the sexuality of man if she is able. This cruel dialectic is mediaeval. One finds it in Villon, in Dunbar and in Chaucer. I think it corresponds to a genuine subjective reality.

But Tam kent what was what fu’ brawlie:
There was ae winsome wench and waulie,
That night enlisted in the core,
Long after kenned on Carrick shore
(For mony a beast to dead she shot
And perished mony a bonie boat
And shook baith meikle corn and bere
And kept the country-side in fear);
Her cutty sark, o’ Paisley harn,
That while a lassie she had worn,
In longitude tho’ sairly scanty,
It was her best, and she was vauntie.
Ah! little kent thy reverend grannie,
That sark she coft for her wee Nannie
Wi’ twa pund Scots (’twas a’ her riches)
Wad ever grace a dance o’ witches! . . .

The young witch is still close to being innocent. Burns describes her on the model of a poor servant-girl who wears her best clothes to a dance. In a few lines his warmth of realism turns her into a living person. But in the symbolism of the poem, what does she represent? We know a little of her objective history, part real and part fantastic – that she is newly enlisted in the coven; that she wears the coarse linen shift her grandmother bought her for four shillings . . . An orphan, perhaps; a girl, as we now say, who’s a bit wild, rebellious; with something irresponsible in her make-up. She could like only women; if she has anything to do with men she uses her sex as a weapon of power, for revenge on a life that has treated her badly. One knows the type. page 213 If there were such a thing as a witches’ coven, she would be bound to join it.

The fantastic part of her history lies mainly in the future beyond Kirk Alloway, but still in the past of the narrator – by magic, she kills animals, shakes the heads of barley in the harvest field so that the grain is lost, raises storms to sink the fishing vessels, and tyrannises over her neighbours. As poetry, this is deeply convincing; it corresponds to some reality one has always been aware of; but as an objective account, it is nonsense. Who – or rather, what then is the young witch?

I think she is Burns’s only real Muse – one of the most powerful evocations in literature of the anima, that mysterious archetype who has been called variously Venus, Cybele, Artemis – but in Burns’s case, one could say definitely, Hekate, patroness of witches, the goddess of the underworld. In another poem, ‘The Vision’, he describes her in much more idealised terms:

Down flowed her robe, a tartan sheen,
Till half a leg was scrimply seen;
An’ sic a leg! My bonie Jean
Could only peer it;
See straught, sae taper, tight an’ clean,
None else came near it.

Her mantle large, of greenish hue,
My gazing wonder chiefly drew . . .

Here, rivers in the sea were lost,
Here, mountains to the skies were tost,
Here, tumbling billows ruled the coast
With surging foam;
There, distant, shone Art’s lofty boast,
The lordly dome . . .

She is the formalised Scottish Muse; and on her mantle the whole land is spread out for the reader’s admiration. But in a sense she wears a false front, dressed up awkwardly like a girl at a Highland dancing show, and the verse suffers for it. Burns’s actual Muse is archaic, natural, by turns beautiful and terrible, located at a deep unconscious level. The anima represents, to my mind, all that is not-self. She cannot be constructed; she has to be discovered. And I believe the sark, the short shift of the young witch, is the original of the formal Muse’s mantle – the bare covering of the winter earth – and the word ‘longitude’ used jokingly by Burns is like a clue dropped to guide one to an understanding of what she is – the great earth herself, known not in idea but existence, here dancing to the music of the god of fertility and death. Burns’s best unconscious wisdom is often hidden in his jokes:

page 214

But here my Muse her wing maun cower,
Sic flights are far beyond her power;
To sing how Nannie lap and flang
(A souple jade she was and strang),
An how Tam stood like ane bewitched
And thought his very e’en enriched;
Even Satan glowered and fidged fu’ fain
And hotched and blew wi’ might and main,
Till first ae caper, syne anither,
Tam tint his reason a’ thegither,
And roars out, ‘Weel done, Cutty-sark!’
And in an instant a’ was dark:
And scarcely had he Maggie rallied
When out the hellish legion sallied . . .

When Burns speaks of ‘my Muse’, it is actually the daimon, the semiconscious power of control over his medium, which he refers to, seeing it as a female bird which cannot fly high or long – a meadowlark perhaps – for I doubt if he was conscious of all that the young witch signified.

It is no wonder that when Tam shouts out in praise of her, stirred by the erotic enchantment, the unconscious mind should shut like a clam shell and begin to take its revenge – partly because Tam has stolen his vision, as herdsmen might rob the honey from a hive of bees and find out that bees have stings; but chiefly because his approach, innocent enough, with a touch of male arrogance and erotic camaraderie, might do well enough for the servant-girl but will not do for the goddess. The anima changes shape according to the motives of those who approach her – a violent man will see her as a wolf; a sensual man, as a temptress; a Puritan, either not at all, or as a poisonous reptile; a saint, as a helpless child who needs to be looked after; a poet, as his difficult Muse – and Tam has approached her with a mixture of dread and bluff sexual curiosity. He is in danger of the fate of Actaeon, who was torn to pieces by Diana’s hounds when he had caught a glimpse of her bathing naked:

As bees bizz out wi’ angry fyke
When plundering herds assail their byke;
As open pussie’s mortal foes
When, pop! she starts before their nose;
As eager runs the market-crowd
When ‘Catch the thief!’ resounds aloud –
So Maggie runs, the witches follow
Wi’ mony an eldritch skriech and hollo . . .

page 215

I have changed the adjective ‘hollow’ to the noun ‘hollo’ because it undoubtedly refers to the sound itself, not to the quality of the sound Tam, again, is a thief, one who has stolen the knowledge of forbidden matters; but he is also ‘pussie’, the hare running before the hounds, and Burns has put his money on him:

Ah Tam! ah Tam! thou’ll get thy fairin’!
In hell they’ll roast thee like a herrin’!
In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin’!
Kate soon will be a woefu’ woman!
Now, do thy speedy utmost, Meg,
And win the key-stane o’ the brig;
There at them thou thy tail may toss,
A running stream they darena cross.
But ere the key-stane she could make,
The fient a tail she had to shake!
For Nannie, far before the rest,
Hard upon noble Maggie prest
And flew at Tam wi’ furious ettle;
But little wist she Maggie’s mettle!
Ae spring brought aff her master hale
But left behind her ain grey tail:
The carlin clocht her by the rump
And left puir Maggie scarce a stump . . .

The experience of the destructive power of the anima is the most terrifying event the conscious mind may have to endure in the journey to self-knowledge. The running stream which the witches cannot cross is a life principle and a borderline between the personal and collective areas of the tribal mind; the bridge too is a symbol of conscious order that gives power over the unconscious forces of life. But the attack of the anima is exceptionally vigorous. Tam himself, the conscious principle of the fable, does not suffer; but the grey mare loses her tail – the personal subconscious has lost something to the negative force of the collective unconscious. Some part of her energy has gone; one cannot be sure what; but I think the tail signifies the beauty and pride of an innocent sexuality, a loss already foreshadowed in the dance at Kirk Alloway. A Freudian might see it as symbolic castration; but I prefer to avoid the rigid categories. The loss is real, interior rather than exterior; the price paid for a certain measure of integration.

Now, wha this tale o’ truth shall read,
Each man and mither’s son tak heed:
Whene’er to drink y’are inclined
page 216 Or Cutty-sarks rin in y’r mind,
Think! ye may buy the joys owre dear,
Remember Tam o’ Shanter’s meare.

The formal ending clinches it that something has been surrendered, that the loss is real. And if my limited faculties have kept me from understanding well the symbolic under-currents of the poem, I must ask not your forgiveness but that of Robert Burns. My method of analysis has scarcely touched the objective richness, and above all the humour of the poem. To explain humour is to destroy it; and I leave the study of sources, influences and word-changes to the scholars. One does not go to buy meat from a fish-monger, unless it happens to be rabbit. ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ has lain at the bottom of my mind for thirty years: a fable of Everyman brought from the mind of the tribe by a great poet. It cannot be imitated; but one can learn from it the meaning of one’s own experience.

A week or two before he died, on the 21st July, 1796, aged thirty-seven years, Robert Burns wrote the following letter to his wife:

My dearest Love: I delayed writing until I could tell you what effect sea-bathing was likely to produce. It would be injustice to deny that it has eased my pains, and I think has strengthened me; but my appetite is still extremely bad. No fish nor flesh can I swallow: porridge and milk are the only things I can taste. I am very happy to hear, by Miss Jess Lewars, that you are all well. My very best and kindest compliments to her and to all the children. I will see you on Sunday. Your affectionate husband, R.B.

It is the kind of letter a woman prefers to receive from her husband: factual, not too gloomy, and affectionate. The last poem he wrote was to Jessie Lewars, mentioned in the letter, who was his nurse in the final sickness: the short song which begins:

O wert thou in the cauld blast
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie fra the angry airt
Wad shelter thee, wad shelter thee . . .

The ‘cauld blast’ was the death which Burn had already begun to experience; and characteristically his attitude is not one of self-protection, but an out-pouring of fraternitas, a protective love towards the woman who is nursing him. Having spent much of his life in the wars of the anima, as an artist must do in order to acquire knowledge of the human heart, though health, money, and the approval of his neighbours had fallen away from him, he died crowned with fraternitas, the tribal love which was his secret, the proper natural base of divine charity. To suppose that love and intellect can be entirely divided in the work of an artist is a foolish thing; without any page 217 of the first, the second will soon wither; and the labour of the second is to discover the meaning of its greater sister and companion – a labour often frustrated but never without value.