Nature was to be given in the next
generation a vast and novel variety of spiritual significance. With
all that Burns had nothing to do. He was realist, not romanticist,
though his example operated beneficently and sanely on some of the
romantic leaders.
Yet in Burns's treatment of nature there is imaginative beauty as well
as humble truth. His language in description, though not mystical or
highly idealized, is often rich in feeling, and his personality was
potent enough to pervade his most objective writing. Thus he ranks
among those who have put lovers of poetry under obligation for a fresh
glimpse of the beauty and meaning of the world around them. This
glimpse is so strongly suggestive of the poet that our delight in it
will largely depend on our sympathy with his temperament; yet now and
again he flashes out a phrase whose imaginative value is absolute,
and which makes its appeal without respect to the author:
The wan moon is setting behind the white wave,
And time is setting with me, oh!
Apart from the respects in which Burns is the inheritor and perfecter
of the vernacular traditions, and apart from his contact, active or
passive, with the English poets of his time, there is much in his
poetry which is thoroughly his own. It does not lie mainly in his
thinking, robust and shrewd though that is. We perceive in his work no
great individual attitude toward life and society such as we are
impelled to perceive in the work of Goethe; we find no message in it
like the message of Browning.
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