Did Burns fear he’d lose his mind... like his favourite poet?
HE was the tragic Scots writer who inspired our national bard Robert Burns.
But the Ploughman Poet was terrified he would suffer the same descent into madness as his ‘brother in the muse’, Robert Fergusson.
Edinburgh-born Fergusson’s life was blighted by depression and he died in a notorious asylum in the city in 1774, at the age of 24.
His death occurred only weeks after he was admitted to Darien House ‘Bedlam’ hospital against his will, following a suspected head injury suffered during a fall.
Burns began to be blighted by bouts of depression when he was 23, while learning how to process flax in Irvine, Ayrshire, in 1781.
Burns scholar Moira Hansen, of Glasgow University, said: ‘Burns’s brother Gilbert, talking about Burns as a teenager, said he had a tendency towards darker moods and low spirits. They’d often find him sitting in the corner on his own complaining of headaches.
‘If you look at how we would look at depression and bipolar nowadays, that is a very typical early presentation, and in Irvine he had his first depressive breakdown. What also happens in Irvine is he encounters Fergusson’s poetry and, I assume, he learns what happened to Fergusson.
‘You can see why he’d latch on to Fergusson as a kindred spirit. Part of him is trying to understand what’s happening to him but, because of what happened to Fergusson, there comes a terror of, “What if I go that way?”.’
Burns referred to the poet as ‘my elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the muse’ – and in 1787 he commissioned and paid for a headstone for Fergusson’s unmarked grave.
Mrs Hansen said: ‘The theory is that Fergusson fell or was pushed down some stairs and suffered a head injury, and a slow bleed on the brain led to his madness.
‘Burns would have no way of knowing that, he would just think it was that kind of depressive temperament, the poetic temperament, that Fergusson had that led to Bedlam.
‘The poems Burns writes coming out of that period of depression are very much about trying to make sense of what is going on.’
Burns biographer Professor Robert Crawford, of St Andrews University, said: ‘The word we might use for what he suffers from throughout his adult life is depression. His favourite Scottish poet was Robert Fergusson – he had gone up like a firework but then crashed to Earth and died on a bed of straw in Bedlam.
‘Burns was terrified something like that might happen to him.’