20 But they shall be free!
Lay the proud Usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty's in every blow!
Let us Do?or Die!!!
1793 1794,1815
A Red, Red Rose1
O my Luve's like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June; O my Luve's like the melodie That's sweetly played in tune.
5 As fair art thou, my bonie lass, So deep in luve am I;
1. Burns's words are set to the old tune to which, the fact that songs like these, transmitted aurally, it was said, Robert Bruces Scottish army had were more likely than compositions in other modes marched when it went to battle against the English to slip past the scrutiny of a censorious govern- invaders in 1314. This marching song is at once a ment, historical reconstruction and an anthem for the 2. Sir William Wallace (ca. 1272-1305), the great Revolutionary 1790s. Burns's turn to songwriting Scottish warrior in the wars against the English. in these last few years of his life might, the critic 1. Like many of Burns's lyrics, this one incorpo- Marilyn Butler has suggested, have had to do with rates elements from several current folk songs.
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14 6 / ROBER T BURN S And I will love thee still, my Dear, Till a' the seas gang dry. 10Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun: O I will love thee still, my Dear, While the sands o' life shall run. 15And fare thee weel, my only Luve! And fare thee weel, a while! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho' it were ten thousand mile! 1794 1796
Song: For a' that and a' that1
Is there, for honest Poverty That hangs his head, and a' that; The coward-slave, we pass him by, We dare be poor for a' that! 5 For a' that, and a' that, Our toils obscure, and a' that, The rank is but the guinea's stamp,0 inscription on a coin The Man's the gowd? for a' that. gold
What though on hamely fare we dine, 10 Wear hodden grey,2 and a' that. Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, A Man's a Man for a' that. For a' that, and a' that, Their tinsel show, and a' that; 15 The honest man, though e'er sae poor, Is king o' men for a' that.
Ye see yon birkie0 ca'd a lord, fellow Wha struts, and stares, and a' that, Though hundreds worship at his word, 20 He's but a cooP for a' that. dolt For a' that, and a' that, His ribband, star and a' that, The man of independant mind, He looks and laughs at a' that.
25 A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that; But an honest man's aboon? his might, above Guid faith he mauna fa' that!3
1. This song was set to a dance tune, known as 2. A coarse cloth of undyed wool. Lady Macintosh's Reel, that Burns had drawn on 3. Must not claim that. for previous songs.
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SONG : FO R A ' THA T AND A ' THA T / 14 7 boFor a' that, and a' that, Their dignities, and a' that, The pith o' Sense, and pride o' Worth, Are higher rank than a' that. 3540Then let us pray that come it may, As come it will for a' that, That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth Shall bear the gree,? and a' that. For a' that, and a' that, It's coming yet for a' that, That Man to Man the warld o'er, Shall brothers be for a' that. win the prize 1795 1795
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e Revolution Controversy and tke
'Spirit o f tke A^e'
In a letter to Byron in 1816, Percy Shelley called the French Revolution 'the master theme of the epoch in which we live'; and in various letters and essays, he declared that, as the result of the repercussions of the Revolution, the literature of England 'has arisen as it were from a new birth,' and that 'the electric life that burns' within the great poets of the time expresses 'less their spirit than the spirit of the age.' (See, for example, the concluding paragraph of Shelley's 'Defence of Poetry,' page 849.) With these judgments many of Shelley's contemporaries concurred. Writers during Shelley's lifetime were obsessed with the possibility of a drastic and inclusive change in the human condition; and the works of the period cannot be understood historically without awareness of the extent to which their distinctive themes, plot forms, imagery, and modes of imagining and feeling were shaped first by the boundless promise, then by the tragedy, of the great events in neighboring France. And for a number of young poets in the early years (1789?93), the enthusiasm for the Revolution had the impetus and intensity of a religious awakening, because they interpreted the events in France in accordance with the apocalyptic prophecies in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures; that is, they viewed these events as fulfilling the promise, guaranteed by an infallible text, that a short period of retributive and cleansing violence would usher in an era of universal peace and felicity equivalent to a restored Paradise. (See 'The French Revolution: Apocalyptic Expectations' at Norton Literature Online.) Even after what they considered the failure of the revolutionary promise?signaled by the execution of the king and queen, the massacres during the Reign of Terror under
Robespierre, and later the wars of imperial conquest under Napoleon?these poets did not surrender their hope for a radical transformation of the political and social world. Instead, they transferred the basis of that hope from violent political revolution to an inner revolution in the moral and imaginative nature of the human race.
The Revolution began with the storming of the Bastille and freeing of a handful of political prisoners by an angry mob of Parisians on July 14, 1789. A month later, the new French National Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Six weeks after that (in early October), citizens marched to the royal palace at Versailles, southwest of the city, and arrested King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, confining them to the Tuileries palace in Paris. These happenings were quickly reported in the London newspapers. The British liberals applauded; the radicals were ecstatic; many ordinary people were confused by the events, which seemed to promise improvement of the common lot but at the cost of toppling long-standing traditions of royalty and aristocracy.
One reaction on the English side of the Channel was the so-called war of pamphlets, initiated by Richard Price's sermon A Discourse on the Love of Our Country, which he delivered on November 4, 1789, a month after the imprisonment of the French king and queen. The controversy accelerated in the wake of Edmund Burke's response to Price a year later, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which itself drew more than fifty further responses, among which the two most famous are Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. The works of Burke and Wollstonecraft and part 1 of Paine's Rights appeared in a very short
