Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at [email protected] and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email.
Tuesday
Here’s a Robert Burns poem to welcome in the twelfth month of the year. December may be grim, he tells us, but he welcomes the grimness because it allows him to wax poetic about “parting wi’ Nancy, oh! ne’er to meet mair”:
Thou Gloomy December
By Robert Burns
Ance mair I hail thee, thou gloomy December!
Ance mair I hail thee wi’ sorrow and care:
Sad was the parting thou makes me remember,
Parting wi’ Nancy, oh! ne’er to meet mair.
Fond lovers’ parting is sweet painful pleasure,
Hope beaming mild on the soft parting hour;
But the dire feeling, O farewell for ever!
Is anguish unmingled, and agony pure.Wild as the winter now tearing the forest,
‘Till the last leaf o’ the summer is flown,
Such is the tempest has shaken my bosom,
Since my last hope and last comfort is gone!
Still as I hail thee, thou gloomy December,
Still shall I hail thee wi’ sorrow and care;
For sad was the parting thou makes me remember,
Parting wi’ Nancy, oh! ne’er to meet mair.
While I find Burns to be enjoyable, I can no longer think of him the same way after reading what Charlotte Heywood in Jane Austen’s Sanditon says about him.
Her comments are in response to Sir Denham, the inept rake who rhapsodizes about Robert Burns in an attempt to seduce her. “Burns,” he declaims, “is always on fire. His soul was the altar in which lovely woman sat enshrined, his spirit truly breathed the immortal incense which is her due.”
Charlotte enjoys Burns well enough, she replies, but says that his philandering raises doubts about the depth of his affections for Nancy or Highland Mary or the other women who function as his poetic muses. Her concluding summation of the poet is short, sweet, and deadly:
“I have read several of Burns’s poems with great delight,” said Charlotte as soon as she had time to speak. “But I am not poetic enough to separate a man’s poetry entirely from his character; and poor Burns’s known irregularities greatly interrupt my enjoyment of his lines. I have difficulty in depending on the truth of his feelings as a lover. I have not faith in the sincerity of the affections of a man of his description. He felt and he wrote and he forgot.”
Austen wields a satiric stiletto like few others. One of literary history’s great tragedies is her dying before she completed Sanditon.