In the description of family worship, Burns
did what his father would do in conducting that worship, adopted
English as more reverent and respectful, but inevitably as more
restrained emotionally; and in the moralizing passage which follows,
as in the apostrophes to Scotia and to the Almighty at the close, he
naturally sticks to English, and in spite of a genuine enough
exaltation of spirit achieves a result rather rhetorical than
poetical.
Contrast again songs like _Corn Rigs_ or _Whistle and I'll Come To
Thee, My Lad_, with most of the songs to Clarinda. The former, in
Scots, are genial, whole-hearted, full of the power of kindling
imaginative sympathy, thoroughly contagious in their lusty emotion or
sly humor. The latter, in English, are stiff, coldly contrived,
consciously elegant or marked by the sentimental factitiousness of the
affair that occasioned them. But their inferiority is due less to the
difference in language than to the difference in the mood. When,
especially at a distance, his relation to Clarinda really touched his
imagination, we have the genuinely poetical _My Nannie's Awa_ and _Ae
Fond Kiss_. The latter poem can be, with few changes, turned into
English without loss of quality; and its most famous lines have almost
no dialect:
Had we never lov'd sae kindly,
Had we never lov'd sae blindly,
Never met--or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
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