Preview of Robert Burns and Women

On the blog the return button is not working so there is no chance of making paragraphs so one must, as it were, read it in one breath. For the Romantics among us this is  my view on Robert Burns and Women (Pre - View of Academic Course Notes)

Robert Burns was a lover of women from the outset, and it almost seems his poetry was just catching up with his passion for them.

In his life he had 6 children out of wedlock and 9 children with Jean. Only 3 of the children survived family life, meaning that 6 of them died before adulthood. It is estimated that he must have had over 10 sexual affairs and countless other unconsummated dalliances with women, who then also became the focus of his poetry. His sexual encounters are legendary because he wrote about them and they are real life affairs making the power of his poetry all the more Romantic because each poem refers to real women in his life at that time. It was as if he was embarking on a theatrical seduction in some cases in that he knew they would become the subject of his poetry but it seems, he also cared for these women at the same time, it was not just mere poetic license.

 

However there is a downside. He seems to have taken most of the women for granted and once they are pregnant he has all but abandoned them. The worse example of this is the pregnancy of Jenny Clow who was the servant girl of Clarinda, known as Agnes McLehose. It is as if he in, not taking Clarinda to bed, takes his sexual frustrations out on the maid. By all accounts when Clarinda points out how ill Jenny is from the baby, Burns just is not interested in helping out with the child or contributing financially. Therefore there is something amiss in his attitude to women. In the case of Clarinda she suffers from immense social pressures because she is related as a cousin to Lord Craig and her upbringing in the social elite in Glasgow where her father was a surgeon, meant that she could not easily shake off the controversy raging in Ayrshire over his latest pregnant love Jean Armour. However Clarinda may have thought that he would choose her over Jean and she expresses bitter disappointment that he bows to social pressure to marry the maid. It is as if Robert Burns is continually living out some higher idea he has of sexual love that he just can’t quite seem to capture in real life, which he seems to easily master in Poetry. He seems to deliberately portray himself as a man seeking love through his muses, but who fails either to find a Women to return his love, or he for her. His poems are always seeking the moment, and when love is found, it slips away. The best example of this is in the poem Ae Fond Kiss, about Clarinda with whom he parts or similarly with Highland Mary who dies in child birth before he can bring her to his heart. Such tragedy is the stuff of poetry and myth but what makes his poetry work is that the verses are about real women, his real loves. Somehow therefore Burns in his literary personality is the epitome of the Romantic Lover, which in Literature has its equivalents in Bronte’s Heathcliff, or in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. But what make Burn’s Romance work more effectively even than these Literary Romances, is that none of the poems are divorced from his real life. These women he writes about are his girlfriends, lovers, and friends to the point that his descriptions of them gave him an ethereal quality creating the international image as a man always in love, always passionate and always rejected – a perfect companion for the Muses, for whom he lusted. Living up to this image was however not easy and it maybe in fact where the fantasy failed to create the reality particularly in his marriage where the sheer struggle to feed the children was taking its toll on both partners. The fact he stood by Jean although she was not his idea of his literary Romantic Love is the measure of the man, in that he stayed with her despite it all, protecting her and making sure she was provided for in life and even after he was gone.

In his Poem ‘The Rights of Women’ he sums up his attitude which presupposes that women are worthy of all human rights invested in a Man and he goes further to say they must be cherished for their rights are unquestionable. He even jokes that these rights require that men must protect women, show decorum and devotion to them at all times. So here we have it, the Romantic poet, in love, as he portrays himself, seeking enlightment and devotion -a recipe that causes his muses to swoon and his adversaries to call time on his passions - a perfect literary creation. But what of the reality? Was he perhaps a sex addict who failed to take responsibility for the consequences? Undoubtedly so but it seems he is forgiven because he tried so hard to master it and failed, so publically to achieve it. His audience forgives him because he devises and creates the most Romantic of Poems; My Love is Like a Red Red Rose the epitome of Robert Burn’s Passion. Here it is.

 

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. As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in luve am I; And I will luve thee still, my dear, Till a' the seas gang dry. Till 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. And fare thee weel, my only luve, And fare thee weel awhile! And I will come again, my luve, Though it were ten thousand mile.