Burns was not alone
February 2009
by Derrick McClure
Brave Ramsay nou, and Fergusson,
Wha hae sae lang time filled the throne
O’ poetry, may nou lie doun
Quaet in their urns,
Since Fame in justice gies the croun
Tae Coila’s Burns.
So wrote the Ayrshire schoolteacher and poet David Sillar, the “Davie, a brither poet” of two of Burns’s epistles: proudly acknowledging the status which his friend and poetical confrere had already acquired – and has retained ever since – in the hearts and minds of his countrymen.
But who were the “brave Ramsay and Fergusson” whom Burns, in Sillar’s all-too-correct estimation, had toppled from the throne? As we seek the answer to this question, we will discover a truth which we in Scotland are prone to overlook: Burns is the greatest, but far from the only, Scottish poet.
Burns, indeed, would not have been the poet we know had it not been for the enormous debt which he owed to his predecessors and contemporaries, of whom Ramsay and Fergusson were the most important. He lived, indeed, during a time when poetry held a place in the national life of Scotland which is hard for us to imagine today.
The establishment of parish schools
Reading, composing and discussing poems, passing copies from hand to hand, exchanging verse epistles, participating in literary societies: these were the regular recreations not only of what we might think of as the ‘professional’ classes, but of people from the humble rural background from which Burns himself emerged. Scotland in this period, remember, had the highest level of general education in Europe: one of the finest achievements of the Reformation had been the establishment of parish schools; and the sterling work which they had done ever since in establishing literacy and a respect for learning among the Scottish people had paved the way for the great literary revival of the 18th century.
A revival it was; for the preceding century had been one of the bleakest in the history of Scottish letters. James VI had presided over a court where poetry flourished, the King himself being an accomplished practitioner; but when he went south to assume the throne of England many of his court poets went with him, leaving the Scottish poetic world shorn of much of its finest talent. And though the Covenanting period, the War of the Three Kingdoms and finally the Killing Times gave rise to stirring exploits, the endemic warfare and growing factionalism in both Kirk and government was not conducive to poetic achievement.
Robert Sempill’s mock-elegy
Even in those troubled times, Scottish literature never faded out completely. Far away from the main theatres of conflict, a landed Renfrewshire family called the Sempills of Beltrees cultivated the old tradition of poetry. James Sempill, one former member of James VI’s poetic circle who did not desert Scotland after 1603, was noted for his satirical poetic attacks on the Catholic Church: in The Packman’s Pater Noster, an uneducated pedlar engages in a dialogue with a priest and, by confronting his dogmas with common-sense questions (why should he say Ave Maria in Latin when Mary would not have known Latin?) shows up their lack of substance. His son Robert Sempill wrote a mock-elegy on an old piper, beginning:
Kilbarchan nou may say alas!
For she hath lost her game and grace,
Baith Trixie and the Maiden-Trace,
But what remeid?
For nae man can supply his place:
Hab Simson’s deid!
– celebrating, with gentle humour, Habbie Simson’s prowess at piping for weddings, sports, military musters and public feast-days; and ending regretfully, “We needna look for piping mair, Sin’ Habbie’s deid!” And Robert’s son Francis continued the family tradition with, among other things, a rambunctious comic poem called The Blythesome Bridal, celebrating the homely but abundant fare to be served at the wedding (“_…tartan, dragen and brochan, /And fouth o’ guid gappocks o’ skate, /Powsodie and drammock and crowdie, /And caller nowt’s feet in a plate”_) and the odd-looking people who are coming to enjoy it (…plouky-faced Watt, capper-nosed Gibbie, splee-fittit Bessie, blinkin’ daft Barb’ra, happer-ersed Nancy – just as a sampling). Another of Francis’s poems, Maggie Lauder, tells how its heroine danced to music supplied by a piper called Rab the Ranter, and paid him the ultimate compliment:
“Weel hae ye play’d your part!” quo Meg,
“Your cheeks are like the crimson:
There’s nane in Scotland plays sae weel
Sin’ we lost Habbie Simson!”
The three generations of Sempill lairds were among those who kept the flame of Scots poetry burning, however feebly and fitfully, throughout this troubled period.
Watson’s comic poems
As the 17th century gave place to the 18th the decline in the national life continued, with the loss of much of the country’s wealth in the disastrous Darien venture and the disappearance of our independent parliament in 1707. Yet it was at this nadir of the national fortunes that the literary scene began to recover. In 1706, an Edinburgh printer named James Watson produced the first of three volumes of his Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems. Compiled with the specific purpose of reviving our bruised national pride by drawing attention to the great literature of the past, this anthology contained poems such as the anonymous Christ’s Kirk on the Green (a lively comic poem of rustic revelry) and Alexander Montgomerie’s The Cherrie and the Slae, and also works by the Sempills and contemporary poets.
Watson’s Choice Collection fulfilled its purpose. Instantly popular, it set Scottish readers not only to exploring the nation’s great literary heritage which had been allowed to disappear into near-oblivion, but to producing new poetry for the new age; the poems in the Choice Collection providing models for contemporary poets to imitate. And none of Watson’s readers applied himself to the task of promoting this national poetic revival more diligently or more effectively than the man whom we will meet in the next issue: Alan Ramsay.
J. Derrick McClure is a Senior Lecturer in English at Aberdeen University, specialising in Scots language and literature. Born in Ayr, but resident for 30 years in Aberdeen, he is therefore keen on both Burns and Doric.
This is an article from the February 2009 edition of Leopard Magazine. To read much more like this every month, see our subscription details.