It is possible that Burns brief infatuation for Alison Begbie was responsible for this, the finest of his early songs, written prior to The Kilmarnock Volume but not included and in fact was sent to Thomson on 20th March 1793. In the first stanza of Mary Morison, all the preoccupations of his early years, his hatred of money, his conviction that sexual love can make the poor man superior to the rich are fused into poetic unity. Her smiles and glances make the miser's treasure poor, and were he to win her he would be able to endure the dust and toil ( the stoure ) of a slave's life. This was written when Burns was contemplating emigration to Jamaica. The Ayrshire ploughman has been transmuted into something rich and strange, a cross between the Helot of ancient times and a negro slave on one of the West Indian plantations, an effect secured by the combination of 'weary slave' with 'sun to sun', the labour is not simply day labour, but labour performed in the heat of a most un-Scottish summer.

In the second stanza Burns conveys with absolute simplicity the obsessive, compulsive nature of love. Every aspect of the music and the dance except their movement is excluded, in complete contrast to the timeless stillness of the trysted hour with which the first verse begins.
The motions of the dancing company lead on naturally to the swift bird's flight of fancy, so that in the fourth line of this second stanza, I sat, but neither heard nor saw, the transition back to stillness again comes as a positive shock to the reader. It is a sudden passing from one opposite to another, we may regard it either as absolute quiet at the centre of movement, or as movement surrounding the still centre, and it conveys to the reader the trance like quality of Burns vision of the absent Mary. Just as in the first stanza agricultural labour is transformed by metaphorical associations with other lands and times, so in the second the environment is denuded of all qualities except those which it shares with an aristocratic entertainment. We are at liberty to imagine any lighted hall, and probably the hall we picture is both larger and grander than the one Burns actually saw. Everything ephemeral and transitory is shut out, and only the permanent and general remains. Yet the general comes to us through an image of the particular (in this case, the lighted ha' ) which we construct for ourselves.

The third stanza is even simpler than the other two. It is the traditional complaint of the lover who would die for his mistress, who is in danger of having his heart broken, and who asks that, at the very least, the beloved substitute pity for disdain. Half way through there is a subtle reminiscence of the money or exchange theme which was present in Burns mind when he began
If love for love thou wilt na gie. .
But the verse, and therefore the whole poem, is rescued from triteness by the delicacy and sensitivity of the two final lines
A thought ungentle canna be, The thought o' Mary Morison.

The exchange of 'love for love' is real, personal, and (in the context of the poem) gentle, a very different thing from the 'stoure' of market exchange. If the woman refuses to enter into the give and take of love, then she can and indeed ought to bestow upon her wooer the other but still human and generous emotion of pity. The movement of the piece is from market-exchange to its negation, from gold (an idea implied but not crudely or even directly stated at the beginning) towards spontaneous and humane feeling. This development of mood is completely integrated with the melancholy and elegiac tone of the poem.

The contrast between love and money, together with the idea that true wealth consists in giving one's affections to another human being, is often found in folk song, and is so old that it is embedded in most of the European languages. It has been pointed out that 'Love's Wealth' is a basic theme of early Shakespearian comedy, of the Sonnets, and of Romeo and Juliet. Thus the motto on the leaden casket in The Merchant of Venice, is 'who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath,' while Juliet says
'They are but beggars that can count their worth
But my true love is grown to such excess,
I cannot sum up the sum of half my wealth.
As the allusions in his correspondence prove, Burns was widely read in Shakespeare.

In Mary Morison, as in all Burns best poems, the form corresponds perfectly to the content. When it is a case of complete interweaving of Scots and English into a seamless garment of image and emotion, it is inadequate to speak of considerable influence from the English tradition. The stanza is that of the octosyllabic ballade, which was brought into Scottish poetry by Robert Henryson, who borrowed it from Chaucer. No sooner was it introduced than it became one of the national measures, a thoroughly Scottish form, called 'Ballat Royal' by King James VI, who prescribed it 'for any heich and graue subiectis, specially drawin out of learnit authoris.' Burns probably got it from Allan Ramsay's Ever Green miscellany, which contains some twenty poems written in the form.

The living rhythm of Mary Morison of course differs in detail from its underlying pattern of iambic octosyllabics. The first four lines of the second stanza contain many more heavy beats than the first stanza, thus adding to the slow, meditative, mournful effect.
Yestreen, when to the trembling string
The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha',
To thee my fancy took its wing,
I sat, but neither heard nor saw.
The contradiction between these heavy beats and the actual hurly-burly of the dance itself prepares for the stock-stillness of 'I sat, but neither heard nor saw,' and intensifies our image of the motionless lover by sheer contrast. At the same time, the alliteration of Yestreen . . trembling string, and the internal rhyme 'trembling string,' create a singularly precise auditory image of Scottish fiddle-music.

The Scottish component of the amalgam is apparent in rhythm and intonation even when the work is simply read as a poem. When it is sung to the tune for which Burns originally intended it, Duncan Davison, the fusion of Scottish and English is seen to be complete.

Return to
Analysis page
for other poems

It is possible that Burns brief infatuation for Alison Begbie was responsible for this, the finest of his early songs, written prior to The Kilmarnock Volume but not included and in fact was sent to Thomson on 20th March 1793. In the first stanza of Mary Morison, all the preoccupations of his early years, his hatred of money, his conviction that sexual love can make the poor man superior to the rich are fused into poetic unity. Her smiles and glances make the miser's treasure poor, and were he to win her he would be able to endure the dust and toil ( the stoure ) of a slave's life. This was written when Burns was contemplating emigration to Jamaica. The Ayrshire ploughman has been transmuted into something rich and strange, a cross between the Helot of ancient times and a negro slave on one of the West Indian plantations, an effect secured by the combination of 'weary slave' with 'sun to sun', the labour is not simply day labour, but labour performed in the heat of a most un-Scottish summer.

In the second stanza Burns conveys with absolute simplicity the obsessive, compulsive nature of love. Every aspect of the music and the dance except their movement is excluded, in complete contrast to the timeless stillness of the trysted hour with which the first verse begins.
The motions of the dancing company lead on naturally to the swift bird's flight of fancy, so that in the fourth line of this second stanza, I sat, but neither heard nor saw, the transition back to stillness again comes as a positive shock to the reader. It is a sudden passing from one opposite to another, we may regard it either as absolute quiet at the centre of movement, or as movement surrounding the still centre, and it conveys to the reader the trance like quality of Burns vision of the absent Mary. Just as in the first stanza agricultural labour is transformed by metaphorical associations with other lands and times, so in the second the environment is denuded of all qualities except those which it shares with an aristocratic entertainment. We are at liberty to imagine any lighted hall, and probably the hall we picture is both larger and grander than the one Burns actually saw. Everything ephemeral and transitory is shut out, and only the permanent and general remains. Yet the general comes to us through an image of the particular (in this case, the lighted ha' ) which we construct for ourselves.

The third stanza is even simpler than the other two. It is the traditional complaint of the lover who would die for his mistress, who is in danger of having his heart broken, and who asks that, at the very least, the beloved substitute pity for disdain. Half way through there is a subtle reminiscence of the money or exchange theme which was present in Burns mind when he began
If love for love thou wilt na gie. .
But the verse, and therefore the whole poem, is rescued from triteness by the delicacy and sensitivity of the two final lines
A thought ungentle canna be, The thought o' Mary Morison.

The exchange of 'love for love' is real, personal, and (in the context of the poem) gentle, a very different thing from the 'stoure' of market exchange. If the woman refuses to enter into the give and take of love, then she can and indeed ought to bestow upon her wooer the other but still human and generous emotion of pity. The movement of the piece is from market-exchange to its negation, from gold (an idea implied but not crudely or even directly stated at the beginning) towards spontaneous and humane feeling. This development of mood is completely integrated with the melancholy and elegiac tone of the poem.

The contrast between love and money, together with the idea that true wealth consists in giving one's affections to another human being, is often found in folk song, and is so old that it is embedded in most of the European languages. It has been pointed out that 'Love's Wealth' is a basic theme of early Shakespearian comedy, of the Sonnets, and of Romeo and Juliet. Thus the motto on the leaden casket in The Merchant of Venice, is 'who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath,' while Juliet says
'They are but beggars that can count their worth
But my true love is grown to such excess,
I cannot sum up the sum of half my wealth.
As the allusions in his correspondence prove, Burns was widely read in Shakespeare.

In Mary Morison, as in all Burns best poems, the form corresponds perfectly to the content. When it is a case of complete interweaving of Scots and English into a seamless garment of image and emotion, it is inadequate to speak of considerable influence from the English tradition. The stanza is that of the octosyllabic ballade, which was brought into Scottish poetry by Robert Henryson, who borrowed it from Chaucer. No sooner was it introduced than it became one of the national measures, a thoroughly Scottish form, called 'Ballat Royal' by King James VI, who prescribed it 'for any heich and graue subiectis, specially drawin out of learnit authoris.' Burns probably got it from Allan Ramsay's Ever Green miscellany, which contains some twenty poems written in the form.

The living rhythm of Mary Morison of course differs in detail from its underlying pattern of iambic octosyllabics. The first four lines of the second stanza contain many more heavy beats than the first stanza, thus adding to the slow, meditative, mournful effect.
Yestreen, when to the trembling string
The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha',
To thee my fancy took its wing,
I sat, but neither heard nor saw.
The contradiction between these heavy beats and the actual hurly-burly of the dance itself prepares for the stock-stillness of 'I sat, but neither heard nor saw,' and intensifies our image of the motionless lover by sheer contrast. At the same time, the alliteration of Yestreen . . trembling string, and the internal rhyme 'trembling string,' create a singularly precise auditory image of Scottish fiddle-music.

The Scottish component of the amalgam is apparent in rhythm and intonation even when the work is simply read as a poem. When it is sung to the tune for which Burns originally intended it, Duncan Davison, the fusion of Scottish and English is seen to be complete.

Return to
Analysis page
for other poems