Perspectives in Dialect

...Burns’ unerring musical instinct is evident in his celebrated “To a Mouse: On turning her up in her nest with the plough, November 1785...

...His antihero takes on some of the mythic qualities of Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill and similar folk figures...

...Of the latter the poet remarks, “How humid/ the heart, its messy/ rooms...

...He celebrates Marian Anderson’s historic 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, after the Daughters of the American Revolution blocked her from singing in Constitution Hall...

...Burns was influenced, too, by John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which mocks the manners of the upper classes by parodying their behavior in scenes of lower-class toughs and their molls...

...What keeps the poem from sounding sentimental or sententious is his self-identification with the rodent...

...In a similar vein, “Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation” is a savage condemnation of “a coward few” who consort with the Sassenach, denying Scotland’s independent identity...

...Even today, though we may not read him as often we once did, Burns’ works never fall out of print...

...So did his natural gift for lyric, back in the days when families entertained themselves standing around the parlor piano singing...

...Your need is what’s missing, unwritten,” Young observes, conjuring the woman’s loneliness...

...The second is Robert Lowell, whose “For the Union Dead” depicts the Colonel Shaw monument on Boston Common, commemorating a white Bostonian who led the Negro troops of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment...

...Twentieth-century Modernists rediscovered Burns’ attacks on pious hypocrisy and social pretension in such poems as “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” “Address of Beelzebub” and “The Twa Dogs...

...In the title poem of this section, Young adopts the sassy tone of Allen Ginsberg’s much anthologized “America”: America, you won’t do anything I want you to...

...the Ploughman Bard of Ayrshire” was welcomed into Edinburgh’s literary circles and could be heard holding forth at its most elegant parties...

...Young is concerned with the roots of contemporary black culture and the way its imagery of heroes and villains has shifted over the centuries...

...In the back of this edition, Carruthers conveniently provides a Glossary...

...Burns’ plebeian origins and republican sentiments held singular appeal for citizens of these United States...

...If I did not know better,” he says sadly of race relations, “I would think/ we were living all along/ a fault...

...In one of them, “Tam o’ Shanter,” based on a folktale, a tipsy rogue spies on some dancing witches, one wearing a “cutty sark”—a short shirt or dress—that shows off her charms...

...Young reminds us that freedom has not been realized for everyone, but his vigorous and appealing voice encourages the hope that we may come to understand and appreciate one another’s perspectives and dialects...

...In the striking title poem (also from the “Americana” section), Young engages with two poetic predecessors, both white...

...Once he became famous, Burns threw himself enthusiastically into contemporary literary pursuits...

...Young also considers the role played in African-American culture by jazz luminary Lionel Hampton...

...To tell the truth, I like that about you...

...The real Lady Liberty lifts her lamp in welcome to the “wretched refuse” of the Old World...

...Burns has a political agenda here...

...Overnight, Burns became a literary sensation...

...Who could resist a Negress who can recite Latin and speak the Queen’s...

...Young sets his response down South, where a Confederate war monument has a plaque that declares war—not Civil, or Between the States, but for Southern Independence...

...He regained his fame by dying prematurely and was one of the Romantics’ first idols and, ironically, the patron saint of British nationalist poets...

...Young’s Confederate dead are unwilling black draftees forced into battles on the side of an army that hoped to establish a country where slavery could endure...

...Washington, whom you praise, victorious, knows this—will even admit you to his parlor...

...You’re too much...

...My favorite section of For the Confederate Dead is “Americana,” a series of short poems evoking imaginary places with names like “East Jesus” and “West Hell...

...Carruthers divides his selection into categories—“Religious Sentiment and Satire,” “Love and Sex,” “Scottish Cultural History,” etc.—that point up Burns’ versatility...

...The untutored “primitive genius” who composed verse as effortlessly as birds sing appeared to embody an ideal of his era: Carruthers reminds us that the truth was quite different...

...Ode for General Washington’s Birthday” exhorts: But come, ye sons of Liberty...

...The cumulative vision,” Carruthers says, “is one that sees the dearest emotional and physical pleasures of humanity as little recognized by any man-made social or political system...

...Over and over he is stifled, but pops up again somewhere else...

...The new collection concludes with an “Homage to Phillis Wheatley: Poet and Servant to Mr...

...Tate is ambivalently nostalgic, Lowell grimly aware of his native city’s hypocrisy...

...Why Should na Poor Folk Mowe” uses the Scots word for sexual intercourse to witty effect...

...How late/ it has gotten...

...The bulk of Burns’ vocabulary can be deciphered from context and quickly becomes familiar the further one reads...

...Many who enjoyed patronizing the Ploughman at the start of his career recoiled at his anti-aristocratic sentiments...

...Obscenities were toned down in his published work but are not hard to find in pieces he did not print in his lifetime...

...Burns’ masterpiece is “The Jolly Beggars: A Cantata,” set at “Poosie-Nansie’s” brothel, where a ragtag crowd gathers to carouse, couple and boast...

...Burns saw the American Revolution as a blow against tyranny...

...A janitor by day, he collected discarded scraps of tinfoil to create his masterpiece...

...After songs by a soldier, a camp follower, an old woman, a fiddler, a tinker, and a poet (perhaps a comic portrait of the author), there is a rousing chorus to celebrate poverty as a kind of freedom: Life is all a variorum, We regard not how it goes...

...What ails ye now, ye lousie bitch,” opens “Reply to a Trimming Epistle Received from a Taylor...

...The slightly unfamiliar forms of his words present a minor obstacle, which would be more daunting had he not taken pains to modify his language from Lallans (the dialect of southern Scotland) to render it accessible to readers of English...

...Despite the dialect, his rhetoric did not sound unfamiliar to 18thcentury readers because he transplanted to a rustic setting the Roman satirical style of Alexander Pope...

...In danger’s hour still flaming in the van, Ye know, and dare maintain, The Royalty of Man...

...Burns treats his own shaming before the local presbytery in “The Fornicator,” relating in lubricious detail just why and how he fell from grace...

...But it stopped short of granting its approval to the American and French revolutions, as the poet did...

...Even Gen...

...His own vices ran to alcohol and womanizing: He was constantly penniless and on the wrong side of the local presbytery of the Kirk of Scotland for his sexual profligacy...

...Burns: Poems, edited by Gerard Carruthers (Knopf, 252 pp., $12.50) in the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets series, displays the immediate charms of the Scotsman’s voice...

...He braved a censorious society to publish “A Poet’s Welcome to His Love-Begotten Daughter...

...The poet deftly terms this “magpiety,” a word that captures the blend of religious inspiration and compulsive gathering of junk that permitted Hampton to construct his amazing vision of the Second Coming...

...What might be considered Young’s answer to “Tam o’ Shanter” is titled in the manner of the popular songs that hailed the scandalous deeds of outlaws like Jesse James: The Ballad of Jim Crow from the life & lore of The Killer a.k.a...

...Wheatley remains enigmatic because we know little about her actual feelings—whether she sought to fulfill the expectations of her white teachers or to express her actual experiences through the straitjacket of classical rhetoric...

...Both a political satire and a grand comic play, the cantata is a lyric tribute to those whose zest for life is not snuffed out by destitution, old age or illness so long as they can drink and sing in good company...

...Young pays tribute as well to the visionary sculptor James Hampton, whose vast installation, “Throne of the Third Heaven,” was discovered in his garage after his death...

...Born in 1759 in Ayrshire, Scotland, the son of an unsuccessful farmer, he inherited his father’s bad luck in agriculture...

...In the 19th century Burns’ success, among other forces, fostered an appetite for regional dialect poetry in the United States that eventually spurred African-American writers to essay verse in a black vernacular...

...Burns resented English rule, especially the Hanover kings who had driven out Scotland’s hereditary line, the Stuarts...

...He helped folklorists collect songs of rural Scotland before they were swept away in the tide of the Industrial Revolution...

...Although he lacked a gentleman’s education, Burns had been well schooled—first by his father, then by a local teacher...

...Its plight parallels that of the era’s poor tenant farmers—including the poet—ruined by sudden sharp tax hikes that ate up their profits and forced many to sell out and move on...

...Wordsworth pictured the Scottish farmer poet striding “in glory and in joy/ Behind his plough upon the mountain side...

...He addresses the “wee, sleekit, cowran, tim’rous beastie” with courtesy, as a fellow inhabitant of the planet, reminding us that The best-laid schemes o mice an men Gang aft agley, An lea’e us nought but grief an pain, For promis’d joy...

...At the time “To a Mouse” was written, Burns’ life seemed to be going “agley...

...His ambiguous portrait of Wheatley moves the reader in a way her own verse cannot...

...in Young’s imagination she holds a rifle...

...While beckoning immigrants from Europe, he implies, she ignored the descendants of Africa, still denied the freedom she promised throughout much of the country...

...For the Confederate Dead (Knopf, 156 pp., $24.95), Kevin Young’s fifth collection, is a tribute to these populist forebears...

...The first is Allen Tate, author of the ambivalent Modernist ode of the same name, an elegy for the young heroes of the South, killed before their time in the name of a cause from “the immoderate past...

...On Poetry Perspectives in Dialect By Phoebe Pettingell What poet’s statue is most commonly found in American cities...

...His own lyric poems were often adapted from cruder folk ditties...

...Her work was the first by a black person to be published in the American territories, and she enjoyed a brief celebrity: —no door to her closed, No stair (servant, or front) too steep...

...One of America’s earliest poets (1753-1784), she was an African-born slave, educated by her master, named by him and freed...

...neither is it Walt Whitman’s...

...Poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and, later, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks enriched American language with styles that conveyed the experiences of their people...

...Mister Red, Doctor Death, Professor Limbo, John Doe & Jim Crow Young weaves blackface stereotypes together with the legacy of Jim Crow to illuminate the indignities of life under segregation...

...Booker T. Abroad: A Travelog” imagines notes scribbled by the great educator during his 1910 trip to Europe, comparing the treatment of poor peasants, Jews and Gypsies to that of the “Negro...

...No one sees scraps are what saves,” the poet says...

...The government could afford to indulge in nostalgia for an independent Caledonia so long as no one tried to raise an army to restore Bonnie Prince Charlie...

...Most of us know his “Auld Lang Syne,” and some may be familiar with “Comin Thro the Rye,” “Ae fond kiss, and then we sever...

...or “Scots, wha hae wi Wallace bled...

...Columbia’s offspring, brave as free...

...She wrote about the injustice of slavery, but since she moved in circles of progressive whites who disapproved of the sale of human beings, we cannot be sure whether here, too, she was aiming to please...

...Readers will be impressed by the sustained verve of his longer works...

...The poet tenderly promises his illegitimate offspring that he will “be a loving father to thee,/ And brag the name o’t...

...When he was 27, however, his friends persuaded him to publish his occasional writings as Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect...

...His praise of America implied that Scotland, too, should throw off the yoke of the monarchy...

...Let them cant about decorum, Who have character to lose...

...He is an irrepressible life force, a malevolent version of Burns’ jolly beggars...

...comparing the organ to a seedy hotel...

...Wheatley of Boston, On Her Maiden Voyage to England...

...This lovable villain is sometimes dressed like a pimp, sometimes like a ragged beggar...

...Like other celebrities before and since, Burns learned how suddenly a favorite can become persona non grata...

...Yet this lyric concludes with a chilling image of “the lady who lines/ your huddled shore” with “her back turned away...

...The Holy Fair” is a caricature of Scottish revival preaching, the verbal equivalent of a Hogarth print...

...In the new volume, Carruthers includes some of Burns’ political poems, less often encountered in anthologies than his lyrics or satires...

...Burns made no attempt to hide his own “mowing...

...Rather, the writer whose bronze bust or full figure graces Central Park as well as thousands of village greens across the country is Robert Burns (1759-96...