Burns Love Life

 

Margaret Chambers

Burns love life is highly complex and complicated!  He wrote some of the most famous love songs ever written. He loved often. His first famous poem, written when Burns was sixteen was Westlin Winds for Peggy. 

As a teenager he fell in love often, after reading a book of French love letters given to him by mistake by his tutor John Murdoch! Burns’s first child, Elizabeth Burns was born to his mother’s servant Elizabeth Paton. 

There was the Mauchline Belles! Many years later when he was twenty two, Burns moved to Mossgiel farm near Mauchline in 1782, where he met his bonny Jean. She was a great singer and knew all the auld Scots ballads like his mother. 

At this time he also met his Highland Mary: after Jean suddenly left for Paisley. He pledged his love for her over a bible and later wrote the poems Highland Mary and To Mary in Heaven to her. Also – “Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, And leave auld Scotia’s shore?” However Mary suddenly died in Greenock from Typhus, she had contracted from her uncle. Burns was devastated.  Machine was a crossroads town, with many travellers and walks fo life. 

Burns also greatly enjoyed educated, cultured women he met on his travels, who he felt a kinship with. First he met Margaret Chambers in Edina, a farmers daughter who was his equal in education and conversation. 

January 1787, Burns wrote to her, Dear Dr. Countrywoman. I know you will laugh at it, when I tell you that your playing and you together have played the deuce somehow, about my heart. I could sit down and cry like a child……’Personal attractions, Madam, you have much above par, Wit and understanding & worth, you possess in the first class. ‘   

 

Burns spent two more winters in Edina in 1787 and 88, and late in 1788 he met the elegant culture Agnes McLahose, his Nancy who was also well educated and a poet too.  He walked under Clarinda/ Nancy’s window. ‘tis the star that guards. My queen of poetesses empress of the poets soul. I gave her two wineglasses with the toast. ‘Long may we love, and long may we be happy.’ 

Clarinda needed the support of her uncle for her annuity. They wrote over 300 letters correspondence to each other from 1788 to 1791 – when he wrote his great song of parting for her Ae Fond Kiss. Clarinda was to leave and told Burns that he must go back to Jean, that there was not likely any future. Burns heart was broken. 

She left for the West indies.

After his Scotia travels (1786-1788) and his time in Edina having his poems published, Burns returned to Ayrshire and married Jean Armour in April 1788, when they moved to the Ellisland farm. They had three surviving sons. He wrote the poem I Love my Jean for her.  Also in 1791, Elizabeth Burns was born to Anna Park, a barmaid at the Globe Inn in 1791. Jean took her in and looked after her. 

Because of his education Burns straddled all walks of life, from the poor he met in Mauchline to the great and good of the Edina’s literati, the academics and the enlightenment writers.  

*In 1791 he was inspired to write one of the greatest love songs ever written, Red Red Rose.

O my Luve is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June;

O my Luve is like the melody

That’s sweetly played in tune.

 

So fair art thou, my bonnie lass,

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the seas gang dry.

 

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;

I will love thee still, my dear,

While the sands o’ life shall run.

 

And fare thee weel, my only luve!

And fare thee weel awhile!

And I will come again, my luve,

Though it were ten thousand mile.

 His stay in the Edina resulted in lifelong friendships - with Lord Glencairn and Francis Dunlop (1730-1815) 

who became a mentor and sponsor and with whom he corresponded. 

*      *      *      *      

Farwell to Clarinda, the mistress of my soul,

The measured time is run

The wretch beneath the dreary pole

So marks his latest sun.

*      *      *      *      *

 

My Peggy’s face, my Peggy’s form,

The frost of hermitage might warm,

My Peggy’s worth, My Peggy’s mind,

Might charm the first of human kind,

I love my Peggy’s angel air,

Her face so truly heavenly fair,

Her nature grace so void of air,

And I do love my Peggy’s heart.   RB

 (Published 1802)

 

A Letter from Mrs Dunlop - She feared I might loose being this ‘rustic bard’ in Edina. She wrote such high praise, and told me, I was the best bard ever to have adorned my country. 

I wrote to her, ‘I have long studied myself and I think I know pretty exactly what ground I occupy, both as a man and a poet….Poets are such outré beings, so much the children of wayward Fancy and capricious Whim, that I believe the word generally allows them a larger latitude in the rules of Propriety, than the sober sons of Judgement and Prudence. ‘ 

 

I Love My Jean

Of a' the airts the wind can blaw,

I dearly like the West;

For there the bony Lassie lives,

The Lassie I lo'e best:

There's wild-woods grow,

and rivers row,

And mony a hill between;

But day and night my fancy's flight

Is ever wi' my Jean.

 

I see her in the dewy flowers,

I see her sweet and fair;

I hear her in the tunefu' birds,

I hear her charm the air:

There's not a bony flower that springs

By fountain, shaw, or green;

There's not a bony bird that sings

But minds me o' my Jean.

RB

 

 

Dismantling the Burns Myths

 

(Or attempting to!)  Our Scots bard has been portrayed at times as a reckless, womanising drunk, and his poetry work has not been taken seriously by academics and educators. I believe these false myths are far from the truth and are of serious consideration. Because our national bard continues to this day to have a significant impact on Scots national image and psyche. 

He has written some of Scots most loved poetry and songs and we celebrate Burns night each January 25^th.

 

He has been dismissed as an uneducated farmer. These myths matter, because as our Scots national bard Burns image is one of the most famous image for Scots. It matters on our images of “Scottishness” and of our long history of Scots cultural identity. 

  In fact Burns was voted by Scots as the most iconic Scots image, much like Mozart’s image in Vienna. During Victorian empire times Burns was viewed as part of the empire narrative associated to Walter Scott’s romantic Scottish nostalgia – of a Scotland that was lost and gone forever – and this image focused on Burns love poems, while neglecting his other work.

 

The elites, the academics and literati in Edinburgh found it hard to accept the farmer Burns in his boots, who never attended university: but was self-educated through his local education, his father and his own reading. He met the great and the good here and began his song collecting journeys, after meeting James Jamieson who published the Scot musical museum.    

  

Burns was far more than the peasant farmer or ploughman poet and was highly educated. What is often ignored is that Burns father was a cultured, disciplined and well spoken man himself, who greatly valued education for his family. His mother knew and sang all the old Scots ballads. For a few years Burns attended a school in Ayr, where he was taught by the young teacher John Murdoch, at the age of seven, and he became a great reader. After which he and Gilbert were tutored by Murdoch over the occasional summer months.

 

 Yes he may have occasionally enjoyed social drinking, but as he writes from Ellisland to his friend Robert Cunningham in 1791, after a party when he had sold off the Ellisland farm equipment:  “After the roup was over, about thirty people engaged in a battle and fought it out for three hours. Nor was the scene much better in the house. Not fighting, indeed, but folk lying drunk on the floor and decanting, until both my dogs got so drunk by attending them, that they could not stand. You will easily guess how I enjoyed the scene as I was no further over than you used to see me.”  

Tam O Shanter by Alexander Goudie

Anchors Close Edinburgh

Edina , the New World

Poozie Nansies

Burns & highland Mary

Library books Ellisland

There has been too much negativity written. Why? Was it because Burns didn’t fit into normal accepted norms, and had friends he met at the Globe Inn who were reformers for votes for all men? Because he grew up the son of a tenant farmer?  Because he was a free, independent thinker, who challenged the elites narratives. Or mainly because he wrote in the Scots language and therefore was not to be taken seriously. 

Considering all Burns writing, studying, researching and collecting – his many letters, poems, songs and epistles. His years of toil and hard farm labour growing up, plus his Scotia travels during his short life and all the myths that surround him. I find it hard to believe that Burns was a hard drinker as some myths put out. Because, how did he find time to write some of his best poetry at Ellisland and in Dumfries – plus his Excise work of detailed record keeping, long days travelling on horseback and being a young father. 

Burns poetry and song have become a symbolic touchstone of Scottish identity for generations, The Patriot Bard, by Patrick Scott Hogg

 

In the age of enlightenment Burns believed in the power of reason and common sense. When there was a crackdown on democratic reform. The Jacobite cause was symbolic of the country’s lost, romantic past. The tyrannical oppression of the Pitt government

brought the enlightenment movement to its knees, and silenced the leading minds of a generation. Burns risked his life and freedom to continue composing such radical material of social satire during his last few years. He published anonymously Scots Wa Hae as he considered it too seditious.