Fergusson and the bycultural canon. (Literature).(Scottish poet Robert Fergusson)

WRITING THIS ESSAY places me in a position somewhat analogous to that of Robert Fergusson in his address, "To the Principal and Professors of the University of St Andrews". When he referred to them as "my winsome billy boys", he was, as poets often are, simultaneously of the academic world and not of it. Fergusson borrowed aspects of the discourse of his old university for a critique of those professors' adulatory welcome to "Samy" Johnson--and I am borrowing something of the descendant of that discourse to offer some suggestions about the present role of literary Scots. May our different results equally distort their borrowed accents.

I too am obliged to retain my iambic foot in the world beyond the academy, that land over the Wall where both our methods and our subject are strangers. Because when I stand up to read my poems in Scots or English to any audience, Scots or English, I face people who are not particularly informed as to the language or the forms I use, or the predecessors who I believe give me the ground from which to proceed. Therefore I plan to be more alert than usual to what might be described as Fergusson's interface with his reader, since it is in that subtle invitation to hooly that I believe most of the issues I wish to raise here reside. I am also conscious that Fergusson shares with many Scots writers the dubious distinction of not yet having been done (or done over) by that academy, and in this respect he is still the responsibility of the poets he inspires and the readers he entertains.

Fergusson's work in Scots and English appeared in a newspaper of sorts, Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine (also, tellingly, known as the Edinburgh Amusement); more, he was asked to perform it, as well as sing songs, at parties, in public houses and as part of the Cape Club where he was known as Sir Precentor, because of his fine voice. The editor of my 1879 edition of Fergusson's poems, Alexander Grosart, comments on the Cape, "This club sustained a respectable and sober character: but the `Convivalia' in Mr Chambers' admirable `Traditions of Edinburgh', opens to us the crapulent habits of the whole society of Edinburgh at this period." Which is as circumspect a way of saying "pissheads" as you could hope to hear. So Fergusson was addressing an intimate audience who were familiar, thanks partly to the efforts of Allan Ramsay, with his sphere of reference and the strategies he deployed within it. The regularity and conviviality of these appearances both in print and in person bear some comparison with the special intimacy enjoyed (and sometimes endured) today by the poet in performance.

Only in Fergusson's case we have a poetry of performance that draws on a broader and more assured frame of reference than it now usually commands. When he mock-celebrates the "King's Birth-Day in Edinburgh", he takes his epigraph from William Drummond's scatological macaronic poem the "Polemo-Middinia", itself a kind of oblique take on the genre of Christis Kirk, the depiction of country life that presents rural fairs and the brawls within them in mock-heroic terms. Fergusson, who worked with the Christis Kirk stanza and subject elsewhere, is here indicating an extension of the genre to cover urban burlesque, and, after rejecting Helicon as "That heath'nish spring", requesting instead that "Highland whisky scour our hawses", goes on to produce a mock-lament for the cannon, Mons Meg:

 
   Oh willawins, Mons Meg! For you, 
   `Twas firin' crack'd thy muckle mou'; 
   What black mishantar gart ye spew 
   Baith gut and ga'? 
   I fear they bang'd thy belly fu' 
   Against the law. 
 
   Right seldom am I gi'en to banning, 
   But, by my saul, ye was a cannon, 
   Cou'd hit a man had he be stauning 
   In shire o' Fife, 
   Sax lang Scots miles ayont Clackmanan, 
   And tak' his life. 

In these two swirl stanzas he hints at elegy in the cry "willawins", slips in hyperbole, sending his allusive cannonball soaring over the scene of dispute in Drummond's poem, and manages an extremely vulgar reference to the impregnation of Mons Meg, which is of course mentioned in the "Polemo-Middinia" in terms which are just as vulgar, when the "mistress of Scotstarvit" (how shall I phrase this?) lets one slip: "Elatisque hippis magno cum murmure fartum / Barytonum emisit, veluti Monsmeggn cracasset ..."

And his audience understood all this, but in that partly-engaged, partly-glancing way that we bring to performance, where it is not necessary to understand every word because the next word, the next phrase, is already among us. In Ruddiman's, too, the next article, the next issue, would tend to crowd out what was not fully understood. The particular relevance of this to Scots, a language we have long been more accustomed to hearing than to reading, will, I hope, be apparent. The lug, as long as it is being entertained, is more forgiving than the ee when it comes to obscurities of reference or vocabulary. And even in print, the. critical eye may be cajoled by a humorous context into lightly acknowledging a complex subtext.