Scots Pastoral And Robert Burns

Known as the “heaven-taught ploughman”, Robert Burns(1759-96) is one of themost famous and influential bards in Scotland. He is also widely regarded as thenational poet of Scotland and is celebrated around the world. His poems are alwayswritten in the Scottish dialect on a variety of versions expounding on different subjects,such as political poems, satirical epigrams and lyrics ballads. If domestic studies aremainly concerned with the appreciation and translation of certain epigrams and epistlesof Burns’ early poems, this thesis will mainly explore his later poems from another newpoint to enlarge a wilder horizon---Burns’ vocational involvement with the prosegeorgics and Scots pastoral in the18thcentury, to which he has gradually attracted moreand more attention.What impresses us readers most today about Robert Burns is, on the one hand, thehallmark feature of his reinvention of pastoral---his use of Scottish dialect and frequenteschewal of polite Augustan couplet verse in favor of sixteenth andseventeenth-centuries Scots verse forms such as the Christ’s Kirk, Cherry and Slae,especially the adoption of the Standard Habbie. Some of his most famous poems such asTo a Mouse and Holy Willie’s Prayer have surprised us with their unusual poetictechniques, particularly for its employment of this representative6-line stanza. On theother hand, Robert Burns calls for the renaissance of classical, and especially Theocritanpastoral, which is identified with the shepherd-songs voice of the revival of Scottishvernacular poetry at that time.But Burns’ pastoral poems have the tendency for rusticity and for critical realism,which is in line with the Scots pastoral poetry. Burns’ poems are rooted deeply inScotland, and are always the reflections of local color and customs. His poems relateshepherds, the cotters with whom he is quite familiar with, the pure and innocent youthof Scotland, the heroes who have fought for the independence of their nation, and theScot church and the snobbish gentry which he hatreds most. As a ploughman poet, Burns is quite familiar with the local native land, where helives happily and laboriously. He also senses the poor life and toilsome labor of thebottom-layered people, for whom he creates many poems to hail their diligence andconvey his mercy and pity. As a romantic poet, Burns enters nature, goes into the wildfield to experience the life and feelings of a goatherd. Besides envisioning the beauty ofnature, pursuing the pleasures in nature, he longs for herding in the wild pasture withfreedom and joyance.