Selected Poems of Robert Fergusson Review

"Ah what bonds we have – born in the same city; both sickly, both pestered, one nearly to madness, one to the madhouse, with a damnatory creed..."

A few weeks after I wrote on Stevenson, here he is again, talking about his fellow Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson. They did indeed share much in common (they were also both somewhat dandified – Fergusson was prone to wearing his long fair hair tied with ribbons and would sing lustily at the drop of a hat), though Louis was from a rather more privileged background and, being born a century later – close to exactly so – endured somewhat more sophisticated attention for his sickliness. Though he too died prematurely, Stevenson lasted two more decades than Fergusson.

As with all early deaths of talented writers and artists, there is an inevitable fixation with the downfall and the death itself, and Fergusson's end was tragic and poignant. It is also a matter of some dispute. It is still commonly held that he killed himself, though this is untrue: he died, in his sleep it seems, in Edinburgh's asylum, taken there by friends who could no longer cope with his irrational behaviour. Drink and that 'damnatory creed' (Fergusson was plagued by religious fears at the end) played their parts, a nasty head injury and pungent medication for a rumoured venereal disease may also have been contributing factors, but it seems likely that the damp conditions of the bedlam, where disease was common, were what finished him.

A new edition of Fergusson's Selected Poems has just been released by Polygon. This is a slightly revised version of the volume produced to mark his 250^th anniversary in 2000. The poems are introduced by a fine forty page biographical essay by James Robertson, who has also edited the poems to make them more reader-friendly. The spelling used in Fergusson's published works was erratic and sometimes, as was the fashion, gave the English word and assumed the reader would pronounce as in Scots, eg night for nicht.

Fergusson's Scots model was Allan Ramsay (yet another dandy – see the fetching orange turban he sports in the best-known portrait of him!), who had died during Rob's childhood and whose historical digging and newsing in the form of occasional verse were strong models for the Scots poems he began to compose in his teens. However, he was also in thrall to the fashionable English poets of the day, late Augustans such as William Shenstone (some of whose verse forms Fergusson adopted) and Thomas Gray whose famous elegy had appeared in the months before Fergusson's birth.

The book contains all of the surviving poems in Scots, many of which were written in some haste for publications such as The Weekly Magazine, whose readers were thrilled to find this resurrected Ramsay, at a time when Scots was frowned upon in learned company. Sadly, Fergusson destroyed much of his work during his last troubled months and only his work from periodicals and small publications survives. I would have liked to have seen a few more of Fergusson's poems in English, though I have to agree with Robertson that most have not dated well. He was still a youngster in the craft and did not have the natural facility that he had for work in Scots.

These Scots poems are as lively, slick and rattling as they ever were and you ought to seek them out if they have eluded you thus far. They exist as records of life in 18^th century Scotland, written in an 'amalgammated dialect' (Fergusson was from Aberdonian stock and spent much of his teenage years in Dundee and St Andrews receiving an education which he took to with part vigour and part scorn). A favourite form was the 'habbie', later much used by Burns, who idolised the Edinburgh bard and Fergusson used it to great comic effect in famous poems like Caller Oysters. Yet one of Fergusson's achievements was to take the form and rescue it from mere comic verse, as in To the Tron-Kirk Bell: