FullReads

But when sober, there is a sadness about the Scottish muse nowadays– as perhaps there ought to be–and the utterances of hers which ring the truest are laments. We question whether in all Mr. Whitelaw’s collection there is a single modern poem (placing Burns as the transition point between the old and new) which rises so high, or pierces so deep, with all its pastoral simplicity, as Smibert’s “Widow’s Lament.”

Afore the Lammas tide
Had dwin’d the birken tree,
In a’ our water-side,
Nae wife was blest like me:
A kind gudeman, and twa
Sweet bairns were round me here;
But they’re a’ ta’en awa’,
Sin’ the fa’ o’ the year.

Sair trouble cam’ our gate,
And made me, when it cam’,
A bird without a mate,
A ewe without a lamb.
Our hay was yet to maw,
And our corn was yet to shear;
When they a’ dwined awa’,
In the fa’ o’ the year.

I daurna look a-field,
For aye I trow to see,
The form that was a bield
To my wee bairns and me.
But wind, and weet, and snaw,
They never mair can fear,
Sin’ they a’ got the ca’,
In the fa’ o’ the year.

Aft on the hill at e’ens,
I see him ‘mang the ferns,
The lover o’ my teens,
The father o’ my bairns:
For there his plaid I saw,
As gloamin’ aye drew near–
But my a’s now awa’,
Sin’ the fa’ o’ the year.

Our bonnie rigs theirsel’,
Reca’ my waes to mind,
Our puir dumb beasties tell
O’ a’ that I ha’e tyned;
For whae our wheat will saw,
And whae our sheep will shear,
Sin’ my a’ gaed awa’,
In the fa’ o’ the year?

My heart is growing cauld,
And will be caulder still,
And sair sair in the fauld,
Will be the winter’s chill;
For peats were yet to ca’,
Our sheep they were to smear,
When my a’ dwined awa’,
In the fa’ o’ the year.

I ettle whiles to spin,
But wee wee patterin’ feet,
Come rinnin’ out and in,
And then I first maun greet:
I ken its fancy a’
And faster rows the tear,
That my a’ dwined awa’,
In the fa’ o’ the year.

Be kind, O heav’n abune!
To ane sae wae and lane,
An’ tak’ her hamewards sune,
In pity o’ her mane:
Lang ere the March winds blaw,
May she, far far frae here,
Meet them a’ that’s awa’,
Sin’ the fa’ o’ the year.

It seems strange why the man who could write this, who shows, in the minor key of metre, which he has so skilfully chosen, such an instinct for the true music of words, could not have written much more. And yet, perhaps, we have ourselves given the reason already. There was not much more to sing about. The fashion of imitating old Jacobite songs is past, the mine now being exhausted, to the great comfort of sincerity and common sense. The peasantry, whose courtship, rich in animal health, yet not over pure and refined, Allan Ramsay sang a hundred years ago, are learning to think, and act, and emigrate, as well as to make love. The age of Theocritus and Bion has given place to–shall we say the age of the Caesars, or the irruption of the barbarians?–and the love-singers of the North are beginning to feel, that if that passion is to retain any longer its rightful place in their popular poetry, it must be spoken of henceforth in words as lofty and refined as those in which the most educated and the most gifted speak of it. Hence, in the transition between the old animalism and the new spiritualism, a jumble of the two elements, not always felicitous; attempts at ambitious description, after Burns’s worst manner; at subjective sentiment, after the worst manner of the world in general; and yet, all the while, a consciousness that there was something worth keeping in the simple objective style of the old school, without which the new thoughtfulness would be hollow, and barren, and windy; and so the two are patched together, “new cloth into an old garment, making the rent worse.” Accordingly, these new songs are universally troubled with the disease of epithets. Ryan’s exquisite “Lass wi’ the Bonny Blue Een,” is utterly spoiled by two offences of this kind.