Good Clean Fun
The Merry Muses of Caledonia. By Robert Burns. A collection of bawdy folk-songs, ancient and modern. Edited by James Barke and Sydney Goodsir Smith. (W. H. Allen, 30s.)
`Bums's bawdry,' wrote the late James Barke, in an introductory essay to The Merry Muses of Caledonia, 'is always coarse, seldom witty, never salacious and not often of a high level.' Pre- cisely. What we have here are barrack-room ballads in dialect; and although there are some unfamiliar felicities of vocabulary (arselins= back- wards, gamon=thighs), both content and versifi- cation are undistinguished. As a note on sources and texts (confirmed by a scholarly page or so in J. W. Egerer's Bibliography of Robert Burns) makes plain to us, only a small part of the verse here is by Burns himself; the rest is traditional material collected by him and in some cases tidied up. But the differences between Burns's own con- tributions and the folk-songs are nugatory: for in almost every poem of either class the same story is told, the same myth proclaimed. The story: randy male meets more or less compliant female, throws her on her back and copulates Crnowes) with her. The myth : since all Scots are well hung (Tway roarin' handfu's and a (laud), the woman is overcome with ecstasy and, hurdies dreepin', clamours for more: She took him to the cellar then, Ha, ha. the girdin o't,
To see gif he could do't again, Ha, ha, the girdin o't.
`Girdin,' for my money, is the mot juste. There
is never a seduction scene worth talking about, no refinements, hardly a single superfluous caress: just plain, straight 'mowing,' with instant satisfaction guaranteed by virile Jock. The edi- tors, James Barke and Sydney Goodsir Smith, are as full of hearty approval as spectators at a rugger match: 'nothing prurient or sniggering in these songs, nothing . . . inflammatory. . . Would to heaven there were. For as it is, the whole affair is just a prolonged and tedious exercise in sexual chauvinism: braw laddies eouping canty lassies with a sonny dunt in the Waulies, all amid the healthy heather, of course, and none of your nasty little Sassenach tricks in
Previous page
