Selected Poems of Robert Fergusson Polygon Edinburgh 2008
“There is no escaping the tragedy of Robert Fergusson” begins the introduction to Polygon’s Selected Poems of Fergusson first brought out by Birlinn seven years ago. And I have to say I am as weary of hearing Fergusson’s name linked with “tragedy” as hearing it linked ineluctably with Robert Burns. Fergusson died young—a few weeks past his 24th birthday. But dying young was hardly uncommon in the eighteenth or any other century before the arrival of the National Health Service in 1948. True, he died in an Edinburgh mental institution, in poverty, having had a mental breakdown some months before his death. But poverty is not and was never unique to poets. And we ought to be long past the days when a person who suffers mental illness is to be described as a “tragic” figure. Had Fergusson been admitted to an Edinburgh mental hospital today, he would clearly have been diagnosed as suffering from severe depression manifesting itself in psychotic episodes of a religious nature. Not an everyday occurrence, but neither an unheard-of psychiatric diagnosis in Scotland. It comes and it came with the culture. And no-one of the time had born witness to his culture more than that young man who died in Edinburgh on October 17th, 1774.
His illness was one witnessing. But the poetry he had written was the greater in that it was a witness that could outlast him, to be shared with us: a poetry written in less than two years throughout 1772 and 1773, when Fergusson was between 21 and 23 years old. Still that fact astonishes. How many poets could produce a body of poetry before their 24th birthday that might be read, disputed, and enjoyed, in two centuries’ time? The word to be insisted on is “enjoyed”. Spare us from another patriotic duty, or the citing of another “linguistic example to be followed.” Like all major artists, Fergusson had no followers, though Burns learned a lot from him. But Burns was a great poet and songwriter; Fergusson was a great poet and linguistic musician. There’s a difference, and the difference is such as to link Fergusson essentially not forward to Burns, or to anyone else—but back to Dunbar, that other great linguistic musician in a living Scots language of his time.
Robert Fergusson published nine poems in Scots in 1772, twenty-one in 1773. Most appeared in the Weekly Magazine or Edinburgh Amusement. And that’s it. On these his reputation rests, and is secure. His poems written in English are all but forgotten: their “poetic English” seems lifeless and artificial beside his poetry in Scots. They can be seen at least as a useful part of Fergusson’s formal training, a process which built through 1771 the necessary pressure of constriction for the dam of language that burst in January 2nd 1772 with his first Scots poem “The Daft Days.”
A word for the reader coming new to Fergusson. Though his poetry in Scots amounts to a mere thirty poems, an adequate glossary to these poems would amount to more than 1000 words. This has been a bar to the widespread popularity Fergusson deserves; the truth is that coming fresh to Fergusson you have to be prepared to do a bit of work, much more work, relatively, than if you were coming to his predecessor Ramsay or to his successor Burns. It is not that Fergusson stands at the head of some dictionary-dredging or “mak it auld” faction; it is that the circumstances peculiar to his life saw him able to skim from a living language, a language in the mouths of people, from his native Edinburgh north to Aberdeen and St Andrews, and south to Dumfries.
In this freeranging language he makes his unique music, enjoys himself, plays with words, makes up daft rhymes, cobbles on occasion fleeting of-the-moment neologisms for the sake of the music, brings to life a huge social spectrum. He is not an encloser of the world, however his fondness for word. He uses word as instance of the presence of the living, as sign of the quick, as heresy against the embalmers, those for whom word is the hand-me-down sarcophagus of the captured and cauterised, the made-safe. The property. But Fergusson is not a coloniser, he is a citizen. He is not of the government, he is one of the population. In his language, he is the population. He is alive.
If it is not pointless—and it is not—to note that Burns’s Poems Written Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect appeared in the same year as Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, it is worthy of mention that Fergusson’s 29 poems in Scots appeared in the same years as Haydn’s great central symphonies of his middle period, numbers 44 to 49. A zeitgeist is not a row of Scottish writers digging a trench through history called Scottish Literature, neither has it borders with passports, nor structures confined to a single art. But while it may be tempting to fit Fergusson nearer home into a snug zeitgeist of a forward-thinking Edinburgh embued with the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment, it is well to note that on November 18th 1773, just one week before Fergusson’s second-last appearance in print in the Weekly Magazine, the journal carried an article denouncing David Hume as one who sought “to extenuate, and render as imperceptible as possible, the difference betwixt virtue and vice; nay, to confound both in one undistinguishable chaos.”
Nor was this new. Fergusson had indeed first burst through to the freedom of “The Daft Days” almost two years earlier. But two poems by other poets were printed in that same issue just before Fergusson’s. The first’s tone is summed up in its lines “The health and strength that God me lent/To save my precious soul/ In vice and folly have I spent/Sinning without controul.” The second, by a Mr Alley, translated Horace thus: “The blameless soul needs no defence!/All heav’n is leagu’d with Innocence!/Thy pallid Spawn, O Guilt! is fear,/That ne’er can find asylum here.” What a change to turn to Fergusson also choosing some Horace—with rather a different world-view.
Ne’er lat your hope o’ergang your days,
For eild and thraldom never stays;
The day looks gash, toot aff your horn,
Nor care yae strae about the morn.
Carpe diem indeed. Nietzsche had it that he could only believe in a God who could dance. Well, Dunbar’s God certainly dances. And so does the “dear God” of Haydn. But not the God of the culture that the Weekly Magazine or Edinburgh Amusement inhabited. None saw that better than Fergusson himself:
On Sunday here, an alter’d scene
O’ men and manners meets our ein:
Ane wad maist trow some people chose
To change their faces wi’ their clo’es,
And fain wad gar ilk neighbour think
They thirst for goodness, as for drink:
—which raised the question:
Why should religion make us sad,
If good frae Virtue’s to be had?
Na, rather gleefu’ turn your face;
Forsake hypocrisy, grimace;
And never have it understood
You fleg mankind frae being good.
“Fleg” = “frighten”. But if the local God wasn’t one to be celebrated, the local people were still to be recorded and enjoyed. And this God-in-the-people wouldn’t dance to a foreign tune, but a Scottish one. As “The Daft-Days” proclaimed:
Fidlers, your pins in temper fix,
And roset weel your fiddle-sticks,
But banish vile Italian tricks
From out your quorum:
Nor fortes wi’ pianos mix
Gie’s Tulloch Gorum.
Language cascades through the poems as the crowds cascading through the streets of Edinburgh: “simmer roses”—acne rosacea; “steghin”—guzzling; “kickshaws”—novelties; “dwyning”—declining; “scaw’d”—scabby; “barkent”—hardened; “misleard”—misguided; “Findrums”—smoked haddocks; “gust”—satisfy; “geck”—mock; “meltith”—meal; “bowie”—milk pail; “brulzies”—fights; “sair dung”—wearied; “cadgie”—cheerful; “spae”—foretell; “runcles”—wrinkles; “oy”—grandchild; “gezy-makers”—wigmakers; “dree the laidin”—bear the load; “seenil”—seldom; “hidling”—secret; “cleeding”—clothes; “streekit”—stretched out; “brawlie buskit”—well dressed up; “gleg”—brisk; “kendling”—budding; “vogie”—carefree; “dautit”—doted on; “fleetching”—flattering; “fairn-year”—last year; “soum”—drown; “master-cann”—piss-pot; “reesle”—clatter; “tongue-tackit”—tongue-tied; “bowden”—swollen; “beenging”—bowing; “maukin-mad”—mad as a hare; “hameil”—homely; “lounder”—thump; “gizzand”—dried out; “priggin”—entreating; “fouth”—plenty; “gimmers”—gossips; “gutcher”—grandfather; “cogie”—bowl; “stoiterin”—staggering; “fire-flaught”—lightning; “rowtin’—roaring.
And across the water, Edinburgh from the Fife coast like a vision of the New Jerusalem:
Aft frae the Fifan coast I’ve seen,
Thee tow’ring on thy summit green;
So glowr the saints when first is given
A fav’rite keek o’ glore and heaven;
On earth nae mair they bend their ein,
But quick assume angelic mein;
So I on Fife wad glowr no more,
But gallop’d to EDINA’s shore.
The best selected edition of Fergusson, best in that it is wholly faithful to the text printed in Fergusson’s lifetime, remains Alexander Law’s selection of 1947 published in the great Saltire Classics series. 1947 was also the year of the famous, or infamous, “Makars Style Sheet” drawn up by a group of poets under the chairmanship of Albert D Mackie, aiming to impose standard spellings on a range of Scots words. Mackie is praised in the introduction to the Birlinn/Polygon edition, whose text features a “revised orthography”— in other words you don’t get the spelling of every Fergusson word exactly as it was printed before his death. This seems to me to be still to do with the desire for an agreed consistency of spelling for contemporary literary Scots by some who practise such. The result for Ferguson is a loss. It’s not just the spelling, but as in the otherwise excellent Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson selection published as one by the Scottish Academic Press in 1974 and 1985, dropped also are the former capitalisation of proper nouns, and the italicisation of sundry common ones. Such aspects of spelling and punctuation are not just irrelevant trivial conventions of the eighteenth century, now to be forgotten. Not with a great linguistic musician like Fergusson. To ignore them is to flatten the music, both the complex music of diversity of spelling that had relation to vocal practice, and the music of those fortes and pianos of capitalisation and italic.
If you can’t find the Saltire Classics or the Scottish Academic Texts edition, and you can’t afford the complete Scottish Text Society Fergusson edited by Matthew P McDiarmid, then the Birlinn/Polygon should not be rejected. Much better you have this Fergusson than none at all. Do some work with the glossary to familiarise yourself with the words in poems like “The Daft Days”, “Caller Herring”, “Caller Water”, “Auld Reekie”, “Braid Claith”—maybe try these for a start. You will see a man taking form and extending it, making it new. You will see and hear a society like as if a word-camera was rolling, and both sound and vision were in the hands of a great director. Fergusson “tragic”? His life was a triumph, for no poet has captured the sounds and sights of a Scottish urban society so truthfully since Fergusson went to his grave.
