Burns and the Natural World

Abstract

Abstract On his long expeditions across America, the pioneering nineteenth-century conservationist John Muir was accompanied, spiritually, by Robert Burns. The poems and songs Burns had known from youth offered inspiration to the solitary naturalist because of their evident sympathy for all living things. Muir’s gratitude to Burns offers a way into reading Burns’s poetry and reassessing the significance of ‘Nature’s Bard’ in the twenty-first century, when matters of conservation and the environment are of urgent concern. The title alludes partly to Keith Thomas’s Man and the Natural World, in which Burns appears fleetingly but significantly, as a poet whose attitude to the non-human as ‘fellow-mortals’ was groundbreaking. The chapter considers shifting critical attitudes to Burns as the poet of nature and focuses on key poems such as ‘To a Mouse’, ‘To a Mountain Daisy’, ‘Poor Mailie’s Elegy’, ‘The Humble Petiton of Bruar Water’, and ‘The Twa Herds’. Close readings of Burns’s literary treatment of animals, birds, fish, and plants, considered in the light of contemporary literary and environmental contexts, demonstrate a profound consciousness of the complexity of the relationship between man and the natural world in his work: ‘Nature’s Bard’ is a very different entity from ‘the Simple Bard’. Burns’s deep understanding of the often conflicted relationship between human and non-human life forms may be as illuminating for twenty-first–century readers in an age of environmental crisis as it was to John Muir in nineteenth-century America. Conversely, the acute environmental concerns of today open new approaches to reading Burns.