Tam O’Shanter

First approached in its original Scots Gaelic dialect, “Tam O’Shanter” can seem exotic, intimidating, even frustrating. In addition, with it’s cautioning about witches and warlocks, it can seem to have little to say to a contemporary audience. The literary importance of “Tam O’Shanter,” stems from three interrelated elements: a) its wily sense of adventure and comic storytelling that is cinematic in conception and scope; b) its willingness to mock the conventions of typical storytelling with a sense of irony that remains accessible to modern readers; and c) the celebration and affirmation of a Scottish national identity and language at a time when Scotland was considered a second-tier country, void of culture compared to its English neighbor.

As a model of storytelling, “Tam O’Shanter,” provides a distinctly contemporary sense of character, setting, action, conflict, suspense, and climax. In this, Burns taps into a traditional kind of poem, the ballad, in which a central character, easy to identify with, often deeply and comically flawed, experiences a succession of trigger events beyond his ken, usually supranatural. The ballad form, like Burns’ poem, stresses the regular cadence of percussive rhythms and tightly controlled rhyme to encourage public recitation. From Tam’s flawed decision to linger with his friends by the roaring fire of the public house to his breathless run to the bridge over the River Doon, the poem entertains with the story itself. The poem creates characters that are vivid and immediate. Tam’s judgmental and disapproving wife, who never actually appears in the poem, is nevertheless conjured in a single image: Tam knows she is waiting for him to get home, sitting at their kitchen table, “Gathering her brows like a gathering storm” (Line 11). The witches and warlocks dancing by the lurid lights of the fires in the old church; the scattered murder weapons; the grinning figure of Satan-as-a-black dog; the lusty striptease of the comely witch Nannie; and, of course, Tam O’Shanter himself, flush with sudden lust that puts him in harms way. The chase to the bridge provides the poem with an ample sense of adventure, complete with a variety of paranormal special effects that invite the reader to bring the haunted church to life.

Burns, an autodidact in the literatures of antiquity, understood the expectations of the ballad; the adventure needs to deliver a lesson, a moral, some wisdom that the reader can feel rewarded for indulging in the otherwise pleasant diversion of a story well told. Since the fables or Aesop and the parables of the Christ, stories are expected to teach, but Burns upends that expectation with bold irreverence. Yes, Tam should have listened to his wife, should have been more obedient to a woman who even in her spare appearance comes across as a harsh, shrewish harridan; and yes, certainly he drank a bit too much, but the fire was so warm and his friends so convivial and the ale so creamy; and yes, certainly he should not have gotten so enraptured by the figure of the dancing witch to the point where he forgot himself. Burns could surely have used any of those character flaws, any of those poor decisions to leave his reader enlightened as to the cost of such violations, such misjudgments. Yet when the narrator returns in the closing stanza to provide the poem’s moral frame, the lesson offered is something strikingly different: watch yourself, the poet exhorts, or your horse might lose its tail. The silliness of the lesson, the strategy of upending conventional expectations with a flippant bit of non-wisdom, gives the poem a style of wink-and-nudge irony that suggests the poet does not entirely dismiss friendship, ale, and a lusty moment or two or three.

More than its cinematic sense of storytelling or even how it pokes gentle fun at those who demand stories instruct, “Tam O’Shanter” is a singular expression of national pride. Burns was well aware of the lack of serious literature coined in the dialect of his native country. Scotland was perceived, much like the American colonies at the same time, as an appendage of Great Britain. The use of the Scottish dialect in an epically conceived poem that would find a wide market appeal is something of Scotland’s Declaration of Independence. As a student of British literature, Burns was aware of the limited opportunities dialect poetry had for market success in London, yet he tells the story of his Scottish ne’er-do-well in the language of his people, his culture. At a time when British literature was defined by the elegant and sculpted lines of late Neo-Classical poetry, like the works of Alexander Pope and John Dryden, Burns recreates the music and rhythms of the speech he grew up listening to. Without condescending to the Scottish people, the poem offers the color and subtle word play of Scotland’s everyday language and elevates it to poetry. As such, the poem becomes an assertion of national pride, defiant and uncompromising, a demand that the Scots people, its characters, its towns, its emotional and spiritual life, its folktales and legends reward the investment of poetry.