Lyricists

"Beauty's of a fading nature Has a season and is gone!"

"The white moon is setting behind the white wave, And Time is setting with me, O!"

"Burns stood, as regarded the old and the new world of poetry, both in Scotland and in England, at the parting of the ways. He was at once the climax of the old and the harbinger of the new. He brought to perfection what many of his Scottish predecessors and models had practised with much charm and ability. In the vernacular Scottish song, in the satire, in the familiar Epistle, in dramatic narrative, he rose to a height which no successor could depose him. He was the greatest of Scottish poets. ... More than any one else, more than Cowper or Wordsworth, did he serve to break up the frost that seemed to be settling upon the lyric flow in England at the end of the last century. The renaissance of poetry early in this century owed much to him, and those who owed to poetry no small part of their higher education would not grudge him their thoughtful gratitude."

"Their great national poet spoke to Scotland in her language, that he read the hearts of her people, and gave eloquent utterance to their dumb thoughts. In his scathing words he was able to condemn everything that was ignoble, selfish, and mean; and he stimulated everything that was noblest and best in the hearts of the people. He gave lessons of the loftiest patriotism and of aspirations for political freedom, while at the same time he maintained a steadfast devotion to the cause of everything that savoured of uncompromising hatred of oppression and wrong."

"Now, Robert Burns was a great man and a great poet, and the influence of his truly tremendous satiric and lyrical genius has been one of the great factors in the disintegration of Scottish superstition."

"Scottish virtues were due...to Wallace, who started the idea of independence, to John Knox for the ineradicable reverence for the Kirk, and to Robert Burns for that feeling of brotherhood and sense of humanity that got below all differences of rank."

"There was neither fortune nor title in the man's pedigree, and yet he sprang from the salt of the earth, for he came from that lowland Scottish peasant stock which was one of the finest stocks that the world could show, if one might judge from its results. The limitations of these men might be marked, but there sprang from them every now and again one who could voice the feelings of his fellow men, and such a man was Robert Burns."

"He has given voice to all the experiences of common life; he has endeared the farm-house and cottage, patches and poverty, beans and barley; ale, the poor man's wine; hardship, the fear of debt, the dear society of weans and wife, of brothers and sisters, proud of each other, knowing so few, and finding amends for want and obscurity in books and thought. ... And, as he was thus the poet of the poor, anxious, cheerful, working humanity, so had he the language of low life. He grew up in a rural district, speaking a patois unintelligible to all but natives, and he has made that Lowland Scotch a Doric dialect of fame. It is the only example in history of a language made classic by the genius of a single man."

"He speaks for a community he is rooted in, as Chaucer and Langland did. He is a lyrical poet of simple tenderness; but he is also a comic and satirical poet with a hard and definite moral vision, a very sharp eye indeed for permanent kinds of human folly, and a glancing and flickering wit... He is also a poet of the people as no modern English poet worth anything has been. He thus fills a gap for the English reader; and if young English poets, ingenious but academic, were to read him to-day they might learn to double their strength by touching the earth."

"I also liked the Romantic poets. Wordsworth, Keats, Burns and Blake were some of my favourites. There was something about their rebellious spirit against the evils of industrialization that moved me. Of course now, some of their pessimism, mysticism and limited critical realist visions make me quite uncomfortable."

"He was a leading Liberal, certainly. It had been said by a great statesman in the old days that he did not care who made the laws so long as he could make the ballads. In the last century the accents of freedom were heard in Scotland in the ballads of Burns. "Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled" and "A man's a man for a' that" were regarded as almost revolutionary in the days when he wrote."

"The economic truths of Socialism, its industrialism, and its sociology, must remain the vainest of vain dreamings unless we preserve among the people the political frame of mind which can appreciate democratic liberty and worth. When "a man's a man for a' that" is recited without making the blood tingle, the man has ceased to be."

"The influence of Burns on the imaginative literature of Scotland has been deep and abiding. Many Scotsmen have been so touched, moved, and stirred by his writings, as to arouse an irrepressible feeling within them to compose verse themselves; and to-day there are many in the humble walks of life who can write passable and even animated verse and song, and appreciate the highest works of the imaginative and elaborate faculties of the race. Burns has exercised much influence over the mind of the Scottish people by removing prejudice and superstition, fostering liberty and independence of spirit, and greater freedom of thought."

"Burns had intellectual breadth and religious susceptibility enough to appropriate what was best in the two phases of the religious thought of his time. Thus it happened that while the average Moderate looked upon Calvinism as represented by the Covenanters as a detestable fanaticism, an enemy to the amenities of social life, Burns paid tribute to their magnificent stand for liberty... Burns, who had Covenanting blood in his veins, had no need to go to Rousseau for his democratic fervour. His "A man's a man for a' that" owes infinitely more to Samuel Rutherford than to Rousseau."

"There was a world of well-dressed company that evening in Dumfries; for the aristocracy of the adjacent country for twenty miles round had poured in to attend a county ball, and were fluttering in groupes along the sunny side of the street, gay as butterflies. On the other side, in the shade, a solitary individual paced slowly along the pavement. Of the hundreds who fluttered past, no one took notice of him; no one seemed to recognise him. He was known to them all as the exciseman and poet, Robert Burns; but he had offended the stately Toryism of the district by the freedom of his political creed; and so, tainted by the plague of Liberalism, he lay under strict quarantine. He was shunned and neglected; for it was with the man Burns that these his contemporaries had to deal. Let the reader contrast with this truly melancholy scene, the scene of his festival a fortnight since. Here are the speeches of the Earl of Eglinton and of Sir John M'Neill, and here the toast of the Lord Justice-General. Let us just imagine these gentlemen, with all their high aristocratic notions about them, carried back half a century into the past, and dropped down, on the sad evening to which we refer, in the main street of Dumfries. Which side, does the reader think, would they have chosen to walk upon? Would they have addressed the one solitary individual in the shade, or not rather joined themselves to the gay groupes in the sunshine who neglected and contemned him? They find it an easy matter to deal with the phantom idea of Burns now: how would they have dealt with the man then?"

"The worker is a mere appendage to the capitalist factory. Machinery has eliminated him. Robert Burns said: “O God, that men should be so cheap, and bread should be so dear!”"

"I think Burns was one of the most extraordinary men I ever met with; his poetry surprised me very much, his prose surprised me still more, and his conversation surprised me more than both his poetry and prose."

"I would claim that Burns is not merely Scotland's greatest poet, but that he is worthy to rank among the greatest poets of the world... Why I claim this place for Burns is this—that he was the poet of nature and of humanity. He raised the conception of the peasant and gave honour and dignity to toil. It is for that reason that all the labouring classes and masses of the world have found in Burns their truest interpreter and their truest friend; and it is as that friend and as that interpreter that I do claim for him a place in the innermost niches of the temple of Fame."

"His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect, perhaps, from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture, but to me it conveys the idea, that they are diminished as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, i.e. none of your modern agriculturists, who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty."

"[A]ll the faculties of Burns' mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for poetry, was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his conversation, I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities."

"This prophecy of the unity of the [human] race [in "A man's a man for a' that"] is founded on the thoroughly Scottish sentiment, fostered by Scottish history from the days of Wallace till our own times, of the value of man as man, of the dignity of labour, whether physical or mental or moral, as compared with the tinsel shows of privileged indolence. The scorn for the empty "birkie ca'd a lord," and for the king-made dignities unbacked by merit, have persistently remained as Scottish qualities all down the ages, and they are becoming the qualities of men wherever thought has filtered down to the humbler classes, wherever the peasant has learned to venerate himself as man."

"Dear Rob! manly, witty, fond, friendly, full of weak spots as well as strong ones—essential type of so many thousands—perhaps the average, as just said, of the decent-born young men and the early mid-aged, not only of the British Isles, but America, too, North and South, just the same. I think, indeed, one best part of Burns is the unquestionable proof he presents of the perennial existence among the laboring classes, especially farmers, of the finest latent poetic elements in their blood."

"Though I have never been able to trace my ancestry to the Land o' Cakes, I have—and I know it is saying a great deal—a Scotchman's love for the poet whose fame deepens and broadens with years. The world has never known a truer singer. We may criticise his rustic verse and compare his brief and simple lyrics with the works of men of longer scrolls and loftier lyres; but after rendering to Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning the homage which the intellect owes to genius, we turn to Burns, if not with awe and reverence, [yet] with a feeling of personal interest and affection. We admire others; we love him. As the day of his birth comes round, I take down his well-worn volume in grateful commemoration, and feel that I am communing with one whom living I could have loved as much for his true manhood and native nobility of soul as for those wonderful songs of his which shall sing themselves forever."

"While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, The fate of empires and the fall of kings; While quacks of State must each produce his plan, And even children lisp the Rights of Man; Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, The Rights of Woman merit some attention."

"Flow gently, sweet Afton! amang thy green braes, Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise. My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream."

"A man may drink and no be drunk; A man may fight and no be slain; A man may kiss a bonnie lass, And aye be welcome back again."

"May coward shame distain his name, The wretch that dares not die!"

"Dweller in yon dungeon dark, Hangman of creation, mark! Who in widow weeds appears, Laden with unhonoured years, Noosing with care a bursting purse, Baited with many a deadly curse?"

"For auld lang syne, my dear, For auld lang syne, We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet For auld lang syne!"

"We twa hae run about the braes, And pu'd the gowans fine."

"Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And never brought to min'? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, And days o' auld lang syne?"

"If naebody care for me, I'll care for naebody."

"Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames, Tied up in godly laces, Before ye gie poor Frailty names, Suppose a change o' cases: A dear-lov'd lad, convenience snug, A treach'rous inclination— But, let me whisper i' your lug, Ye're aiblins nae temptation. Then gently scan your brother man, Still gentler sister woman; Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang, To step aside is human."

"Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the puddin'-race! Aboon them a' ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm: Weel are ye wordy o' a grace As lang's my arm."

"Affliction's sons are brothers in distress; A brother to relieve,—how exquisite the bliss!"

"The heart benevolent and kind The most resembles God."

"John Barleycorn got up again, And sore surprised them all."

"Some wee short hours ayont the twal."

"I was na fou, but just had plenty."

"Some books are lies frae end to end."

"Green grow the rashes, O; Green grow the rashes, O; The sweetest hours that e'er I spend Are spent among the lasses, O."

"Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears Her noblest work she classes, O: Her prentice han' she tried on man, An' then she made the lasses, O."

"There's nought but care on ev'ry han', In every hour that passes, O: What signifies the life o' man, An 'twerna for the lasses, O."

"Green grow the rashes, O; Green grow the rashes, O; The sweetest hours that e'er I spend, Are spent amang the lasses, O."

"An' fareweel dear, deluding woman, The joy of joys!"

"Some rhyme a neebor's name to lash; Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu' cash; Some rhyme to court the countra clash, An' raise a din; For me, an aim I never fash; I rhyme for fun."

"Just now I've taen the fit o' rhyme, My barmie noddle's working prime."

"There's some are fou o' love divine; There's some are fou o' brandy."

"Leeze me on drink! it gi'es us mair Than either school or college."

"Here, some are thinkin' on their sins, An' some upo' their claes."