We twa hae run about the braes
And pou’d the gowans fine,
But we’ve wandered monie a weary fit
Sin’ auld lang syne.
We twa hae paidl’d in the burn
Frae morning sun till dine,
But seas between us braid hae roared
Sin’ auld lang syne.
And there’s a hand, my trusty fiere,
And gie’s a hand o’ thine,
And we’ll tak a right guid-willie waught For auld lang syne!
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne!
Jean Armour, though his wife, was not Burns’s only love. Mary Campbell inspired “Highland Mary,” and Mary Morrison inspired a poem that is named after her:
O Mary, at thy window be,
It is the wish'd, the trysted hour!
Those smiles and glances let me see,
That makes the miser's treasure poor.
O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace,
Wha for thy sake wad gladly die?
Or canst thou break that heart of his,
Whase only fault is loving thee?
Probably there were half a dozen others, most of whom were inspirations, too. But one of Burns’ finest poems is not about young love at all, or illegitimate love with all its attractions. In “John Anderson, My Jo,” an aging wife speaks with affectionate sweetness to her equally aging husband.
John Anderson, my jo, John,
We clamb the hill thegither;
And mony a cantie day, John,
We’ve had wi’ ane anither:
Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we’ll go,
And sleep thegither at the foot,
John Anderson, my jo.
There are many other Burns poems and songs that are as good or nearly so: “The Banks o’ Doon,” “Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We Sever,” and “To a Mouse, on Turning Up Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785”:
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin’, tim’rous beastie,
O what a panic’s in thy breastie!
O Thou need na start awa’ sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
Also, “To a Louse, on Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church,” “Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous,” “Charlie, He’s My Darling,” and (perhaps most famous of all) “A Man’s a Man for A’ That!” We needn’t to stop even there; still to be mentioned are “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” and “Tam o’Shanter,” to say nothing of “Oh, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast,” which he wrote as he lay dying, to the favorite air of the young woman who was nursing him. And indeed there are a hundred more.
WILLIAM BLAKE
1757–1827
Songs of Innocence
Songs of Experience
When William Blake died at the age of seventy in 1827, he was buried in an unmarked grave. This anonymity was symbolic of the loneliness and solitude that had been his lot throughout most of his life. He published several books, but all of them failed with a public that had no conception whatsoever of his greatness, as a poet, as an artist, and as a man; and for nearly a century after his death he was still largely unread and unknown. William Butler Yeats helped to edit an annotated edition of Blake’s major works in 1893, and T.S. Eliot included an essay on Blake in The Sacred Wood (1920) that invited a larger audience than had ever known Blake to appreciate and understand him. The centenary of his death in 1927 brought forth a multitude of articles, critical essays, and editions. Today, Blake is permanently established in the highest pantheon of English poetry.
The reason Blake spoke not to his own age but to an age more than a century after his death is perhaps not far to seek. Blake was a seer—in two senses of the term. First, he possessed what is known as eidetic sight (a very rare quality): sometimes, when he imagined something, he could “see” it posed in front of his eyes, so that he could look at it from one side and another. Perhaps more than one artist has possessed this gift, but even among artists it must be extremely rare, and it is never easily understood. Sometimes possessors of the talent are driven mad by it. Blake was thought to be mad by those of his contemporaries who thought of him at all.
Having the gift of seeing mental images as real entities may or may not be good for an artist; it is probably good for a poet, if he lives in the twentieth century, an age of images and imagism in literature. Unfortunately, it was not good for a poet who was born in 1757 and who lived in an age of rational thought and feeling. Blake’s first book of poems, Songs of Innocence, which he illustrated and printed himself (he was an engraver as well as a watercolorist), and which appeared in 1789, the year of the French Revolution (of which Blake passionately approved), should have provoked the storm of excitement produced by Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which was published nine years later. Songs of Innocence should have, in short, initiated the so-called Romantic period in English poetry. Lyrical Ballads was a collection of poems about a life that most of its readers understood. Its “revolutionary” poems offered thoughtful, even novel comments on that life, and these were appreciated or objected to by readers. But there were readers.
No one read Songs of Innocence because it described, in powerful images, a life that no one understood. It would not be understood for more than a hundred years.
Songs of Innocence presents a kind of dreamlike childhood existence; Songs of Experience, its companion piece, presents poems on many of the same themes that depict the horror of life as it was lived by the poor and the abject, and especially as life was going to be led by thousands, then millions, of the victims of the English Industrial Revolution. For Blake was a seer in this other sense of the word as well; that is, he could foresee the future, could imagine things that had not yet occurred. As a sort of preface to his long poem, Milton, he wrote these famous lines:
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
But in writing them he was not describing anything that had happened yet, or that he had ever seen. He had never been to the not- yet-industrially-blighted north and Midlands of England; he had never seen a factory “manned” (the word carries heavy irony) by women and children, working from sunup to sundown; he had never seen the black smoke filling the sky over Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool. Yet he did “see” these things, as no other man in his time. It was no wonder that he did not come to be read until a century after his death.