" TO MARY IN HEAVEN."

Otago Witness, Issue 1987, 24 March 1892, Page 43

" TO MARY IN HEAVEN."

A HERETICAL OKITIOISM. If style be worth anything at all as evidence, the "To Mary in Heaven " of Burns is beyond question the work of a man ndt merely bent on saying something he does not mean, but so artificially inspired withal that he must needs express himself in a medium which is not his own, and , in whose , use he has indifferent skill. 0 Mary 1 dear departed shade ! Where is thy lflace of blissful rest? Seest thou thy lover lowly laid? Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast ?

The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar Twin'd am'roits round the raptur'd scene. Still o'er these scenes my mem'ry wakes, And fondly broods with miser care ! Here is surely the very stuff of the drawing room ballad. Nay : pretentious, frigid, inexpressive, with an epithet — or even two — of no particular significance in every verse, is not here the drawing room, ballad itself 1 Whatever the poet's relations with Highland Mary, she can scarce have deserved- to be thus tamely, thus prosaically, besting,' especi ally by the greatest lyrist of his century and one of the greatest in all liteiature. . But, in truth, if you want the real IS urns you must look for him elsewhere, and advise with him on matters nearer his heart than what is a half-forgotten affair with a mistress dead and gone. Compare, for instance, the immortal quatrain— Had we never loved sac kindly, Had we never loved sab blindly, \ Never met or never parted, '' s We had ne'er been broken-hearted, tbe one gem in a string of pebbles and paste, and all that cant about dear departed shades and groans that rend tbe breasts of, lovers lowly laid, and you will see "at a glance the difference between the real Burns and the sham. Take, too, thatfustian stuff about Ayr gurgling as he kissed his pebbled "shore, while birch and hawthorn twined " ani'rous," and the "scene" was "raptur'd," until the "glowing west," in due time, "proclaimed the 3peed of winged day " ; take all this, I say, and set it beside such a little masterpiece of landscape-painting y in words as that one from the " Bigs o' Barley "—" —

The sky was blue, the wind was still, The moon was shining clearly — where in ten or a dozen words you get an effect that will last as long as the English tongue. — W. E. Henley, in the National Observer.