Burns Love songs and their beautiful tunes are particularly
memorable. The Lea Rig and Corn Rigs are Bonie celebrate the
bitter-sweetness of first assignations and the joys of sexual
meeting.
Mary Morison, Ae Fond Kiss and Highland Mary are songs of parting
and death suffused with the poet's sense of mortality.
These intimations of inevitable ending invade love lyrics such as
Red, Rose and O Wert thou in the Cauld Blast whilst John Anderson
was rewritten as an expression of simple companionship between
aging lovers.
Ae Fond Kiss
The final song to Clarinda, written in 1791, is among the
masterpieces of its kind. In it, with the skill so characteristic
of his love poetry at its best, he reduces everything to one basic
and overpowering emotion, the emotion of having loved and now
having to part.
Sir Walter Scott remarked, in reference to the four last lines of
the second stanza this contains the essence of a thousand love
tales and furthermore that one verse is worth a thousand
romances
They are more than that though, they are, in themselves a complete
romance. The Alpha and Omega of feeling and contain the essence of
an existence of pain and pleasure distilled into one burning
drop.
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever
Ae fareweel, and then for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee
Who shall say that Fortune grieves him
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me
Dark despair around benights me
I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy
Naething could resist my Nancy
But to see her was to love her
Love but her, and love for ever
Had we never lov'd sae kindly
Had we never lov'd sae blindly
Never met or never parted
We had ne'er been broken-hearted
Fare-thee-weel, thou first and
fairest!
Fare-thee-weel, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka, joy and treasure
Peace, Enjoyment, Love, and Pleasure!
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!
Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee
Burns and Clarinda never met again although a few letters were
exchanged.
Clarinda remembered that day of parting forever. At the age of 72,
in her journal, under the date 6th December 1831 ( 40 yrs to the
day after they last met ) she wrote
This day I never can forget. Parted with Burns, in the year 1791,
never more to meet in this world, Oh may we meet in Heaven.
This song is truly Burns own hand, every line has produced a
rush of traditioners who pretend to treat us with what they call
the old words.
To all lovers of Burns and to the great mass of romantic souls the
rose newly sprung in June provides us with perfect imagery.
Burns imagination and his ear gathered these inherited
comparisons and metaphors together, altered them, however slightly,
purged them of all vulgarity and created in the end one of the
loveliest lyrics of all time. It is a masterpiece of technique
rather than of passion. It is by the superb blending of the various
units into one harmonious whole that the song achieves its
beauty.
In a Red Rose, traditional similes and comparisons perform a
serious function. The rose, the melody, the drying seas, the
melting rocks and sands are symbolic.
My love is like a red, red, rose.
At the same time the reader feels that they are not merely physical
objects of the ordinary kind, but draw their evocative power from
all the roses that young girls have ever been compared to, and from
age old prophecies that some day the seas will evaporate and the
earth be consumed in some enormous conflagration.We can speak of
these images only if we are willing to define them as the
concentrated experiences and feelings of many generations,
organised by language and handed down and it is from socially
transmitted emotional patterns of this sort that Burns song derives
its particular beauty.
The red rose is is a lyric of genius, made out of the common
inherited material of folk song. It is an example of something that
is very old but which seems startlingly new because it manages to
convey deep feeling without qualification or embroidery. In the
rose, there is no incongruence between particular and universal.
The reader, still more, the singer, experiences what they have felt
for a person which they themself have loved. The reader ( singer )
attaches the beautiful words and tune to their own image of the
face and of the person. This they can do, only because the song
generalises the emotions of countless lovers, high and low, at all
times and in all places. Here the distinction between personal and
impersonal becomes quite worthless. Burns is any man in love with
any woman, yet in the act of artistic creation he is more truly and
more intensely himself than at any ordinary moment of daily
life.
My Love is Like a Red, Red, Rose Tune, Major Graham
Midi sequence by Barry Taylor. Click on the play arrow to hear the tune
O, my luve's like a red, red rose
That's newly sprung in June
O, my luve's like the melodie
That's sweetly play'd in tune
As fair art thou, my bonie lass
So deep in luve am I
And I will luve thee still, my Dear
Till a' the seas gang dry
Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear
And the rocks melt wi' the sun!
O I will luve thee still, my Dear
While the sands o' life shall run
And fare thee weel, my only Luve
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my Luve
Tho' it were ten thousand mile
Songwriting, which draws on the resources of both poetry and
music, is an art in itself. The songs as opposed to the poetry give
different kinds of satisfaction, sometimes one values one more than
the other, depending on one's mood. Yet Burns genius was such that
he was master of both arts. It is surely a matter of sheer
wonderment that the man who wrote Holy Willie's Prayer could also
write A Red Rose. Yet he did, and both have been so long familiar
to us, so much a part of our way of looking at the world, that we
rarely stop to think how improbable it is that they should both
have sprung from the mind of a single artist. Few men have achieved
so much, in quality if not in quantity, in both poetry and
song-writing, yet, when all is said and done, the songs give more
lasting pleasure than even the very best of his poetry can supply.
Taken en masse, as a single entity (and here the extent of Burns
individual authorship of particular songs is quite irrelevant),
they recreate and preserve for all time the commonest feelings of
an entire people, yet they are also the most international of Burns
works and, therefore, they are among the most universal works of
art ever to have been created.
Where you can then enter The World of Burns
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