(Delivered at the Churchill College Burns Supper in 2013.)
I have to begin with a confession: I don’t like Robert Burns’ poetry. [Nervous laughter from the audience.] I find it sentimental and unimaginative. [Hissing from three graduate students in kilts.] And I fear the MCR has made a terrible mistake in asking me to give this toast. [Grimaces from MCR committee members.] The modernist William Carlos Williams has a poem in which he compares his love to a “greenglass insulator on a blue sky”; I think it’s a much better poem than Burns’ famous “red, red rose” [cry of “shame” from the High Table], but I promise I’ll try to give Burns a fair chance.
My first introduction to Burns came in high school in the US. We were reading
John Steinbeck’s novel Of Mice and Men, and we were handed a copy of Burns’
poem “To a Mouse” in order to explain the book’s title. The relevant portion of
the poem reads
> The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men
> Gang aft agley
which, when you are an American, of course explains nothing at all. I should
point out here that if nothing else, Burns accomplished the singular feat of
writing something that looks very much like English and is nevertheless wholly
unpronounceable by English speakers from outside his homeland. In order to avoid
inciting the Master to further haggis-knife violence with additional
mispronunciations [chuckle, mercifully, from the Master], this toast has been
designed to require the recitation of as little poetry as possible.
But back to the mouse: My trusted Scots-English dictionary explains that this thing that happens to the best-laid schemes of mice and men is that they go astray. And the theme of going astray is a perfect way to begin the recitation of Burns’ life and times which custom seems to require at this point in the toast.
Robert Burns was a drunk, a womanizer, and spectacularly unlucky. He was born to poor tenant farmers in 1759. When he was eight the family farm failed; then so did their second, and their third. At this point Burns decided it was time to get out of the farming business. [At last, general laughter.] He got a job at a flax dresser’s, where he worked for less than a month before the shop burned to the ground. In the years that followed he wandered from house to house and woman to woman—he fathered twelve children by four different mothers over the course of his life [light applause from JCR]—and by the time of publication of his first volume of poetry Burns was effectively homeless, sleeping in friends’ beds while planning to flee from his ex-wife’s vengeful father to Jamaica. After the poems were published he decided to remain in Scotland, where he enjoyed a decade of modest literary acclaim before dying at the age of thirty-seven, of complications of a toothache. [Laughter only from non-Scots.]
We forgive offenses much worse than philandering and bad luck in our favorite lyricists. Dylan Thomas’ drinking put Burns’ to shame, Ezra Pound was a Fascist and about Rudyard Kipling I think nothing at all need be said. So the question is: what is it in Robert Burns that transcends the pathetic circumstances of his life—that elevates him to this highest level of our literary pantheon? What it is about his poetry that compels us to celebrate him year after year, all over the world, with this bizarre ritual in which we are presently engaged?
I want to return to the poem I mentioned at the beginning of this toast, and at
my own peril I will read you the first verse in full. It goes:
> O my Luve’s like a red, red rose
> That’s newly sprung in June;
> O my Luve’s like the melodie
> That’s sweetly play’d in tune
Now what so offends me [“boo!”] about this poem is its ordinariness, its
conventionality. It is a commonplace that beautiful women are like flowers, and
it was for hundreds of years before Burns’ time. When Williams writes that his
love is “like a greenglass insulator on a blue sky”, the line is fresh,
unexpected—things that seem to me to be principal virtues in a piece of
poetry, and which are absent from Burns’. [General hissing.]
But [“but” again, for emphasis] I think it is precisely the ordinariness of Burns’ poetry that is the source of its lasting importance. And by that I certainly don’t mean that all Burns enthusiasts are philistines or sentimentalists. It’s that his poems—with their pretty women, their mice, their haggises and toothaches and bottles—are written in the language of everyday experience. We do not, most of us, see the world through the eyes of the poets who find electrical equipment in romance and their flowers in crowded subway traffic—we see rather as Burns does.
And if other poets allow us to see the world through new eyes, Burns reminds us that the world, even as we are accustomed to seeing it, is saturated with song and meaning. This, I think, is why we celebrate Robert Burns, and why we celebrate his poetry. If his images sometimes seem stale it is because, across the gap of two centuries, we recognize those images as familiar, as our own. I think we will still call them familiar two centuries from now. And long after our power lines have shed their green glass insulators, we will still have roses, and we will still have Burns.
Let’s drink a toast to his immortal memory. To Robert Burns! [Clinking of glasses, followed by applause with intermittent booing.]