Peeping Tam
Karl Miller
Robert Burns wrote about art, friendship, religion, animals, drink, marriage and love. The First two and the last of these themes – poetry, sociability and sexual adventure, to call them by other names – commemorate activities which enabled him in youth, as did his drinking, to face the prospect of a lifetime’s hard labour on the land. After just such a life, his own auld farmer addressed his auld mare in these words:
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[*] Thomas Crawford discusses ‘The Jolly Beggars’ in Society and the Lyric (Scottish Academic Press, 237 pp., £6, 28 February 1980, 7073 0227 7). He expresses what could be called a romantic view of the poem, and takes issue with James Kinsley, who has held that ‘ “Love and Liberty” is not mythopoeic; its character is energetic and satiric realism.’ For Crawford, it is both realism and myth: Burns sides with his beggars in such a way as to suggest that the energy affirmed in the poem is like the energy affirmed in Blake’s aphorisms. ‘The social character within the work is a profoundly critical comment on Burns’s Scotland, which he was to explore again, quite seriously and indeed respectfully, in other poems such as “The Vision”.’
[†] In Society and the Lyric, Crawford stresses that at this time the market for printed versions of popular songs was an all-British one. He compares some lines from an 18th-century song in polite English with a song by Burns in Scots (‘Corn Rigs’): the difference between them ‘is more the difference between a high style and a colloquial style than between standard English and a regional dialect’. He goes on: ‘lt is not a matter of two poets employing different languages, but rather different registers or levels of usage within the same language.’ The levels of usage perceived by Crawford may he understood with reference to differences of class within the society which spoke the language in question, and have been both determined and obscured by the regional variations in pronunciation and vocabulary which are perceived by many readers, so far as Scotland is concerned, as features of a second language. See also Graham Tulloch’s The Language of Walter Scott: A Study of his Scottish and Period Language (Deutsch, 331 pp., £12.95, 27 October 1980, 0 233 07223 4), which explains how Scots started from ‘the same base as Standard English’ and developed phonologically along different lines, and tells how Scott set himself in his fiction, with Burns in mind, to keep alive the ‘flame’ of Scots speech and Scottish subjects. Both these books are welcome additions to the stock of Scottish literary studies.