Robert Burns and 'Auld Lang Syne'

From December 2019:

Revelers around the world will soon bid farewell to 2019 and welcome to 2020 with raised glasses and “Auld Lang Syne.”

The words to the song are attributed to Scottish poet Robert Burns, but he claimed to have transcribed them from an elderly man in 1788. Some scholars believe the song’s title, at least, dates to the 16th century.

“Auld Lang Syne” means “old long since.” In modern English, “days gone by.” In uber-modern parlance, “back in the day.”

However it’s translated, the sentiment is appropriate for New Year’s celebrations, as society takes a cue from the Roman god Janus, he of the two heads, one looking to the past and one to the future.

The older people are, the more rose-colored their glasses for “auld acquaintance” and a mythical past when things were allegedly simpler. This pining can be sweet and benign, yet it is also the belief that lies at the rotting heart of the modern white nationalism movement, or whatever vile euphemism it lurks under these days.

Similarly, older people are less optimistic for tomorrow because rapid change threatens to erase outmoded ways of thinking and living, no matter how ingrained into tradition they may be.

But pessimism infects our youth, too, and often for the same reasons. Some wonder — at New Year’s and other times — what kind of world they will inherit and how they will make ends meet as technology obliterates entire careers, sometimes through nothing more than a few lines of code and the push of a button.

Such fears and anxieties are natural byproducts of the age we live in, when the “cup of kindness” from “Auld Lang Syne” may be in short supply.

The speculation over past and future appears more forcefully elsewhere in Robert Burns’ verse, in “To a Mouse,” subtitled “On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.”

The poem’s speaker addresses the rodent of the title, apologizing for the accidental destruction of its home. The mouse had hoped to ride out winter, “cozie here, beneath the blast,” until fate — and the farmer — intervened. The accident prompts a sincere apology from the speaker:

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle,

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

An’ fellow-mortal.

Later in the poem, the speaker laments that “the best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” often go astray, thus inspiring the title of John Steinbeck’s classic novel a few centuries later and reminding those of us thinking New Year’s thoughts how fragile the future can be.

Burns’ speaker actually envies the mouse, despite the loss of shelter, because “the present only” affects her, while he is cursed to “backward cast” his eye “On prospects drear” and look ahead to a future about which he can only “guess an’ fear.”

Despite this comforting absence of introspection and worry on the mouse’s part, I doubt many readers would want to trade places, to live only in the here and now with no recollection of the past, good and bad, and no thought toward the future. I’m reminded too of Dickens’ Scrooge, also timely at this time of year, who learns through an encounter with a plow of his own — in his case, the spirits of Christmas — to “live in the past, the present, and the future” (and to celebrate the holiday in a way that capitalists the world over would approve).

The truth is that in life, sometimes we are the mouse, out of doors, scrambling, lost, and sometimes we are the farmer, pushing the plow and inadvertently hurting others with our deeds and words.

When we are the former, let us hope that our trials and tribulations are brief. When we are the latter, let us strive to be kind-hearted and understanding, willing to fix what we have done wrong and recognizing our shared bond with those who struggle while we have so much. And let’s keep the memory of both states of being.

It’s a sentiment worth toasting in the New Year, with or without the maudlin refrain of “Auld Lang Syne.”

chris.schillig@yahoo.com



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