Robert Burns, William Blake, and Being a Radical

Practical Romanticism

Last Friday was a good day here at Stella Matutina Farm. I had been collecting sap from some of my maple trees and, the day being warm and pleasant, it was an opportune moment to boil the wonderful liquid into syrup. If I were really ambitious, I could tap quite a few more trees (I was only running about fifteen spiles) but I don’t have a proper evaporating table, just four steam trays I use for boiling, which takes all day. I only had about 50 gallons to boil, which, once complete, yielded almost a gallon and a half of syrup. That should last us a few months.

Since most of boiling sap consists of making sure the fire has enough fuel and adding more sap as the sap levels decrease, it’s a day of sitting outside and being patient. Actually, like deer hunting, boiling sap is conducive to reading and contemplation. At least the way I do it. So I had to choose the proper reading material. On a recent excursion to John K. King Books in Detroit, definitely one of the greatest used bookstores on the planet, among other things I picked up a copy of The Canongate Burns, a scholarly edition of the poetry and songs of Robert Burns, one of my favorite poets. When the book was published in 2003, it was the first scholarly edition of Burns’s complete poems and lyrics to appear in 200 years, which, in terms of scholarship and considering Burns’s importance as Scotland’s national poet, is something of a shock. You’d think a scholarly edition on such an important poet would show up more frequently! So I decided to dip into the volume as the sap boiled. Seemed fitting to read the words of a Scottish farmer whilst doing farm stuff.

My love for Burns goes back to childhood. As I mentioned before on The Druid Stares Back, my best friend growing up was from Scotland and my love for all things Scottish was born in that friendship (the Scottish family in Mike Myer’s film So I Married an Axe-Murderer is only a slight exaggeration of my friend’s family—to his own admission!) When, in my twenties, I started to learn and perform the songs of Burns via Dougie MacLean, my friend’s mother was moved to tears, not that my performances were that fantastic, but because the graft took (that’s another farming metaphor).

My boiling of sap and re-immersion in the poetry of Burns coincided with the course I am currently giving on William’s Blake’s Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion, one of the most remarkable works in all of English literature. Blake, born in 1757, and Burns, born in 1759, are tow of the early figures of British Romanticism. For the sake of context, Wordsworth was born in 1770, Coleridge in 1772, Shelley in 1792, Keats in 1795, and John Clare, the English poet most comparable to the farmer Burns, in 1793. So Blake and Burns were true harbingers. At first glance, Blake and Burns couldn’t be more different: the first a Londoner, through and through, and the second a Scottish man of the soil. But they were more alike than you might think.

One thing that unites them is that they both lived their entire lives at the edge of dire poverty. Blake, who was almost entirely unknown as a poet and painter during his lifetime, barely and, quite literally, scratched out a living as an engraver while Burns did his own kind of scratching with a hoe on the soil of his farm. Burns did achieve a certain degree of fame with the publication by the time the Edinburgh edition of his poetry appeared in 1787, but the money he made, far less than what he deserved due to a bad contract, almost all went to saving the family farm from bankruptcy. After that, it was back to subsistence farming and a side gig as an excise officer. It is no wonder that he described himself in a letter as “half-mad, half-starved, half-sarket” (“half-sarket” means, basically, “half-shirted,” i.e., threadbare).

Blake, though I don’t believe he ever considered himself mad (I’m sure it was quite the opposite,), he was nevertheless considered mad by many of his contemporaries. Robert Southey, poet laureate that he was, for example, described Blake as “that painter of great but insane genius.” But Blake, like Burns, was in no way mad; the world was. To be sane in an insane world is to be mad.

Though he often takes forays into legend and folktale in his poetry, as in his wonderful version of Tam Lin,” Burns could never be called a visionary in the way that Blake is. But he still knew a hawk from a handsaw. And he knew that poverty and the injustice surrounding it are not accidental, but by design. Had Burns lived to see what the Irish call “The Hunger,” but what history calls “The Potato Famine,” he would not have been surprised. The Hunger was not the product of potato blight—there were plenty of other crops—but of British policy of practical genocide. Indeed, the recent reveal from the JFK files describing the CIA’s strategy of agricultural sabotage to promote political aims shows us that there is nothing new under the sun.

These kinds of things, the powerful preying on the weak, angered Burns, but being the wry-witted Scot that he was, he often couched his anger in humor. His poem “The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer to the Scotch Representatives in the Houses of Parliament,” while on the surface a comic commentary on the Wash Act that would have put limits on Scottish distilleries in favor of the English. Burns hated English supremacy and oppression and knew that suppressing Scottish distilleries would also suppress the Scots themselves, through taxation on Scottish whisky and suppression of enterprise (translation of dialect on the right):

Paint Scotland greetan owre her thrissle;		weeping, over, thistle
Her mutchkin stowp as toom’s a whissle;		       pint-pot, empty as a whistle
An’ damn’d Excise-men in a bustle,
	Seizin a Stell,					                       still
Triumphant, crushan’t like a mussel,
	Or laimpet shell.				                        limpet

You might not know this, but the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill” is also a cloaked protest about whisky. In the 17^th century, King Charles I tried to raise the tax on alcoholic beverages. Needless to say, it was very unpopular. His proposal failed, but he found a way around it: keeping the tax the same, but lowering the volume on a jack (1/2 pint) and a gill (1/4) pint, not coincidentally, sizes of drink popular (because affordable) with the poor.

I don’t know what this thing is or if it’s in my backyard.

The poverty and oppression Burns saw was of a rural variety. That which Blake witnessed was an urban problem.

Blake may have been an antinomian Christian visionary, but his was far from in the clouds. In his poem, “London,” from Songs of Experience, he lays bare the sins of his culture infected by religious and political hypocrisy and the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

That’s pretty harsh. It’s also accurate. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake articulates this sensibility in a more succinct manner: “Prisons are built with the stones of Law, Brothels with the bricks of Religion.” He wasn’t playing nice. Blake may be the most brilliant analyst of religious psychology ever to have lived. Freud can’t hold a candle to him.

Politically, Burns was a Jacobite, which is not surprising for a Scot with nationalist inclination, though problematic for those who want to frame the Scotsman as a proto-Marxist. Guess what? You can actually be against economic and ethnic injustice without being a Marxist. (I will skip my rant about how most modern academic “Marxists”—and I know dozens—actually despise the working class, but you can probably catch an update on MSNBC). As a Jacobite, Burns was a kind of monarchist, though the kind that assured religious liberty of his subjects (which would have saved Scotland from the godawful hell of Presbyterianism) held up in the symbol of James II, the last Catholic king of England who was deposed in the “Glorious Revolution” (depending on what you understand by “glorious”) in 1688. One of my favorite songs of Burns is his Jacobite lament “It Was A’ For Our Rightfu’ King,” performed here by the incomparable Dougie MacLean:

My own politics are somewhat akin to Burns’s and Blake’s, though, obviously, the cultural, economic, and social conditions are quite different. Like both of them, most of my life has been spent at the edge of the threat of poverty, and, as a small scale farmer and small business owner, I know the precariousness of economics, the real household of things. Farming is a tough gig, though I know people like to think what we do here is Romantic. It is, but it’s also incredibly difficult work and even more difficult to turn a profit (I know—I just did my taxes!)

Like Blake, I definitely have anarchist tendencies. I tend to think of myself as a Christian anarchist, but I’m not so naïve as to think one can think of oneself like that in a vacuum. I have many friends, Guido Preparata and my podcast partner Mike Sauter among them, who also identify as Christian anarchists; but, given the absolute dearth of any kind of political power for such a movement, I know that any kind of Christian anarchism only works under current conditions when one lives in a county that will leave people and communities alone enough to pursue their own social and economic initiatives—like the Amish. Without the freedom to pursue any variety of Christian anarchism, all that’s left is the worthless aims of “raising awareness” or chatrooms at best, or a descent into Hobbit-esque cosplay at worst.

The Amish would prefer to be left alone; and when left alone, their communities flourish, both in terms of economics and in children (don’t let anybody lie to you: the two go together. Think of it as sympathetic magic). But, certainly in my state of Michigan, as in Pennsylvania and New York, the governments don’t always leave the Amish alone. So I’d have to say that freedom is a pre-requisite for even the possibility of anything close to Christian anarchism.

Freedom, indeed, is a theme for both Blake and Burns. As Blake writes in Jerusalem, “I know of no other Christianity and no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.” Without spiritual liberty, there is no liberty at all. Burns’s ambitions are more political and earthly: to break the yoke of tyranny from the neck of the people—which is why he so often mentions William Wallace in his poetry.

Unfortunately, as I learned all too tragically over the nightmare of Covid tyranny, many alleged “Christian anarchists” are simply fascists dressed in the trappings of Franciscan or Benedictine piety. They were among the first to support government lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and all the rest of the insanity. One in particular wrote what he thought was a scathing indictment of those of us actually resisting such measures as “Braveheart freedom,” thinking he was so, so clever. Like Pope Francis, who assured us that getting the vaccine was an “act of love,” no apology has been forthcoming from this arrogant phony. The Amish, on the other hand, never went along with it and resisted to the end—and much of the persecution they have endured, such as the recent mandate that they vaccinate their school-age children in New York, is precisely because of this resistance. I know whose side Blake and Burns would be on. The radical one.

Obviously, neither Blake nor Burns made much impact on their times, both dying in relative obscurity and penury. I expect no less for myself. Nevertheless, I can still imagine a world in which, as Blake so beautifully wrote, “we will build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” For that is the real world.

Growing up as an Irish kid with a Scottish best friend, this scene has always resonated with me.