5 - Women, Love and the Body

Summary

The most certain area of Robert Burns's personal notoriety concerns sex. The poet sired at least thirteen children to at least five women and had a series of affairs and liaisons, the precise number of which is not easily computed by biographers. The weighing of Burns's machismo, however, should not be allowed to obscure the nuances of his writings about women, sex and the body, some of which, at least, have to do with the cultural and intellectual climate in which Burns existed and to which he sought to respond.

‘A Poet's Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter; the first instance that entitled him to the venerable appellation of Father’ (PS 60) sees Burns in emotional and combative mood. He peddles a powerful mixture of love for his first child – his illegitimate daughter born on 22 May 1785 to Elizabeth Paton, his mother's serving-girl – and a defiant savouring of the label ‘Fornicator’, that category of sinner loudly proclaimed by the kirk with its public chastisement of offenders upon the ‘cuttystool’. The poem has Burns in an attitude that is best summed up as pro-life:

THOU's welcome, Wean! Mischanter fa’ me, [misfortune

If thoughts o’ thee, or yet thy Mamie,

Shall ever daunton me or awe me,

My bonie lady;

Or if I blush when thou shalt ca’ me Tyta, or Daddie.

(ll. 1–6)

The real sin would be denial of the existence and validity (which orthodox Christian morality would frown upon) of this daughter, and, indeed, of the feelings between the parents that have produced the child. In one of his characteristic hallmarks as a poet, Burns subversively inhabits the language of religion and utters a prayer for a daughter who is ‘love-begotten’ (a reversal of a phrase in common parlance, ‘ill-begotten’):

Lord grant that thou may ay inherit

Thy Mither's looks an’ gracefu’ merit;

An’ thy poor, worthless Daddie's spirit,

Without his failins!

‘Twad please me mair to see thee heir it

Than stocked mailins! [farmsteads

(ll. 37–42)

Here Burns seizes the moral high-ground, appropriating the deepest tenets of the age of sensibility, its promotion of the primacy of a good-oriented ‘natural man’ and of the inner, benevolent feelings as social cement a priori to the institutional endorsement of human relationships.