An Ode to Burns and Ulster

Robert Burns is one of Scotland's national treasures.

He has been voted the greatest Scot of all time

and is regarded as the country's national poet.

But the appeal of Burns stretches far beyond Scotland's shores.

He's celebrated worldwide, not least in Ulster,

where his influence was felt even during his own brief lifetime.

But what about now? What is the connection between Burns and Ulster?

And in particular, what influence does Burns have on the Ulster poets

living and working today?

Robert Burns was born in Ayrshire in Scotland in January 1759...

..where he was to live for just 37 years,

dying at his home in Dumfries in 1796.

But Burns packed so much into his short life.

He left behind not only a substantial body of work,

in his poetry and songs, but he was also a farmer and father

of nine children with his wife, and several more with other women.

Part of the appeal of Burns is that he means different things

to different people.

Even within his work, he was regarded as a Romantic,

as a nature poet and as a political radical.

As a Scot, I feel a simple, straightforward connection to Burns.

But how was that connection made across the Irish Sea,

in Ulster, and with Ulster poets?

I was brought up in Ayr and Dumfries, real Burns country,

and as a child growing up in that part of the world,

I was always aware of Burns.

He was a constant presence.

It's when you're on a sailing like this

that you realise there's no real distance

between the West of Scotland, where Burns lived, and Ulster.

So it's no surprise that there's a bond between Burns and his poetry

and the people living in Ulster, on the other side of the Irish Sea.

Over the years, I've been in Ireland many times.

But this trip is different.

I'm on my way to meet some of Ulster's most celebrated poets,

to talk to them about Robert Burns

and for me, that makes this a real journey of discovery.

I've come to the North Antrim coast.

Just then there is the village of Cushendall

and over in that direction, not so very far away,

is Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland.

Now, this site dates all the way back to the Stone Age, to the Neolithic.

But it's also said to be, in folklore at least,

the grave of the legendary warrior poet Ossian.

One of Ulster's most influential poets, John Hewitt,

wrote a poem about this site, which he described as his chosen ground.

Hewitt, who died in 1987,

also wrote about his close connections to Scotland.

But I'm here to meet Chris Agee, a poet who was born in San Francisco

but has lived and worked in Ireland for over 30 years.

Where do you detect the influence of Burns on Hewitt

and other poets here?

To discern the influence of someone like Burns,

you would have to step back to the early 19th century

because Burns obviously had a huge impact

on the Ulster-Scots writing tradition,

which is rich enough in the first half of the 19th century

and then that tradition goes in a more subterranean way.

Do you see a discernible impact still today in poets

living and working in Ulster now, that you can dot a line all the way

-back to Burns?

-Yes. You can see very clear influences in Tom Paulin

and Michael Longley, fairly self-consciously,

much more integral in Alan Gillis,

who is really dealing with Ulster-Scots as a familial presence.

And you can feel it in Heaney. What is the Scots thing?

It's this folk closeness, it's this precision,

it's the sensuality close to the lived reality of daily details

and things, or as Heaney put it in one poem, "the bastion of sensation".

And this was very different from mainstream,

metropolitan London, English lexicon of the day.

So Burns was bringing a confidence, making people feel that their

daily lives, the way that they spoke to one another,

the things they were experiencing in the home and in the field,

were worthy of art and being made the stuff of art and poetry?

Absolutely.

And his art, his final art, is the art of simplicity

because he is accessible.

He is conversational.

And he consolidated and internationalised

the Scottish variant of English and gave it status.

And gave it definition.

And that travelled globally.

And, to that extent, he must have an influence.

I'm intrigued by Chris's view that Burns' influence has travelled

across the world.

That he has an impact on an international level.

But what is the nature of that influence?

For back in Scotland, and probably elsewhere,

people are drawn to different aspects of Burns' poetry.

One thread that runs right through Burns's work

is his political radicalism.

He welcomed both the French and the American revolutions

and he believed in the fundamental rights of ordinary men.

To try and understand more about how this aspect of Burns' poetry

has been felt here,

I've come to meet one of Ulster's most celebrated poets - Tom Paulin.

How much would you say that your work, and even your thinking,

was shaped and informed by Burns' radical politics?

When I was a child, my maternal grandparents were from Scotland

and I was born on what is known as Burns's Day, the 25th of January,

so I grew up with the idea of Burns and then I realised,

when I got interested in politics, I realised he was a great radical poet.

I mean, he is the most radical poet in the 18th century.

So there are all sorts of great poems to friends of his about drinking

and about going out chasing women,

and there is this great sort of radical libertarian

sort of joyous sense running right throughout the poems.

If there was only one work, one poem of Burns,

that you could save, which one would it be?

I think it would be a poem called Love And Liberty.

It's set in this, you know, dark, as they would have said,

noisesome drinking den.

Very interestingly, what he does is, he has Boreas,

which is the classical word for the north wind.

And he mixes that up with the bauckie bird, which is Scots for bat.

So you get this movement in the poems constantly between standard English,

which he writes very perfectly, and Scots,

which is again part of the energy of the poems.

When lyart leaves bestrow the yird

Or wavering like the bauckie-bird

Bedim cauld Boreas' blast

When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte

And infant frosts begin to bite

In hoary cranreuch drest

Ae night at e'en a merry core O' randie, gangrel bodies

In Poosie-Nansie's held the splore To drink their orra dudies

Wi' quaffing, and laughing They ranted an' they sang

Wi' jumping an' thumping The vera girdle rang.

Again, you know, celebrating drinking

and drinking songs in this very low dive.

If you and he had been contemporaries, what would you

have seen as the things that you have in common, as men?

Well, I suppose, you know, interest in sociability and craic

and obviously drinking is very, very important in Burns.

And to be prepared to write in that way at that time,

he had to kick the doors down.

Yes, I think there is this tremendous egalitarian sense of irreverence

towards hierarchy and towards, you know, moralistic ways of thinking,

he just runs completely counter to that and tries to explode it.

I had expected Tom to talk about Burns the egalitarian,

so it was fascinating to discover that he was equally enthusiastic

about remembering him as an irreverent free spirit, and a man

who liked to drink with his friends and seek the company of women.

That, I think, is the Burns that many of us have loved

down through the years.

When you grow up in Scotland, you're made aware of Robert Burns

and his poetry very early on.

I can't honestly remember a time when I didn't know that name.

And now my own children are coming home from primary school

with Burns' poetry to learn and memorise

and they're encouraged to perform it, to recite it, and the prize,

if you're good enough, will be The Collected Works Of Robert Burns.

And because of all of that, it becomes very difficult to separate

the man from the myth that has grown up around him.

I'm now on my way to Dublin to meet Seamus Heaney.

And that, for me, is another name with powerful resonance.

And it's quite nerve-wracking enough just to contemplate

going to speak to a poet of that stature.

-Hello, Seamus.

-How are you?

-How are you doing?

-Nice to meet you. I've seen you around.

-Oh, good!

-Come in.

Seamus, how and when did you first encounter Burns and his poetry?

Well, I first encountered Burns at secondary school level,

about the age of 12, in a book called The Ambleside Book Of Verse,

which was a prescribed text,

and it had To A Mountain Daisy

and, of course, To A Mouse.

But before that, in the ceilidhs at home,

when visitors would call, Burns would be referred to.

It was an old cousin of my father's who was a country man

without any schooling.

But he had read Burns and he quoted Burns,

admittedly a line at a time or two lines at a time.

But nevertheless, Burns was part of,

if you like, the vernacular in that part of County Derry anyway.

What was it that caught your ear, why did it resonate for you?

Well, it was the sense of at homeness with the language.

I've written a couple or three paragraphs about the word "wee",

you know, "Wee, sleekit, tim'rous, cow'rin beastie."

"Wee" is a very common word in our vocabulary in the North of Ireland.

Sleekit is also a word that would have been part of the vocabulary

of the people around where I lived,

"You're a sleekit sort of a boyo."

The number of words that were part of our home language,

hearth language, but wouldn't have appeared in the dictionaries.

Cowp, to fall, he cowped.

And what difference did it make to you to see that someone was

using that language of the hearth?

Well, it made you more at home with printed books, if you like.

You changed your clothes, as it were, to read a poem.

Whereas with Burns you would stay in your working clothes,

it's kind of straightforward.

At homeness about the speech.

But I should say this also, and it's the obverse of what I've been saying,

when I was at Queen's University studying literature...

..and this... I...

I didn't do - inverted commas - "Burns".

Because I thought he belonged in a different...

I mean, I understood him too well and he wasn't a high-class,

-Eng Lit creature...

-Oh, right.

So you snubbed him from your university course.

-I didn't see how you could study it.

-What changed, then?

At what point did you think he was worthy of that kind of study

-that you would have applied to other poets?

-I got a bit older and read...

-I mean, I think that To A Mouse is a great poem. I mean, it's...

-Why?

Because it's a sense of fate in it and a sense of doom.

And Burns is looking at the mouse

and there's a kind of foresight

or sensing of his own destiny.

To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough.

November 1785.

"Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim'rous beastie

"O, what a panic's in thy breastie!

"Thou need na start awa sae hasty

"Wi' bickering brattle!

"I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee

"Wi' murd'ring pattle.

"I'm truly sorry Man's dominion

"Has broken nature's social union

"An' justifies that ill opinion

"Which makes thee startle

"At me, thy poor, Earth-born companion

"An' fellow-mortal!"

Is the work of Burns, is it high art?

Is it appropriate to let it stand with the greatest of the great?

Yes, it is high art. There's no doubt about that.

I mean, the artfulness of the thing is in the devising of it,

and in the... HE SIGHS

..energy and shape and spirit of the...

of the whole thing.

It isn't just a matter of words or vocabulary.

It has to have a human boost in it, you know?

It has to have the spirit as well as the letter, as they say.

And Burns certainly has that.

'I was surprised by what Seamus had to say

'about the way in which Burns is regarded in Ulster.

'I know that Burns and his poetry are famous around the world,

'but I had imagined that part of this appeal

'was the very strangeness of him,

'the unfamiliarity of his language and vocabulary.

'So it's really heart-warming to learn that, for Seamus,

'he didn't become a love figure because of any sense of foreignness,

'but precisely because he regards him as one of his own.'

'I've come back to Belfast to meet Frank Ormsby,

'a poet originally from County Fermanagh.

'Along with men like Heaney and Tom Paulin,

'Frank is one of the golden generation of Ulster poets

'that emerged in the 1960s,

'those that followed in the footsteps of John Hewitt,

'and he's been at the forefront of poetry here since that time.'

What do you think ARE the characteristics

simply of a Burns poem?

What marks it out?

I think it's probably the use of the Scottish dialect and so on,

that kind of...makes these poems some sort of bridge between...

maybe literary culture and popular culture.

Do you see his influence in your contemporaries

or, indeed, anyone working today in Ulster?

I sense that the Ulster poet

who was most conscious of Burns and his influence was John Hewitt.

And that was partly because, you know,

Hewitt had a tremendous love of the Glens of Antrim area,

and lived, at least during his summer holidays,

among the country folk up there,

and made them the subject of his verse and so on.

The language that they spoke

and the influence of Ulster Scots on them,

on the influence of poets like Ramsey and Montgomery and Burns,

was something he was always deeply, deeply conscious of.

Did he influence you directly or indirectly?

No, I'm not aware of being influenced in any way at all

by the poetry of Robert Burns,

but when you come across the poetry of someone

which seems particularly addictive, you know,

and I would put Burns in that category,

I would put Yeats very much in that category, you know...

It's almost as if you have to exert a kind of caution

about the degree of influence, you know?

What is the nature of the addiction?

What's addictive about the work of Burns?

-Um...

-For you?

There's something tremendously strong and confident, I think,

about a Burns poem on the page.

There's a part of you that wants to begin reading it aloud,

wants to begin declaiming it, you know.

There's something actually about the quality of the language that...

seduces you in that sort of direction, you know?

-As a teacher...

-Yeah?

Did Burns figure, for you, in the curriculum,

or was he part of what YOU brought to your students?

No, I would have to say that he didn't really figure very much.

-And why not?

-Well, I'm not sure.

He was certainly in the school's anthologies,

but when they came to selecting the poets from the anthologies

who were, you know, set writers for examinations and so on,

Burns tended to get left out.

I think most people were probably aware of Burns

through certain popular songs.

Auld Lang Syne, A Man's A Man For A' That,

My Love Is Like A Red, Red Rose, and so on.

I mean, that's probably the Burns that they know,

but maybe the inclusion of Burns would have...

would have varied the poetry diet

in a very highly enjoyable way.

# Wide o'er the plain

# Delights the weary farmer

# And the moon shines... #

'It was interesting to hear Frank say that many people

'are perhaps more familiar with Burns' songs than his poems.

'To find out more about this, I've come to meet Len Graham,

'one of Ulster's leading traditional singers.'

# ..swallow

# The skies are blue The fields in view

# A' fading green and yellow

# Avaunt, away!

# The cruel sway

# Tyrannic man's dominion

# The huntsman's joy The murd'ring cry

# The flutt'ring, gory pinion. #

That's the first time I've ever heard that song.

How prolific a songwriter was Burns?

Oh, very much a songwriter, and a song collector.

That particular song is a fairly early one that he wrote,

and that take on it is very much an Ulster version.

I heard it away back, many, many moons ago in County Antrim.

What would characterise it as an Ulster version?

Well, a lot of these songs, when they come over here,

they get interfered with, let's say.

You always get that.

It's a living tradition, it's an oral tradition,

and, you know, it's not working off dots,

so, whenever these things are going back and forth,

they're inclined to get changed in the process.

I think of Burns first and foremost as a poet,

but can you detect that he's someone who understood

the difference between a poem and a song?

I think so. Particularly that song, Westlin Winds.

It is so singable because of the internal rhyme,

and that also turns up very much in the Gaelic tradition,

both in Scotland and in Ireland,

that internal rhyming is very much part of it, makes it very singable.

It occurs quite a lot over here in songs.

I liked what Len had to say about the songs of Robert Burns.

It's one thing to hear that the poetry came over here

and was learned and recited and studied.

But it's something much more intimate

to learn that when the music came over, the people changed it.

Len said that was an Ulster version,

that it came over here and was tampered with.

And that's proof, if proof were needed,

that here, the people took the work of Burns and made it their own.

'This has been an intriguing journey for me.

'Hearing how people here in Ulster have been affected by Burns

'has allowed me, as a Scot,

'to see my own national poet in a different light.

'It has added new dimensions to the man and his work.'

But, if I'm ever going to fully understand

the connection between Ulster and Burns,

there's one more place I have to go.

'Now, my journey has come full circle.

'I'm back in Edinburgh,

'the city that Burns first travelled to in 1786,

'after the publication of his collection of poetry,

'Poems, Chiefly In The Scottish Dialect.'

'Burns made his way here on a pony from his farm in Ayrshire,

'but soon was embraced by the literary circles of the city.'

I've come to meet two younger Ulster poets,

Alan Gillis and Miriam Gamble, who are based here in Edinburgh,

because I want to see what influence Burns is having

on the next generation,

those poets following in the footsteps of men like Seamus Heaney.

Do you feel, either of you,

that there's a natural connection between Ulster and Scotland?

You know, that there's a natural crossover there?

I think so, to some extent.

Sometimes it's difficult to ascertain the differences.

No-one thinks straightaway about Robbie Burns,

as you read the biography.

I mean, that description of the childhood and growing up in Ayrshire

could be Down, Tyrone, so easily.

And, Miriam, are you aware of any ways in which, even unconsciously,

you've inherited something of his work?

Yeah, well, I suppose one of the things he is, he is funny.

He's also very playful.

You know, the way he uses language is playful, and I like that.

I can see how he's influenced older people,

older writers from Northern Ireland.

I know Seamus Heaney has written about him,

and that he would identify him as somebody enabling,

in terms of using language, you know,

that actually sounds like yourself,

rather than feeling obliged to write in kind of standardised English

that doesn't reflect the tones of your own voice.

To some extent, I think those battles,

for people of our generation, have already been gone through.

A huge tip of the scales came, for me,

going into a primary school in Edinburgh,

when I arrived here as a lecturer.

I said yes to judging the recitals on Burns Day.

It was absolutely new to me.

And the enthusiasm and joy that was going on...

And I was quite...

Was it Ode To A Haggis? It wasn't easy.

And they were only ten.

And then my own son was four, went into P1,

and all of a sudden he was doing one, and was evidently enjoying it.

And I started asking people about this, and what really surprised me

is nobody had negative memories of going through that.

That was actually what...

"I have to read this guy again." How come these guys...?

How come these people aren't annoyed at being made to do this?

They're actually really enjoying having these words on their tongue.

Do you see yourself as being connected,

however remotely, to Burns?

Yes, but I've only recently sort of discovered

the possibility of saying yes to that.

So, it's in hindsight?

Yeah, I mean, you do work backwards, a lot of the time.

You know, you start in a position of extreme ignorance

and you try and fill in gaps,

and you go on wayward paths to fill in those gaps.

'It feels a little strange for me to have discovered aspects of Burns

'that I had never really thought about before,

'by talking about him with poets from Ulster.

'It also feels strange to realise that, in some sense,

'now I have to share my national poet

'with people from beyond Scotland.

'Not least, just across the Irish Sea.'

It would be foolish for me, as a Scot,

to try and argue that Ulster poetry

was shaped in its entirety by Robert Burns.

I've heard for myself from Ulster poets living and working today

that their work was NOT influenced directly

by Scotland's national bard.

But it seems to me that,

although Robert Burns the man never went to Ulster,

some essence of him certainly did...

..because he undoubtedly has a presence there.

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