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side, till by came a Highlandman at the gallop, on a tolerably good horse, but which had never known the ornaments of iron or leather. We scorned to be out-galloped by a Highlandman, so off we started, whip and spur. My companions, though seemingly gaily mounted, fell sadly astern; but my old mare, Jenny Geddes, one of the Rosinante family, she strained past the Highlandman in spite of all his efforts, with the hair-halter: just as I was passing him, Donald wheeled his horse, as if to cross before me to mar my progress, when down came his horse, and threw his rider’s breekless arse in a clipt hedge; and down came Jenny Geddes over all, and my bardship between her and the Highlandman’s horse. Jenny Geddes trode over me with such cautious reverence, that matters were not so bad as might well have been expected; so I came off with a few cuts and bruises, and a thorough resolution to be a pattern of sobriety for the future. From Dumbarton he went on to Paisley and returned to Mossgiel, “a certain gloominess” seeming to hang around his countenance. It was from Mossgiel that he wrote this letter (probably on 30 June 1787) to his old Mauchline friend Jamie Smith, which continues: “I am, just as usual, a rhyming, masonmaking, raking, aimless, idle fellow.” Shaking off his gloom with such self-reassurance, Burns set off for Edinburgh and travels in the North-east shortly afterwards. Horses are essential to poem and paintings. The great broad flanks of Meg and other horses are deliberately evocative of Nannie’s buttocks, bare beneath the “cutty sark” in the leaps and bounds of the dance. But beyond the visual puns the historical moment of the poem is also important. Burns was aged about seventeen when he was in Kirkoswald, meeting Douglas Graham, the model for Tam, and other prototypes for
the poem’s characters. These older men – local legends now ageing into respectable members of the community – would have been nostalgic for the appetite and excess of their own youth. Burns’ depictions were recognised and irreverent. The Miller and Souter were well-known in the area. The Miller especially was known as the first cartwright or wheelwright in the area. In other words, the poem is set at a time when horsedrawn transport and developed roads were changing the face of transport. Previously, sleds might have been dragged across open land from port to port or farm to market. The moment of Tam is exactly at a turning point, a world unimaginable without horses. Apart from the riding, the fact that the Devil in the poem is playing the bagpipes associates him with Highlanders and suggests the pressing proximity of the Highland horseman Burns raced on the second Highland tour. The competition between them is both serious and comic – serious to the point of being life-threatening (as it was for Sandy, galloping up the driveway and road by my Uncle Glen’s house in Lanarkshire) – but also hilarious, wild, unjustified by reason, unpredicted by anything, but entered into willingly, and to glorious literary consequence. The point is that with Burns and Goudie you’re swept along without safety belts on a journey of reckless energy. The law would never allow it, but you wouldn’t ever deny that it was worth the ride. This is the key to the balance between comedy and seriousness in the poem. Thomas Carlyle’s description of it as “a failed tragedy” is surely badly misjudged, reflecting his sympathy for ballast over dexterity. The message of the poem is more to do with the relation between mundane reality and the work of the imagination. We are being told a story intended to explain away the fact of a horse with a missing tail. There are numerous versions of what “really” happened to cause Meg to lose her tail, but beyond the folk-tales on which Burns may have based the story there is a contrast between the flight of fancy that takes
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place between leaving the pub and crossing the brig – between the two “key-stanes” of midnight and the bridge at mid-river. One story I’ve heard is that, as Tam was drinking, a group of boys passing the pub saw him securely planted indoors and cut off his horse’s tail to use the hair for fishing lines. Another is simply that drunken cronies cut off the tail to embarrass him. Such wild humour would not be unknown to readers of Lewis Grassic Gibbon. These were wild men, Muckle men wi’ tousled beards, I grat at as a bairn as MacDiarmid describes them in his poem “Crowdieknowe”. The childishness of this mischief is acknowledged when Burns writes, That night, a child might understand, The Deil had business on his hand. A sense of humour is required to appreciate that. It’s not just that “The Deil had business on his hand” – it’s that “a child might understand” that, and only, as it happens, on a night like this. Yet where are the children in the poem? Dead, murdered, their corpses in a basin on a table in the Auld Kirk, in the middle of the hell-party. The horror is real, but a child’s understanding – as opposed to an adult’s – also informs the poem: it is out for a lark. An adult understanding will never be enough. The world both Burns and Goudie lived in had these shared qualities of tenderness to the young and old, robustness to the adult, and appetite in evidence in every direction. This is what makes Tam o’ Shanter a key-text. Just as Burns is pivotal in Scottish literature, Tam o’ Shanter is the central poem in Scottish poetry. The epigraph is acknowledged to Gavin Douglas (c.1475–1522), whose translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Burns had been reading in Thomas Ruddiman’s edition of 1710. So the link