Burns Night. My children
are terrified that they will be forced to endure the whole of Tam o'Shanter before they get their
haggis burgers. But just thinking about the many
faces of Robert Burns has always cheered me up—ploughman and dandy, dancer and
fiddle-player, womanizing partygoer and soul-searching depressive.
A world-class poet, he rose
from a two-room clay cottage rented by his gardening father, who was determined
to get his children educated even though their mother was illiterate. Just as
important to the young Robert’s development was his relative Betty Davidson, who
enthralled him with ‘stories and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights,
wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other
trumpery.’ She would—obviously—head up my list of invitees to my ideal Burns’
Night party.
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| Carpenter's Son & Greek Prof. |
Next would be Professor Andrew Dalziel,
the carpenter’s son who rose—as was then possible in the Scottish educational
system—to be a leading Edinburgh intellectual. Via parochial school he arrived
at Edinburgh University and by 1779 at the Chair of Greek. He was almost
single-handedly responsible for saving the reputation of Classics at that university
after a long decline, but remained entirely free from snobbery: '... We have
got a poet in town just now, whom everybody is taking notice of — a ploughman
from Ayrshire — a man of unquestionable genius.’
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| Esther Knew it Off by Heart |
My next invitee would be Esther
Easton, the gardener's wife Burns visited in 1787. He recorded that she
was ‘a very remarkable woman for reciting poetry of all kinds, and sometimes
making Scotch doggerel herself—she can repeat by heart almost everything she
has ever read, particularly Pope’s ‘Homer’ from end to end; has studied Euclid
by herself; and, in short, is a woman of very extraordinary abilities’ and ‘a
great florist.’ Esther could recite Pope's Homer and do the accounts and flower arrangements.
The last, though, would be John
Lapraik, a friend to whom Burns showed touching loyalty,
supporting him when he was sent to debtors’ prison. It was in his famous Epistle for J. Lapraik, an Old Scots Bard,
that Burns set out his own poetic manifesto: education was all very well, but
even men like him and Lapraik, who had not studied at university, could write
inspirational poetry.
Contrary to popular (prejudiced)
interpretation, Burns never ever says that
study of the Greek and Latin Classics is prejudicial to poetry. On the
contrary, he takes care to show his own immersion in the entire poetic tradition. His
point is this: without talent, no amount of education can turn ‘dull, conceited’
students into anything but ‘asses’, who have confused ‘their brains in college
classes’. Nobody ever managed ‘to climb Parnassus / By dint of Greek:’
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| Boring the family 25th Jan 2013 |
Gie me ae spark o' nature's
fire,
That's a' the learning I
desire;
Then tho' I drudge thro' dub
an' mire
At pleugh or cart,
My muse, tho' hamely in attire,
May touch the heart.
This poem has the added virtue of
being short enough to prevent the haggis getting cold. For those of
you as mystified by Burns’ dialect as many of his readers were by ancient
Greek, you can preface your dinner tonight with this delicious and comprehensible
recording of the poem by David Rintoul: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/epistle_to_j_lapraik.
This blog is in honour of my TWO friends who share a birthday with Robert Burns as well as a love of all things Greek, Fiona Macintosh and Pantelis Michelakis.
