A Portrait of Robbie Burns ~ Man and Mason

A Portrait of Robbie Burns Man & Mason

Mickey Ander ,

Past Master

Rove the main streets of Ayr, Edinburgh, lnnellan, or Dunoon. Stop about a hundred people, and ask them; “When is Scotland’ s National Day?” The vast majority would reply, “Why, it’s the 25 th of January of course! Patron Saint Andrew (on 30 November) may pass virtually unnoticed. But Scots, wheresoever dispersed over land and water, flock together to hear their native tongue spoken with a decided ancient dialect, feast on haggis, and quaff a few drams of highland whisky, all to honor their favorite son on his birthday. Burns wins these polls every year because he is an ageless man who not only gave the world a great legacy of poetry, but because his gentle philosophies have continued to grow in prominence, day-by-day, and year-by-year. who expressed the genius of democracy, and the unspoken hopes and dreams of the depressed and humble in every corner of the world. No greater tribute can be paid to any person, than to say that the character of the universe is gentler, brighter, and kinder for his having passed this way. It certainly can be said of Robbie Burns, that his very name is a signet of compassion, personal magnetism, and the joy of brotherly love. We regard Burns, as much for his tenderness as for his strength, and all the more because he was an amiable, thoughtful, and unassuming human being. It is given to very few men, to endure in the hearts of their fellows. The memory and legend of Burns is a vital force uniting men of many lands into a living association of constant faith, persistent hope, and enduring charity. Emerson proclaimed; “The Memory of Burns! — I am afraid heaven and earth have taken too good care of it, to leave me anything to say. The west winds murmur it. Open those windows behind you and harken to the incoming tide, hear what the waves say of it. The doves perched on the eaves of the stone chapel opposite know something about it. The Memory of Burns — every man’s, every boy’s, every girl’s head carries snatches of his songs, and they say them by heart; and what is strangest of all, never learned them from a book, but from mouth to mouth.

They are the property of all mankind!”

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759 in a tiny, two-room, clay-thrown, thatch-roofed cottage, on the banks of the Doon, in the district of Kyle, two miles south of the town of Ayr, in rural southwest Scotland. It was a peasant farmer’s home, such as he afterwards described in the immortal poem, “The Coffer’s Saturday Night”, in which poverty was consecrated by piety, where the father was ever faithful and the mother an Our Freemasonry embraces no greater far as schooling is concerned, his early eduname than that of Robert Burns. Almost ROBBIE BURNS cation was limited to basic grammar, writing, everyone agrees that he is our greatest lyriand arithmetic. Later he picked up a little cist. To this day, 247 years since his birth, he remains an Latin, a smattering of French, and some knowledge of Engactive voice of Freemasonry’s faith, philosophy, ethics, and lish and the classic poets. But he knew the albums of expectations; its friendship, its pleasure, its passion and its nature, leaf-by-leaf, and the peculiar tablet of the human prophecy. More, he is the minstrel of the Scottish people, heart, as only the swift insight of genius can decipher them. angel, guarding the blessed things of life. So The mysteries of Freemasonry were conveyed to Robbie Burns in Lodge St. David, at Tarbolton, in July 1781, at the age of twenty-two. The historian Lockhart says, that he was introduced to the Lodge by John Rankine. The record of his initiation reads on July 4 th ; “Robert Burns in Lochly was

entered an Apprentice.” Both the Fellow Crafts and Master Mason Degrees were conferred just a few months later, on the same evening in October. Six years later he was made a Knight Templar as well as a Royal Arch Mason, in Eyemouth. Under the system in operation at that time, the two were always conferred together. By this time he had won some fame as a poet, and the higher degrees were granted in token of his ample reputation as a muse and his zeal as an active Mason. On the 27th of July 1784, he was elected Depute Master of Lodge St. James No.135, Tarbolton, a position he held until 1788. Robbie Burns was unanimously elected an honorary member of Lodge St. John No. 22, in Kilmarnock, on October

26, 1786. Major William Parker, the reigning Master of Lodge St. John, became a fast friend of Burns, and personally subscribed to thirty-five copies of the first published edition of his poems. He is immortalized as Willie in the song; “Ye Sons of Auld Killie” (which is a contraction for Kilmarnock) composed and sung by Burns on the occasion of his admittance as an honorary member:

Ye Sons of Auld Killie, assembled by Willie,

To follow the noble vocation;

Your thrifty old mother has scarce such another,

To sit in that honored station.

I’ve little to say, but only to pray, As praying‘s the ton of your fashion A prayer from the muse, who ye well may excuse, for ‘Tis seldom his favourite passion.

Ye powers who preside, o’er the wind and the tide. Who mark each element’s border; Who formed this frame with beneficent aim, Whose sovereign statute is order;

Within this dear mansion may wayward contention, Or withered envy neer enter May secrecy round be the mystical bound, And brotherly love be the center.

Read the meeting minutes [for October 26, 1786]; they conclude with these words: “Robert Burns, poet, from Mauchline, a member of Lodge St. James, Tarbolton, was made an honorary member of this Lodge.” This was the first Masonic Lodge to distinguish Burns with the title “Poet” and to glorify him with an honorary membership. Burns was nearly five feet ten inches tall. He was agile and strong; his high forehead shaded with black, curling hair; his large, dark eyes were full of bright intelligence, his face vividly expressive. His inattentive dress and careless manner gave an impression of coarseness at first, but this was soon forgotten in the warm glow of his charming personality. Full of fun and fire, affable and the best of good company; his superior mind did not make him arrogant, and he loved more than all else a holiday that was half frolic and an ample feast where joy and goodwill were welcome guests. Hard, two-fisted drinking was an acute social problem in Scotland those days; to a degree that we can hardly imagine today. It carved a bitter tragedy in Robert Burns’ life. His fatal environment and frail will made him easy prey to every whim of fancy and passion. It is an awful risk to be endowed with the genius of a Burns; it digs deep pitfalls for the man to whom it is given. Yet, if in his later life he was a degraded man of genius, he was never a man of degraded genius. The corruption never did enter his songs. Allen Cunningham was correct when he said: “Few men had so much of the poet in them, and few poets so much of the man: the man was probably less pure than he ought to have been, but the poet was pure and bright to the end.” Burns is credited as the author of one of the most often repeated drinking songs – the heart warming Auld Lang Syne. Many men voluntarily camouflage Burns checkered life in a generous mask of compassion. On reading his poems, even the exacting Byron was said to have exclaimed: “What an antithetical mind! Tenderness, roughness; delicacy, coarseness; sentiment, sensuality; dirt and deity – all mixed up in a complex earthly compound of inspired clay!” But, if Burns was a sinner, then he was like us; a little good and a little bad, a little weak and a little strong, foolish when he thought he was wise, and wise, often, when he feared he was foolish. So too, may we give Burns benefit of the simple charity which he often prayed for others. By the same token, no man whose name is so closely intertwined with our Craft ever owed more to Freemasonry, or gave more to it. Its ideals and teachings moved his thought; its spirit inspired his song; its genius nurtured a fierce love of freedom and fraternity which he set to meter and music. He was the harbinger of the nineteenth century, the poet of the rights and dominance of the common people. In the gentle air of Freemasonry he found refuge from hardship and heaviness of spirit; and its fellowship served to shelter him from the sharp arrows of his detractors. There are those whose dreams are a vague blur; in which all local loyalties, all heroic national genius are merged and then ignored. Not so Robert Burns. He was a distinctively national poet, who struck deep roots in his native soil, and touched a chord so haunting that it echoes forever. This, we know is true: a man who is not deeply rooted somewhere – to whom one spot on earth is not a little dearer, whose winds a little warmer, and the skies over it a little bluer – will not be of much use anywhere. When Robert Burns appeared, the spirit of Scotland was at low ebb. Her people were crushed and her ancient fire almost quenched. Even her scholars refrained from using the local dialect. It was at such a time that a God-endowed singer took up his harp. He was inspired by the colorful history of his people; the traditions of the Scottish national patriots, Sir William Wallace and Robert the Bruce stirred him with passion. His very being was carefully tuned to the old ballads of love and daring. He often sang about the beautiful, natural simplicity of life in his nation, usually using its vivid and picturesque language. He struck the deep, fierce pride and noble feelings of his countrymen with a delicate but strong hand; and painstakingly embroidered the life, faith, and

genius of his people in poetry and song. It is no wonder Scotland loved him, as people never before adored a poet. He made national glory a living shrine. He was deeply rooted in the soil of his own land. And, because he was so sweetly, sadly, joyously, yes, and even sinfully, human, his spirit and appeal are universal. We are caused to remember that people are the same the world over, and that loyalty, is respected everywhere. His passion for liberty, his affirmation of the nobility of man, his sense of the dignity of labor, his word-pictures of the hard lot of the lowly, find a warm response in every man’s being. It is for these reasons, and more, that all men love Burns; for it was he who taught, as few have taught since, the brotherhood of man and the kinship of all breathing things. Such singers live as long as men love life and their words become a part of the inviolable scriptures of the human heart. Astute scholars and critics agree that Robert Burns was a lyric poet of the first order, and rank him as a major Scottish poet and one of the finest lyricists of the 18 th century (if not the greatest song-writer of the world). The qualities of Burns are direct simplicity, naturalness, vividness, fire, sweet-toned tenderness, and rollicking bawdy humor. He is admired for having voiced the attitudes of the common person with his innate lyrical sense. His poems celebrate the simple, and often earthy, love between a man and woman, the pleasures of convival drinking, and the fierce pride of the independent mind. It is no wonder Burns was the best loved poet of President Lincoln; as much for his democracy as for his humor, tenderness, and rich humanity. With him social rank was nothing, a gaudy bauble alongside the native nobility of manhood. He honored a man for his personal worth, not for his worldly wealth. He displayed genuine contempt for the snob. If he regularly nicked the selfish pride of the rich, it wasn’t from envy, with equal vigor, he held the poor man with disdain who, instead of standing erect, only cringes and whines. His fame rests upon hastily written verses; just as men write short, fast letters to friends; and upon songs as spontaneous, as artless, as lovely as the songs of birds. He sang of simple things, of the joys and woes and spirituality of the common life, where virtue far overshadows sin. He saw the world as God made it; woven as a tapestry of good and evil, of light and shadow, of morality and wickedness; and his songs were a comfort and a consecration to the rich and poor alike. He told the poor man that it is no sin to be destitute, but that it is a sin to be ashamed of it. He taught that honest poverty is not only nobler, but happier, than ill-gotten wealth. The Cotter’s dog and the Laird’s dog are very real dogs, as all admit, but their talk is something more than dog-philosophy. It is the ages old story of the high and the low, and it was just like Burns to take the part of the underdog. Still, had the Cotter’s dog given way to self-pity, Burns would have been the first to boot him. He hated fawning, as he hated sham, and he knew that if toil is tragedy, honest labor is an upright honor and joy. That which still lives of Robert Burns, and will continue to live so long as human nature remains the same, is his sincere love of justice, honesty, reality, his touch of melting sympathy, his demand for liberty, his faith in man and in God – all uttered with simple speech and the golden voice of song. His poems were little jets of love and liberty and pity finding their way out through the fissures in the granite-like theology of his day. They came fresh from the heart of a man whom the death of a little bird set dreaming of the meaning of the world wherein life is woven of beauty, mystery and sorrow. A flower crushed in the budding, a field mouse turned out of its home by a plowshare, a wounded hare limping along the road to dusty death, or the memory of a tiny bird that sang for him, touched him to tears, and made him feel the hurt and heartache of the world. Burns’ poems didn’t germinate and slowly sprout; they awoke and burst forth complete. He was a child of the open air, and his songs had an outdoor feeling. He saw nature with the swift glances of a child, saw beauty in the folds of clouds, in the tilt of trees, in the sound and glitter of flowing waters, in the immutable game of hide-and-seek played by sunbeams and shadows, in the foggy haze trailing the highland. The sigh of the wind in the forest filled him with a kind of wild, sad joy, and the tender face of a mountain daisy was like the thought of one much loved. The throb of his heart was warm in his words, and it was a heart in which he carried an abundant container of warm pity. He had a sad life and a soul of fire, the instincts of an angel in the midst of hard poverty; yet he lived with dash and daring, sometimes with folly, and with a certain bubbling joyousness, despite all his tragedy. Such was the spirit of Robert Burns, a touching and passionate man, capable of withering scorn, quickly shifting from the laughable to the horrible, poised between laughter and tears. If by some magic we could send his soul into all the dark places of the world, pity and joy would return to the common ways of man. His feet may have been in the furrow, but the nobility of manhood was in his heart. Long live the spirit of Robert Burns, poet and Freemason! ■

Note: An unabridged version of this article, available in the office of the Grand Secretary, contains the lyrics of Auld Lang Syne in full.