The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial, by James Orr.

 A Highland Funeral, Sir James Guthrie, 1882. Taken from Glasgow Museums collections navigator.

Full text of the poem: The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial, by James Orr


1(a) Why was this text created?
  (b) What motivations does the author have for his style choices? (Extent of distinctive Scots vocabulary and grammatical aspects; neologisms and other innovative language use; spelling; distinctive form; imagery.)

The poem can be seen as a challenge to Robert Burns' poem "The Cotter's Saturday Night". That poem is a story in the pastoral tradition, in Spenserian stanza (ababbcbcc; iambic pentameter except for last line which is iambic hexameter), which describes an idyllic Saturday night in a Cottage home. A cott(i)er is someone who has been given the use of a cottage in exchange for labour rather than rent. Carol Baraniuk argues that Orr's poem is a protest against the romantic image Burns sketches of rural life: "Orr seems implicitly to oppose the Scots Bard’s idyll, choosing rather to articulate the Ulster-Scots community’s experience of poverty, injustice and marginalisation" (2009).

D. Sibbald (2007) notes that Burns wrote his poem with a genteel urban audience in mind, as demonstrated by its dedication to Robert Aitken, an Ayr lawyer. Sibbald goes on to argue that in trying to please the high-class audience, Burns ends up posturing too much, as evidenced for instance by his choice of a traditionally English stanzaic form; he gets quite sentimental and tries to imitate other authors too much. Whether this is true or not is a matter for literary critics; however it can be seen that Burns' use of Scots in the poem is quite "thin"; the poem is largely intelligible to the English-speaking reader, with Scots words used to evoke a rural atmosphere. Indeed stanzas 13 through 17, which describe the Bible reading in the cottage, contain hardly any distinctive Scots terms at all. Sibbald notes that this is appropriate, as "the Scottish rustic of the period would in fact move into the language of the King James Bible on such occasions". If the poem was indeed intended for a high class, the choice for a "thin" Scots could be understood as a way of accommodating the audience, with Scots after all being seen as the language of the poor and rural.

That Orr's poem is a response to Burns' one is clear from his choice of a similar setting and main characters, the same poetic form (spenserian stanza), and a similar usage of "thin" Scots as compared to some of Orr's other poems. In "Donegore Hill" the use of distinctive Scots words is much more dense than in "The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial". He does not use English terms in the latter for things he indicates with Scots terms in the former; rather, he uses more formal or abstract terms in the latter for which he uses terms shared between Scots and English; look for instance at sentences such as "Thy grievances through time shall not be scorn'd", or "Deceiv'd by hope, they thought till now he'd mend". The language in "Donegore Hill" is less abstract or formal. While both poems contain a lot of imagery, "Death and Burial" takes a more explanative, interpretative tone whereas "Donegore Hill" seems to present the raw reality of conflict in harsh, slang-like terminology. Thus we find such phrases as "chiels wha grudg'd", "Some hade, like hens in byre-neuks", "lea the daft anes", "Hags, wha to henpeck didna spare". It is not clear whether Orr intended "The Cottier's Death and Burial" for a more genteel audience than "Donegore Hill" was intended for; rather, it seems he chose a more 'thin' Scots in this poem (a) because Burns chose a similar variety of language in "the Cotter's Saturday Night", and (b) to make the poem sound more respectful and moderate, as befitting to its subject matter: a funeral. The people in the poem, too, feel that Scots is not appropriate to the formality of the situation: they try in vain "to quat braid Scotch" (to stop speaking it) when the minister comes in (stanza 5).

Although the formality level of the variety of language in Orr's and Burns' poem is the same, some of the Scots words used differ between the two poems, which could be an indication of Orr self-consciously writing in Ulster Scots rather than Scots Scots. Where Burns talks of a neebor town, Orr uses nyb'rin town. Orr talks about a glaikit wean and Burns about expectant wee-things, though this may have been needed to keep the meter intact. Burns says his subjects spier (= pry) one another for their welfare, but those of Orr speer. Orr uses owre twice but Burns keeps to o'er. Orr uses the word freets (n.), which is included in Fenton's dictionary of Ulster-Scots (meaning superstitions), but not in the Online Scots Dictionary (Eaton, 2000). However, there are more similarities than differences; both authors use belyve, to gar, ben and bairns, aft, wha and frae among others.

The Funeral of Shelley, Louis Edouard Fournier, 1889. See Liverpool Museums website.

2 How successful was this text in reaching its audience?

James Orr published his poems in the Belfast Newsletter and the Northern Star, which indicates that his audience were liberal to radical readers. "The Irish Cottier's Death and Burial" was published in a posthumously published collection compiled by his friends (Ferguson 2008: 135). The group of Weaver Poets that Orr is commonly seen as a part of (Herbison 1996:4) never achieved quite as much fame as contemporary Scots, English or southern Irish counterparts, such as Burns, Allan Ramsay, Jonathan Swift or Samuel Johnson. Stephen Dornan (2005) theorises that this group has been caught in between two paradigms: they were not Scottish enough to be included in collections of Scottish poetry, but not Irish enough to be seen as part of the Irish canon. He says: "The anomalous and problematic position of Ulster Scots literature has tended to mean that it has been at best marginalised and often completely excluded from studies of Irish literary history." Ivan Herbison (1996) further suggests that the Weaver poets never became very succesful because they were (unjustly) viewed by contemporary critics as imitators of Burns.