A poet who led the way for the Scots leid to live anew

THE poet Robert Fergusson was a key figure in the Scots vernacular revival and a forerunner of Bob Burns. Alas, being Scottish, he was early suffused in booze, gloom and the Bible. He died young. Twenty-four years before that arguably stressful event, Fergusson was born on September 5, 1750, in a tenement between Cap and Feather Close and Halkerston’s Wynd, two small vennels north of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.

His parents, William and Elizabeth (née Forbes), were originally from Aberdeenshire, but had moved to the city two years previously. His father worked as a clerk in the British Linen Bank.

Fergusson was educated at the city’s High School and then the High School of Dundee. With a bursary, he attended St Andrews Yoonie, back when it was a Scottish university, excelling at mathematics, pranks and rioting. Principal Thomas Tullideph (“Pauly Tam”) wanted to expel him but was dissuaded by Prof William Wilkie (“Potato Willie”) due to Fergusson’s imminent graduation.

After which, Fergusson forbore to graduate.

However, Fergusson’s literary ambition had already been taking shape with a mooted tragedy about William Wallace, which was abandoned, possibly on his hearing of another play being produced on the same subject.

He did, though, complete a merry satirical elegy in Scots on the death of one of the university’s maths professors.

In 1768, after the death of his father, Fergusson returned to Edinburgh, where he had to support his mother. Rejecting church, medicine and law – then, as now, the usual career routes for middle-class chancers – he became a copy clerk, the occupation of his father, at the Commissary Records Office.

Which sounds rather dull – unlike his life outside the office. Fergusson became right bohemian, staggering around Edinburgh’s social and artistic circles during the intellectual and cultural ferment of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Unlike today, the Scottish capital was then a jumble of genius, vulgarity, crapulence and philosophy.

Knight club

ROBERT was a member of the Cape Club, which met at The Isle of Man Arms in Craig’s Close. Each member was assigned a name and character, with Fergusson dubbed a knight called Sir Precentor. What larks. This was in the days before the internet.

A theatre-manager friend scored him free admission to dramatic productions, and Fergusson became pally with Italian singer Giusto Fernando Tenducci, who was a castrato, though that may be a cock and bull story. Fergusson’s literary debut came when Tenducci asked him to contribute Scots airs for an opera’s Edinburgh run. Fergusson supplied three.

In 1771, he contributed a trio of satires or pastorals for anonymous publication in Walter Ruddiman’s Weekly Magazine. These were written in conventional English.

His first Scots poem, The Daft Days, appeared on January 2, 1772, heralding two years during which nearly all Fergusson’s poems were produced. The Daft Days celebrated the convivial warmth of Edinburgh’s New Year holidays against the cold climate (From naked groves nae birdie sings/To shepherd’s pipe nae hillock rings/The breeze nae od’rous flavour brings).

After popular acclaim, Ruddiman published a first collection of Fergusson’s poems, which appeared in early 1773 and sold around 500 copies (pretty decent in those days).

Fair-ly talented

AMONG other verse, Hallow Fair celebrates an annual lively event: Here chapman billies tak their stand/An shaw their bonny wallies/Wow, but they lie fu’ gleg aff hand/To trick the silly fallows.

Wow, indeed. You can see the influence on Kate Bush there.

Braid Claith lays bare the sartorial pretensions of his fellow burghers: Braid Claith lends fock an unco heese/ Makes mony kail-worms butter-flees.

But Fergusson was not looking down on his fellow Edinburghers. He was laughing with them, not at them.

In mid-1773 came the poem that confirmed him as the capital’s poet laureate: Auld Reikie (as in Reekie), a panoramic portrait in 300 lines of a day in the life of his home city, beginning at dawn: Now Morn, with bonny purpiesmiles/Kisses the air-cock o’ St Giles/ Rakin their ein, the servant lasses/Early begin their lies and clashes.

It is, as the Scottish Poetry Library notes, “a work which refuses to shy from either the grandeur or the depravities of Edinburgh life”.

Depravity brings us nicely (joking) to famous lexicographer Samuel Johnson, whose visit to St Andrews in August 1773 afforded Fergusson the opportunity to hit

In 1774, he sustained a head injury after falling down stairs, which only served to make him more morbid

back at the proud Englishman’s humorous definition of oats as “a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people”.

Food for thought

FERGUSSON suggested feting the good doctor with a true Scottish banquet of haggis followed by a gude sheep’s head/Whase hide was singit, never flead/ And four black trotters cled wi’ girsle. Later, Fergusson inquired solicitously of Johnson if he had ever applied the kilt aerian to your Anglian thighs.

Politically, Fergusson might be described as a nationalist imbued with Jacobite sentiments.

In The Ghaists, one graveyard spectre says to another: Black be the day that e’er to England’s ground/Scotland was eikit by the Union’s bond.

Alas, Fergusson was soon graveyardbound himself. Like most Scots, he came to suffer from melancholy, possibly a side effect of his carousing.

He took to his room to read the Bible obsessively. In late 1773, he’d dedicated a poem to John Cunningham, a fellow versifier who died in a Newcastle asylum. Fergusson expressed fears of a similar fate.

Good call, mate. In 1774, he sustained a head injury after falling down a flight of stairs, which only served to make him more morbid and temperamental. Thereafter, he was taken protestingly from his mother’s home, and bunged into Darien House asylum where, within weeks, on October 16, in a strawstrewn cell, he suddenly died. He’d just turned 24. Initially, Fergusson was buried in an unmarked grave in Canongate Kirkyard, until Robert Burns privately commissioned and paid for a headstone of his own design in 1787, which was erected in 1789.

Burns, who himself lived to the ripe old age of 37, called Fergusson “my elder brother in misfortune; by far my elder brother in the muse”.

His inscription on the headstone reads: No sculptur’d marble here, nor pompus lay/No story’d urn nor animated bust/ This simple stone directs pale Scotia’s way/To pour her sorrows o’er her poet’s dust.