Man was made to Mourn

The origin of this poem is alluded to by Burns in one of his letters to Frances Dunlop: "I had an old grand-uncle with whom my mother lived in her girlish years: the good old man was long blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoyment was to sit and cry, while my mother would sing the simple old song of 'The Life and Age of Man'".[1] "The Age and Life of Man" that Burns wrote about hearing his mother sing was a 17th-century ballad. it served as the basis of "Man was made to Mourn".[2] An early draft of the poem was included in The First Commonplace Book, a work that was largely texts intended to be sung to the tunes of existing songs.[3]

"Man was made to Mourn" is an eleven stanza dirge by Robert Burns, first published in 1784.[4][2] The poem was originally intended to be sung to the tune of the song "Peggy Bawn". It is written as if it were being delivered by a wiser old man to a "young stranger" standing in the winter on "the banks of Aire".[2] It includes the stanza:

Many and sharp the num'rous ills
    Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves
    Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whose heav'n-erected face
    The smiles of love adorn,—
Man's inhumanity to man
    Makes countless thousands mourn!

Despite being based on a 17th-century folk song, the idiom of "man's inhumanity to man" is a distinctly neoclassical rhetorical expression, according to scholar David Daiches, who cites the poem as one of Burns's English works that "use a Scots literary form but are otherwise English in inspiration".[5]

"Man was made to Mourn" is one of Burns's many early poems that protest class inequalities.[6] The scholar Nigel Leask writes that the poem includes "surprisingly contemporary themes", noting its "lament for the harshness and brevity of human life" and direct criticism of "hundreds labour[ing] to support / a haughty lordling's pride". It does not offer these poor hope, emphasising the negative sentiment that "man was made to mourn". Leask also notes that the poem supports a right to work by criticising a lord who will not hire a former farmer looking for work.[2]

Critic and author Edwin Muir described "Man was made to Mourn" as one of Burns's few poems that clearly expresses his own emotions, describing it as "obviously composed under the stress of deep personal emotion," in contrast to his works that express the personas of other people or groups. Muir considers that this makes the poem "among the worst he [Burns] wrote".[7] McGuirk argues that the poem is representative of Burns's inability in his early poems to conceive of an end other than death to the struggles and injustices of life.[8]

Burns initially wrote the poem in response to pervasive "economic and social injustices" in society.[9] It was well received. The author Thomas De Quincey was deeply impacted by a stanza in the poem about a struggling peasant who was not allowed to work by Cassilis, a wealthy man:[6]

See, yonder poor, o'erlabour'd wight,
  So abject, mean and vile,
Who begs a brother of the earth
  To give him leave to toil.

De Quincey wrote that "I had for ever ringing in my ears... those groans which ascended to heaven from his over-burdened heart— those harrowing words, "to give him leave to toil".[6] The poem also influenced poet William Wordsworth, most notably in his Lines Written in Early Spring (1798) and "Resolution and Independence" (1802).[10] McGuirk describes the poem and "Despondency: An Ode" as serving as a touchstone "for later poets in and out of Scotland."[11]^: 68 However, in the years since its publication, the poem has been more broadly applied to wars and genocides.[9]

• Broadhead, Alex (2014). The Language of Robert Burns: Style, Ideology, and Identity. Bucknell University Press. ISBN 978-1-61148-528-8.
• Celinscak, Mark (2015). Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Nazi Concentration Camp. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-1-4426-1570-0.
• Crawford, Robert (2009). The Bard. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 9780224077682.
• Cunningham, Allan, ed. (1855). The Complete Works of Robert Burns. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company. pp. 95–96.
• Dabundo, Laura (2009). Encyclopedia of Romanticism (Routledge Revivals): Culture in Britain, 1780s-1830s. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-23235-1.
• Hughey, Michael W. (2016). New Tribalisms: The Resurgence of Race and Ethnicity. Springer. ISBN 978-1-349-26403-2.
• Jack, R. D. S.; Noble, Andrew, eds. (1982). "Introduction". The Art of Robert Burns. Vision Press. pp. 7–21. ISBN 0389202037.
• Leask, Nigel (2010). "Pastoral Politics". Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland. pp. 115–143. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199572618.003.0005. ISBN 978-0-19-957261-8.
• McGuirk, Carol (2015). Reading Robert Burns: Texts, Contexts, Transformations. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-31734-0.
• Roth, Hans Ingvar (2018). P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-9547-4.
• Weston, John C. (1982). "Robert Burns's Satire". In Jack, R. D. S.; Noble, Andrew (eds.). The Art of Robert Burns. Vision Press. pp. 36–58. ISBN 0389202037.

• Braidwood, Alistair; Orr, Jennifer (2014). "Robert Burns - Man Was Made To Mourn". BBC Arts. Retrieved 18 September 2022.
• Cunningham, Allan, ed. (1884). The Poetical Works of Robert Burns. New York: R. Worthington. p. 49.
• Douglas, William Scott, ed. (1890) The Kilmarnock Edition of the Poetical Works of Robert Burns. 7th ed. Toronto: The Rose Publishing Co, Ltd.; Kilmarnock: D. Brown & Co. p. 83.