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A Bard's Epitaph
A Bard's Epitaph
The political implications of Burns’s code-switching are more obvious in “A Bard’s Epitaph,”
the concluding poem of the Kilmarnock edition. Here Burns makes himself into a national
symbol by writing about himself as one – albeit deceased. Where Burns names himself a
bard it is with the connotations that McGuirk outlines: “a bard is a poet whose insights
convey a national perspective and for whom self-expression simultaneously involves cultural
definition” (106). In the opening stanza, Burns asks any man, any “whim-inspir’d fool, / Owre
fast for thought, owre hot for rule” that passes his grave to pause and shed a tear on his
behalf. The words “inspir’d” and “rule” hint at the political undercurrent in this poem. Yet, it is
in the second stanza where Burns really begins to characterize himself as a fallen hero of
Scotland. He, “the bard of rustic song” who (in a hidden pun) both “steals” a position among
the crowds and “steels” the crowd towards radical sentiment, appeals to the onlookers and
hopes to elicit a “frater-feeling strong” or sense of Scottish fraternity. Burns then makes an
example of himself for others, asking them to avoid his mistakes and wildness (probably his
fondness for whisky and women). He cautions the onlooker, and so too the reader, to
“attend” and learn to steer the course of their lives with similar passionate Scottishness but
with more prudence.
In so doing, Burns switches from a thin Scots at the opening to pure Standard English in the
final stanza – linking “self-control” with an increasingly anglicized voice. This code-switching
implies that the English stanzas are the careful ones, those more officially permissible yet
drained of the passion of the opening Scots. It is the English turned voice that is also linked
to his supposed bardic failure. Of course, as Andrews points out, these lines are highly ironic
“in light of Burns’s project of national identification through the representation of character.
Where Ramsay and Fergusson had been unable to create successful models for national
unification […], Burns’s appealed much more effectively to its national audience because of
the ‘prudent, cautious self-control’ at the heart of its representations of character” (330-1).
Burns’s bardic self allowed Scotsmen to see themselves as flawed yet genuine, as farmers
also capable of philosophical thought, as both able to use English and able to choose Scots
as best suits the moment. This “offered them a national character that could not be
incorporated or dissolved” even in the midst of the English pressures that were so forcefully
present in Scotland the later eighteenth century (Andrews 331).
In its message of self-control and prudence as the root of wisdom, it is atypical for Burns,
and is arguably inspired by the poet's own self-made image as 'a Bard of rustic song' whose
'thoughtless follies... stained his name!'
After the first stanza in the vernacular, the poem warns us in English of the dangers of
reckless and impulsive living, ultimately revealing that if reputation is to be saved and
wisdom attained, life ought to be lived prudently.