Program Note: About Robert Burns

Burn in rehearsal. Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.

NOTES FROM THE ACADEMICS The best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley.

We start with the same words that Alan and Steven quote but with a very different focus. As is often the case with Burns, there’s a multi-layered reading of these famous lines. Yes, they are a profound reflection on the realities of life with which we can all relate, but they’re also a hint of that darker aspect of Burns’s psyche, of the periods of pervasive pessimism that marked the episodes of melancholy that punctuated his life.

Long considered to be evidence of Burns drinking excessively, more recent work has begun to consider his melancholy as a condition in its own right. With this reexamination, comes the question of the impact of these disordered moods on his life. And, as Alan and Steven discovered, it is Burns’ letters that offer the best evidence for this, giving us the experiences in his own words.

What becomes clear is that Burns fears his lows. He confides only in a small number of friends he can trust, most notably Frances Dunlop, but is heart-wrenchingly honest when he does so. Through these confidences, we begin to understand why he dreaded their onset — at their most severe, they will render him bed-ridden, unable to ‘read, write or think’; the mental disorder will manifest itself physically as headaches or stomach upsets; at times, the darkness is so pervasive that he admits he ‘could contentedly & gladly resign’ life. Even milder episodes will leave him ‘in a compleat [sic] Decemberish humour, gloomy, sullen, stupid.’ Consistent across all episodes, regardless of severity, is a dullness of thought, a dampening of activity, and a muffling of the voice of his poetic muse.

What we also find, however, is that these episodes are directly related to his creativity.

In the closing months of 1781, Burns suffers his first major depression; as it resolves, he produces works with titles such as To Ruin’ and ‘A Prayer, Under the Pressure of

Violent Anguish, and opening lines like ‘O raging Fortune’s withering blast.’ In light of his recent recovery, they now read as poetic therapy helping him to understand what he later calls his ‘constitutional hypochondriac taint.’ It’s an approach that works and we see him use again. A Winter’s Night, written in November 1786, describes ‘… burns, wi’ snawy wreeths up-choked.’ The play on ‘Burns’ talks to an approaching melancholy, to his creativity being stifled. This first section gives way to Burns evoking the muffled voice of his muse, but the poem has a triumphant closing (in his native Scots) as he emerges from the gloom. Burns uses his creativity to map out an episode, comforting himself with the reminder that, however bad it gets, it will come to an end.

While the threat of a depression is constant, it is not all darkness. Less explicitly discussed, but still evident in Burns’ correspondence, are periods of elevated moods — times where he is full of energy and full of himself, grandiose in his language, and more optimistic than circumstances suggest he should be. Thus, in early 1788, he leases Ellisland Farm despite his own better judgement of the prospects it offers; he swears close friends to secrecy but then can’t contain himself and spreads the news anyway. Despite his professions of love for Agnes McLehose, her maid Jenny Clow is now pregnant by Burns and, within weeks, he will have married Jean Armour. Other episodes see his restless energy turn out dozens of songs, original and edited, for Edinburgh publisher George Thomson, each work providing just enough distraction for his shortened attention span.

If we know that Burns writes Tam o Shanter in late summer 1790, after one such period of elevated mood, we might then read his lines ‘pleasures are like poppies spread,/You seize the flower, its bloom is shed’ as a summary of his condition. Tam must brave the threatening darkness but, by pushing on, he can find refuge in the light of Alloway Kirk. Only there does he find that the light carries its own threat — the rising energy of witches’ dance mirrors Burns’ climbing mood state until neither he nor Tam can contain themselves and ‘Weel done cutty sark!’ brings problems of a different kind.

For Burns, the ‘fairy pleasures of the Muse’ are a fair trade for ‘the catalogue of evils’ that his poetic temperament brings. He understands they are an integral part of who he is. Through his letters, we too can come to understand this; we open up new ways of seeing a man we think we know and new ways of reading works that seem so familiar.

We are privileged in our work to be able to spend significant time with Burns’ life and works and to be able to open these new vistas from which to see Burns.

Our thanks to all our team at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies and to Alan and Steven for their keen and stimulating creative engagement. © Dr Moira Hansen and Professor Kirsteen McCue Dr Moira Hansen is a Project Assistant and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Glasgow, having completed her thesis on the physical and mental health in the life and work of Robert Burns in 2020.

Professor Kirsteen McCue is Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture and CoDirector of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow. Both have worked as Academic Consultants on the production.