Monday
After two days of balmy 70-degree weather here in southern Tennessee, temperatures will be plummeting into the twenties, promising to wreak havoc on the blossoms that are bursting out all over. I’m not sure if this is a blackberry, dogwood, or redbud winter—maybe all three—but I always find myself reciting a stanza from Robert Burns ‘s “Highland Mary” at such moments.
To set up the stanza, the poem opens in the high Romantic style with fertility imagery running amuck:
Ye banks, and braes, and streams around
The castle o’ Montgomery,
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,
Your waters never drumlie!
There Simmer first unfald her robes,
And there the langest tarry:
For there I took the last Fareweel
O’ my sweet Highland Mary.
How sweetly bloom’d the gay, green birk,
How rich the hawthorn’s blossom;
As underneath their fragrant shade,
I clasp’d her to my bosom!
The golden Hours, on angel wings,
Flew o’er me and my Dearie;
For dear to me as light and life
Was my sweet Highland Mary.
Then comes the stanza that I use to articulate the turn in the weather:
Wi’ mony a vow, and lock’d embrace,
Our parting was fu’ tender;
And pledging aft to meet again,
We tore oursels asunder:
But Oh! fell Death’s untimely frost,
That nipt my Flower sae early!
Now green’s the sod, and cauld’s the clay,
That wraps my Highland Mary!
Burns couldn’t get blunter with “death’s untimely frost” and the image of Mary wrapped in cold clay. Nor do things get any better in the following stanza as the poet gets unnervingly specific:
O pale, pale now, those rosy lips,
I aft hae kiss’d sae fondly!
And clos’d for ay the sparkling glance,
That dwalt on me sae kindly!
And mouldering now in silent dust,
That heart that lo’ed me dearly!
The poet tries to end on an upbeat note, although I am doubtful whether this graphic descent into the grave can be offset so easily. I am reminded of Charlotte’s critique of the poet in Jane Austen’s Sanditon. First the concluding couplet:
But still within my bosom’s core
Shall live my Highland Mary.
And now for Charlotte’s assessment. She is responding to a rake, who is rhapsodizing about Burns in an attempt to seduce her:
“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.
So should all the dead blossoms that we will be witnessing by the end of the week feel consoled by my reassurance that they will continue to live in my bosom’s core? Hmm.
