Burns Night Redux
Below, I reproduce a piece I published for Burns Night 2020 in the Edinburgh University student newspaper (2020, I now realise with some alarm, was four whole years ago!). This is still the only thing I have ever written that has appeared in traditional newspaper format (with smelly, inky paper and all), so it is quite special to me. It also appeared online.
I have taken this opportunity to make some corrections and additions to the piece. Having noticed some annoying infelicities upon re-reading it—as I often do with, well, almost everything I have previously published—I have also touched it up a little, though it cannot be made perfect without a complete rewrite. I have also added some references where appropriate.
I am still not entirely happy with it, though I don’t think it’s too bad a piece. And I stand by the spirit of it.
So, Happy Burns Night, and raise a glass of whisky with me to one of Scotland’s greatest sons!
Burns Night: a kitsch memorial worth celebrating
Let’s be honest: Burns Night is terribly sentimental and garish. The pipes, the haggis, the emotional recitations and reflections, the kilts, the flags—all these things are an evocation of an invented Scottish tradition, one which is unimportant in the ordinary lives of most of us Scots. It is also deeply ahistorical. Robert Burns, one of the world’s finest poets, is reduced to a collection of kitsch rituals. In sentimentalising Burns so, we unmoor him from his historical reality.
And yet, is it not wonderful to have a national holiday celebrating a poet? It is not very common to celebrate writers in this way. Such rituals allow for kitsch nonsense, of course, but there is still something valuable to be distilled from Burns Night, I think. And that is its central idea: that an exceptional national poet is worth going to a lot of trouble for. And I confess that I find the kitsch fun and I grant that Burns Nights are not (or not quite) as absurd as my above exaggeration suggests.
Nonetheless, I think we should ditch the kitsch (well, most of it: the ‘Address to a Haggis’ ceremony is good fun) and instead just swill whisky and gobble haggis, neeps, and tatties while reciting poetry—and reflecting on Burns and Scotland as historical reality demands that we do.
Take, for example, Burns’ ambivalence about the Union between Scotland and England. He is known for writing poetry scathingly critical of it but he was also loyal to the Glorious Revolution and the British constitution, though he thought it could do with a good dose of purifying reform.1 So, neither team in our never-ending independence debate can claim him entirely—history, as ever, does not take sides.
Burns did have some sympathies with the American and French Revolutions and with radical politics, however. He wrote an ‘Ode For General Washington’s Birthday’ in 1794 in tribute to the great revolutionary and first American president. This poem lamented Scotland’s loss of freedom at the hands of England while celebrating America’s triumph against the oppressor. The poem was too radical to publish in his lifetime (1794 was also the year of William Pitt’s Treason Trials, let us not forget). Indeed, one of Burns’ close friends, Frances Dunlop, cut ties with him for a while due to his fervour for the French Revolution.
Mention of George Washington inevitably brings up the question of slavery. Burns was an opponent of slavery—his 1792 poem ‘The Slave’s Lament’ directly attacked the institution—yet he had, some years earlier, accepted a job as a bookkeeper on a Jamaican slave plantation. His finances were precarious at this time, and he had yet to make his name as a poet. In the end, his first published collection of poetry made him famous and beloved, so he had no need of the plantation job.
This is not to say that Burns was as hypocritical as those American revolutionaries who proclaimed liberty while owning slaves, but it is still lamentable. It also means that we must treat him as a historical figure, with all the ambiguities thus entailed, rather than as a sentimentalised hero. A man’s a man for a’ that, indeed.
As I mentioned, Burns was also ambiguous on the Union question. In his ‘Ode’ and many of his other poems, he venerated heroic Scottish resistance to English domination. This raises the question of Scotland and empire. Was Scotland colonised by England? Are we under the English boot? Many see it this way, but it is simply not true. Scots reconciled themselves to the Union fairly quickly and were at the forefront of the British Empire. We made money through and with an imperialism founded on astonishing arrogance and very often backed by sickening brutality. Scots were disproportionately represented in the ranks of the East India Company. Highland regiments became the ‘shock troops’ of the empire, as the eminent historian T.M. Devine has put it. Once more, history tells more complex stories than the simplistic ones we seem to yearn for.
So, what is to be done about Burns Night? I suggest we celebrate Burns as a great poet and a great man, and use the opportunity to (maturely) reflect on Scottish and global history. In doing so, we should respect historical complexity and refrain from reducing Burns to a kitsch caricature. And, of course, we should drink some good whisky and sing some lovely songs all the while.
I am inclined to emphasise Burns’ radical politics, but it would be wrong to disregard contrary aspects of his life and career. When citing the Ploughman Poet, do so carefully, for history is painted in chiaroscuro. Still, for a’ that, I think it is fair to conclude by saying that Robert Burns—opponent of slavery, scourge of tyrants, and lyrical genius—is a man well worth celebrating.
I need to remember this line:
history is painted in chiaroscuro.