The Scottish Contribution:

'Living in the living seasons'

Reverting to Burns' narrative poem, 'The Twa Dogs-A Tale' (DN 2nd May, '12), let us look now at its closing stanza:

"By this the sun was out o' sight, An darker gloaming brought the night: The bum-clock hummed wi' lazy drone, The kye sood rowtin' i' the loan, When up they gat, and shook their lugs, Rejoiced they were na' men but dogs; An' each took off his several way, Resolved to meet some ither day."

(bumclock-humming beetle, kye-cows, rowting-lowing, loan-milking place, lugs-ears)

On the face of it, this is a pleasant rounding-off of a long dialogue and little more. On closer examination, however, Burns' conclusion contains much that is of significance. Consider that the dogs recognise that sunset signals the time to end their chat and go their separate ways home. This prompting by nature is reinforced by the intrusive hum of the evening beetle, while the lowing cattle are a reminder of the demands of an agriculural way of life. The dogs' thankfulness for being dogs rather than men suggests a contentment with one's lot in life as well as a sense of belonging to a socio-natural order.

Thus, what Burns has done is deftly to establish the context of the poem as that of a society which, with its primarily agricultural base, is deeply rooted in the natural world. The lives of its members, consequently, are closely inter-connected and their lifestyles regulated by the rhythms and cycles of nature. Hence man is at one with both his social and his natural environment.

And this is very much a continuation of the socio-natural milieu reflected in Henryson's Fables ( DN 25th Apr.'12). In fact, the evocation of this milieu is no small part of Henryson's achievement in recreating Aesop's fables in terms of the Scottish countryside and its denizens. That Burns should have been able to echo it some three hundred years later shows how little Scotland had been affected by the commercial and industrial developments that had taken their toll of a traditionally agricultural way of life in England.

The outstanding expression of this English decline is, of course, Goldsmith's 'The Deserted Village', viz:

"Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, Thy sports are fled and all thy charms withdrawn. Amid thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, And desolation saddens all thy green....But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied....A time there was, ere England's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintained its man: For him light labour spread her wholesome store, Just gave what life required, but gave no more...But times are altered: trade's unfeeling train Usurp the land and dispossess the swain."

These lines are as much an indication of what Scotland had retained as of what England had lost. This is not to say that England once, and Scotland still, enjoyed an ideal way of life. It was, after, a feudal society that prevailed, with all the entrenched injustice that this entailed.

That Henryson and Burns were aware of this is only too apparent from their poetry. Still, the essentially agricultural nature of its economy, centred as it was about "a sturdy peasantry", made for an organic society in which values were largely shared, enabling that sense of communal and environmental at-one-ness mentioned earlier. This was felt not only by everyman but by the poet too, however acute a social commentator he may have been, (as Henryson and Burns certainly were).

Thus, though Burns is often classed with the Romantics, there is little of the Romantic temperament about him. Most of the Romantics, from Blake onwards, were preoccupied with their personal experience and the need to develop their own philosophy of life. Blake himself proclaimed, "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's."

Wordsworth sought to construct a virtual religion from his relationship with nature. Keats declared that "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'-that is all ....ye need to know."

Burns' concern, however, was not his vision of life but his observation of it. His observation was not of such "extensive view as to survey mankind from China to Peru", but limited itself to the compass of the Scottish milieu. His comic satirising of its vices and foibles, too, was from the perspective of the values and homely wisdom of that milieu, of which he was an integral part.

This is yet another aspect of Burns' "strong aptitude for sociability."

This is not meant to be a continuation of the article on Burns. It is an effort to highlight an invaluable feature of the Scottish contribution to English poetry; namely, its presentation of an integrated way of life in which the poet, whilst representing the most sensitive consciousness of his time and place, could still feel at home. After Burns that sense has been increasingly lost to English poetry. What we have, instead, are poetic efforts to recapture it by retreating to the past, either the distant past or the past of one's childhood. Both tendencies are to be found in the Eliot of the 'Four Quartets.' In 'Burnt Norton' we see him indulging in childhood remembrances. In 'East Coker' he recalls in his imagination the seventeenth century lifestyle of the village of the same name from which his ancestors had emigrated to America.

"..in that open field If you do not come too close..On a Summer midnight, you can hear the music..And see them dancing around the bonfire....Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth Mirth of those long since under the earth Nourishing the corn.

Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the living seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of coupling of man and woman And that of beasts.."

This is a poet's conscious evocation of the organic, earth-bound way of life that we see the last living glimpse of in the Scottish poetry of Burns. Its relevance to the English poetic tradition is that it reveals the loss of something that most poets have since, consciously or not, been striving to recover. We see it as much in Alfreda de Silva's recreation of the world of her childhood as in Seamus Heaney's efforts to recover the Irish past both of his childhood and of his country.

They rarely succeed because that integrated way of life has been largely lost to the modern world. At best they succeed in capturing a sense or spirit of place, a virtue in itself, but far from being the real thing. Yet their poetry has a tragic relevance because the loss is that of mankind as a whole. We can all relate to these efforts, if we can relate to literature, because we all have an innate yearning to belong, both communally and environmentally.

This yearning to belong can be seen in the special appeal of certain popular entertainments. For example, the Shire of Tolkein's 'Lord of the Rings', that delightful "green and pleasant" homeland of the Hobbits, the threat to which from the forces of evil is the raison d'etre of the trilogy, and the restoration of which is the happiest aspect of its ending. And, in the last two decades of the last century, much of the attraction of the Scottish television series, 'The High Road', was Scotland's countryside scenery.

We felt it might embody an equally attractive way of life in which town, village and nature were all closely connected, but this did not prove to be the case. Again, the main appeal of the more recent British detective series, 'The Midsomer Murders', was its setting in the heart of the English countryside, but this too was only a facade.

In Sri Lanka, we were irresistibly drawn to the 'Kopi Kade' series because it suggested that, at least in some parts of our country, the traditionally rural lifestyle was still a reality. But in time, amid the mounting realities of modern life, we came sadly to conclude that the 'Kopi Kade' was an anachronism.

Writers and readers will no doubt go on searching for what seems to be less and less hopeful of realisation.

The tragic realities of our artificial and fragmented modern existence make for good literature, because the sense of loss and unfulfilment that is imparted resonates strongly with us. It is a chilling thought that this is all that the literature of this world may have to offer, however effectively it may be presented.