Peripeteia

Robert Burns, Ae Fond Kiss

Ev’ry time we say goodbye
People have gone mad for Ae Fond Kiss ever since Robert Burns wrote it in 1791, and had it published a year later in The Scots Musical Museum. Probably only the New Year’s Eve club anthem, Auld Lang Syne, pulls in more royalties for the Burns estate, and that’s just a matter of branding more than anything. The novelist Sir Walter Scott called AFK ‘exquisitely affecting,’ adding that it ‘contains the essence of a thousand love tales,’ and modern critics have tended to agree: G. Ross Roy dubbed it ‘one of the greatest love songs in the language,’ while David Daiches wrote that ‘in it, with the skill so characteristic of love poetry at its best, Burns reduces everything to one basic and overpowering emotion, the emotion of having loved and now having to part.’

Ringing endorsements all; and elicited in part, no doubt, by the autobiographical content underpinning the words: a true story of love and loss from Burns’ life, which inevitably lends added intrigue and gravity to the poem. The story went as follows: Burns had come to Edinburgh in 1787 to supervise the republication of his collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, and found that Poems had made him something of a celebrity among the aristocratic and literary circles of Edinburgh. Among their number was Mrs Agnes Maclehose, a married woman whose estranged and unloving husband had long been living in Jamaica, and she found herself immediately drawn to Burns, and he to her. They exchanged letters, increasingly intense, but, owing to Maclehose being a] a married woman, and b] of a higher class than Burns, social conventions made the relationship impossible. Ae Fond Kiss was written after the pair’s final, sorrowful meeting, before Maclehose would travel to Jamaica to rejoin her husband.

A touching story of true love’s course running rough. And, for many, one of the most touching love songs on the market. The ‘heart-wrung tears’ of the first stanza are classic lovelorn stuff, as are the ‘sighs and groans’ of the next line. The image of the infinite, lightless universe, devoid of the ‘cheerfu’ twinkle’ of a ‘star of hope’, where ‘Dark despair’ descends all around, seems to get stuck in people’s throat. And the substitution of ‘alas!’ for ‘and then’ in the otherwise exact repetition of the first four lines, which implies an involuntary eruption of deepest feeling in the otherwise controlled versification, brings a tear to the collective eye. Moving, too, is the present tense of ‘Ae fond kiss, and then we sever’ which, given that the words were written after the couple’s last meeting, seems designed to keep that final kiss alive indefinitely, or at least to prolong it. And the title of Most Stirring Four Lines is often awarded to:

‘Had we never lov’d sae kindly,
Had we never lov’d sae blindly,
Never met – or never parted –
We had ne’er been broken-hearted,’

Note the intricate job which the anaphora and rhyme-scheme do in making the lovers’ causes of joy and agony inseparable: their ‘kindly’ [good, or natural] love can hardly be divorced from their rash ‘blindness’ to the inevitable consequences. The seed of their anguish, Burns acknowledges, was right there in the fruit of their bliss.

Don’t you want me, baby?
But there’s something else going on in those much-celebrated four lines, specifically in the line ‘Never met – or never parted’. Burns uses long dashes, which he doesn’t use anywhere else in the poem, to separate the clause, ‘or never parted’, as if he is trying to draw particular attention to it. And the significance of the words is unmistakable: though he has been railing against ‘Fortune’, as if the situation is beyond mortal control, and has fused ‘kindly’ and ‘blindly’ in the manner described above, he can’t help but lay the blame for the miserable circumstances on Agnes. It’s her decision for them to part – she’s the one sailing off to Jamaica – and all would be solved if she simply reversed her decision. It’s a touch of finger-pointing and hostility which at first seems out of place in this most plaintive of love songs, until it becomes clear that there is pent-up aggression lurking behind pretty much every line. Beneath the poem’s romantic overtures which generations of readers and critics have heard, there is a strain of anger and resentment.

Take the first line, the line by which the song is known: ‘Ae fond kiss, and then we sever’. Clearly, ‘and then we sever’ means ‘and then we part’; and yet ‘sever’ is a surprisingly violent choice of verb for the context, with its connotations of cutting, of physical mutilation. It could be that Burns wishes to evoke a particularly sudden and / or painful separation, of course, but it could also be that he wishes to establish from the outset an undertone of violence and combativeness. This aggro theory is strengthened when Burns qualifies the standard ‘sighs and groans’ with the unlikely adjective ‘Warring’, and seems to be confirmed when he ends that fourth line with the phrase, ‘I’ll wage thee’, since ‘wage’ can mean ‘promise’, but is also regularly used in the context of ‘waging war’, initiating a conflict. Indeed, flanked by ‘Warring’ and ‘wage’, those commonplace ‘sighs and groans’ start to sound less like those of a broken-hearted lover than those of a soldier, nursing his injuries. It’s almost as if Burns and Maclehose have taken up arms against each other, or at least the former against the latter.

Certainly, Burns is feeling aggrieved, and that interjection, ‘or never parted’, isn’t the only instance of him subtly shifting the blame for the situation from Fate to Agnes. The second verse’s first line, ‘I’ll ne’er blame my partial fancy’, sees him doing the groundwork for the indictment, making it clear that it’s not his fault, that he isn’t the one to blame [even though he conceals it in the tones of helpless love: ‘Naething could resist my Nancy’]. Moreover, that phrase ‘partial fancy’ is really odd, and though people are often trying their best to twist it about and make it synonymous with ‘true love’, it isn’t an easy fit. It’s possible to argue that ‘partial’ means ‘biased’ or ‘fond’ [as in, ‘I’m partial’, but it’s unlikely that Burns was unaware of the word’s other meaning: minor, or incomplete. ‘Fancy’, too, though often used to signify an amorous inclination [and even then it’s not a particularly strong term, like ‘love’ or ‘adoration’], can also stand for an illusion or a delusion, a transitory fascination, or an assumption based on no solid evidence. A minor romantic interest? Or a misguided delusion? Either way, this doesn’t exactly sound like Burns being sincere and tender and heartfelt, aching with the loss of his one true love.

What it sounds like is someone slightly dismissing the significance of a relationship in order to get back a former lover who’s abandoned them. The ‘fond’ and ‘fareweel’ of the opening lines have a tendency to sound a little formal, a little polite, a little less than passionate, as if the speaker is trying to imply the relationship was never much more than platonic, anyway. And that ‘fond’, if read as more romantic, is tinged with the word’s other, less earnest connotations: silliness, childishness, playfulness. We know that Maclehose was far from Burns’ only lover; is he trying to remind her of that? to imply that, to him, the relationship was just a light-hearted way to pass the time? The lines ‘Thine be ilka joy and treasure, / Peace, enjoyment, love, and pleasure!’ have been criticised for being weak and impersonal, the cheap words of valentine sentimentality, but surely this effect is deliberate: surely the bathetic, uninspiring list of some of life’s ‘treasures’ is meant to communicate that, to an extent, at least, Burns isn’t being sincere when he says he wishes her well.