Burns Essay Winner 2008

Nozdrachyova Youlia Andreevna

Age: 15

Form: 10 “C”

School 61

Then Gently Scan Your Brother Man

Robert Burns is the best known of all Scottish poets. His birthday on the twenty fifth of January is celebrated in Scotland as a national holiday. Burns’s poems were translated into many languages. His lyric poetry has survived through the centuries, and he even became a national hero of Scotland as nobody before him had been able to create poems with such an expressive power of words, touching the particular strings of one’s soul. Burns is considered to be a poet who sang the common people, their joys and sorrows. His lyrical poems are famous for their beauty, truthfulness, and depth of feelings. Burns emphasized the natural simplicity and independence of the individual, and his works had a great influence on the English romantic poets. Robert Burns was always inspired by the love for his motherland: he was devoted to Scotland; he admired its forests, valleys, rivers, lakes and fields. Burns composed verses to the melodies of Scottish folk songs. The praise of his motherland, of its wonderful picturesque landscapes and the immortal spirit of the Scottish people, appears in almost all of his works. For example, his famous poem “My Heart’s In The Highlands” can be called a hymn to Scotland, its nature and its glorious past.

Judging by the colourfulness of the descriptions and the depth of expression of emotions, Robert Burns can be compared with such great poets as Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Derzhavin and later Pushkin in Russia. As Mozart or Beethoven in music, Burns played an important role in the development of the national poetry. His lyrical pieces reflect the usual everyday life in all its aspects, showing the charm of the simple and earthy love.

There are a lot of translations of Robert Burns’s poems into Russian, but the best ones were created by Samuel Marshak. He turned Burns’s masterpieces into his own masterpieces instead of making the exact copies, but he did not lose the general ideas and the main points of the poems, so when you read Robert Burns in original and in translation of Marshak, you can compare the two different views on one problem.

The poetry of Robert Burns is dedicated not only to the life of a common person and to the charmes of nature; Burns also reflects on the meaning of life, contemplating the world and trying to show it in the brilliance of the words. In his unique poem “Addressed To The Unco Guid” he touches upon the problem of the equal attitude to all the people despite of their social status and wealth, the problem of tolerance and forgiving love to a human with all his temptations and sins.

Burns supposes that no human can be higher or better than the other judging by the amount of money he has or by his authority in the society. Some people who claim to be wise just pretend they are, some people that keep silent about their intelligence are real wisemen. Moreover, no one is sinless: every human can be tempted by something, and the richer he is, the more is the risk. This idea (which will pass through all the poem) is stated metaphorically in the epigraph from Solomon:

My Son, these maxims make a rule,
An' lump them aye thegither;
The Rigid Righteous is a fool,
The Rigid Wise anither:
The cleanest corn that ere was dight

May hae some pyles o' caff in;
So ne'er a fellow-creature slight
For random fits o' daffin.

The poem is addressed to those who are “sae guid, sae pious and sae holy”, in other words – to the hypocrites, carving their sins with the mask of piety. They accuse the poor of immorality, although the poor do not deserve the contempt because they are also humans, and no human must be blamed for his disability to resist the cruel and indifferent life. Burns satirically represents the “unco guid” who tries to hide his own shortcomings by deriding weak and powerless – usually the poor:

Ye've nought to do but mark and tell

Your neibours' fauts and folly!

Robert Burns appears to be a generous humanist because he insists on the innocence of the poor:

I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,

Would here propone defences -

Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes,

Their failings and mischances.

He assures the reader that, though the wealth is the measure of the human’s dignity, the people who criticise poverty are more sinful because they do not admit their sins; he unmasks the cruel and unfair attitude to the suffering folk in the bright and furious words:

Discount what scant occasion gave,

That purity ye pride in;

And (what's aft mair than a' the lave),

Your better art o' hidin.

Burns’s satire to the mighty reveals in the powerful metaphor where the poet depicts the life of an “unco guid” who can not let the purity, mercy and love (which belong to eternity) in his life:

Wi' wind and tide fair i' your tail,

Right on ye scud your sea-way;

But in the teeth o' baith to sail,

It maks a unco lee-way.

In fact, Robert Burns justifies the poor people and claims that every human deserves mercy. He explains that everyone could make mistakes because the life is full of temptations and the human seems to be miserable compared with the power of fate. Nevertheless, those mistakes must be forgiven to the people who do not lie and hide them:

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang,
To step aside is human:
One point must still be greatly dark, -
The moving Why they do it;
And just as lamely can ye mark,
How far perhaps they rue it.

So, Burns is full of love and compassion to the suffering and poor people, however he blames the shameless, hypocritical and indifferent “unco guid” who can be compared with Moliere’s Tartuffe, a sly puritan who pretended to be godly, but was actually the artful deceiver. Like Burns, Moliere accuses the hypocrisy, so the theme of Burns’s poem was actual and important throughout the centuries in the whole world – because this theme is reflected in other works of great writers.

Taking everything into consideration, Robert Burns’s works are not dependent on time because their wisdom and eternity helped them remain up-to-date even though centuries passed since the poem “Addressed To The Unco Guid” was written. The immortal problem which is touched in the poem is not only the blaming of the rich and wealthy, but also the love and forgiving of the human, and that is absolutely necessary in our indifferent times.