Isabel Pagan, an Ayrshire poet and songwriter in Scots and English of the Romantic period, rarely conformed to type. She comes alive in this posthumous account in 1840 by James Paterson, a prolific collector, historian, and antiquarian of Ayrshire, though apparently garnered from contemporary accounts and living memory.
Whether sober or tipsy she was a woman of violent temper, and her crutch was always ready to obey the impulse of the moment. However much her character and mode of life might be reprobated, few were willing to offend her by their expostulations or remarks; and she attained a sort of ascendency, which the fear of her sarcasm and her crutch alike combined in enabling her to maintain.
Pagan’s apparent fierceness, according to Paterson, was linked to her habit of being intoxicated, especially around midnight. His account also describes her as being of ‘very unearthly appearance’, ‘the most perfect realisation of a witch or hag’, and thus says more about the assumptions of her Victorian biographer in relation to female conduct and the role of the woman poet than Pagan herself. She may be the ‘anti-heroine’ of Paterson’s litany of Ayrshire writers but she was perhaps more poignantly ordinary than this account suggests ─ an unmarried woman, living in a small community, and coping with a physical impairment. Significantly, a volume of her poetry was published in her lifetime. It first appeared in an edition of 1803 by the Glasgow Trongate press Niven, Napier, and Khull, and was subsequently reprinted in 1808. This contains 46 poems, ‘[p]rinted on extremely thin paper and containing only seventy-six pages in all, the volume was just the right size to fit in a hunter’s pocket’ (Feldman, p. 540), therefore cheap and portable. On its first printing, Pagan would have been 62 years old, though an autobiographical lyric tells us that, far from being a late developer, she began ‘making’ song and verse from the age of 14. The poems in her volume, then, conceivably stem from the last five decades of eighteenth century (though there is little internal evidence for dating). They are her ‘trade’, the collection implies; by implication sometimes bartered and exchanged with wealthier or obliging ‘patrons’ in exchange for drink: ‘I thank you for your bottle, Sir, / But woes my heart its dry, / 'Tis in your power to fill't again, / The next time you come by’. poetry is part of a spirit economy.
Pagan presents her poetry and song-making as part of a spirit economy, and as an art of survival in various ways, but she wanted longevity for it too:
Were I in power to publish them,
To be sung when I'm dead,
And while I am upon the stage,
Might help to merit bread. (no. 20)
In histories of Scottish literature, however, Pagan is usually mentioned only as a footnote or supplement in an attribution debate concerning Robert Burns — namely the authorship of the well-known song ‘Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes’. This appeared in James Johnson’s collection, The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803), one of the pivotal vernacular song collections of the eighteenth century, although it is not printed in her published collection. Burns, too, claimed a different source of transmission for the song than Pagan, and more recent scholarship has suggested that it is unlikely that Pagan was ‘the originator of the first version’ [MPM, Crossing the Highland Line, p. 148; McCue, HWW, p. 60). And that Pagan was a tradition-bearer of this beautiful song rather than its definitive ‘author’ is more sensitive anyway to the intermeshing of literary and oral cultures in later eighteenth-century Lowland Scotland. Pagan has been seen as emblematic of folk culture or folk tradition. In Stephen C. Behrendt’s recent illuminating reading of eighteenth-century Scottish female poets, Pagan is seen to embrace the ‘naturalness of a folkloric idiom characterized by its ostensible orality’ (ie. the non-traditional’ poetic discourse of Scots vernacular poetry), and therefore socially subversive (Behrendt, p. 206). For Valentina Bold, Pagan belongs to a tradition of autodidactic poets argued to be especially strong eighteenth and nineteenth-century Scottish culture. One lyric offers an account of her education: the nurturing guidance of an older woman in the community spurs her desire to read beyond scripture.
My learning it can soon be told,
Ten weeks when I was seven years old.
With a good old religious wife,
Who liv'd a quiet and sober life;
Indeed she took of me more pains
Than some does now of forty bairns.
With my attention, and her skill,
I read the Bible no that ill;
And when I grew a wee thought mair,
I read when I had time to spare.
‘Account of the Author's Lifetime’
Pagan’s poetry is distinctively located within community. That immediate world was the small village of Muirkirk in Ayrshire ─ indeed, Pagan remains an important part of local heritage ─ but her verse is also strongly rooted in the cultural traditions and practices of wider Ayrshire communities. There’s a wealth of poems in the collection which commemorate the seasonal huntings, visiting regiments, and other kinds of communal, shared rituals. And it’s this aspect which associates Pagan’s poetry with a Scottish poetic tradition of carnival and social conviviality, popular in late medieval and early modern Scottish poetry and resurgent in the eighteenth-century vernacular revival. Interestingly, she frequently locates herself at the heart of this economy of social circulation which trades on the exchange of poetry and song, drink and tobacco:
I'll sing a song with noble glee,
And tune that I think canty,
But I sing best, it is no jest,
When the tobacco's plenty.
‘The Spinning Wheel’
Of course, these webs of social interaction and exchange may be a poetic fiction spun by Pagan rather than a reality. But her poetry still richly depicts the experiential life of her community, whether actual or imagined or both, and it feeds her poetry with topical events and issues, as well as a fund of protagonists.
Pagan forges her own kind of individual localism but as the so-called ‘poetess of Muirkirk’, Pagan could already call upon the pre-existing associations of the place with Burns. Including Pagan in her edited anthology of eighteenth-century women’s verse, Paula Feldman reprints her dedicatory lyric ‘On Burns and Ramsay’, commenting that it ‘legitimises her own poetic voice’.
Now Burns and Ramsay both are dead,
Although I cannot them succeed;
Yet here I'll try my natural skill,
And hope you will not take it ill.
You know their learning was not sma'
And mine is next to nane at a';
Theirs must be brighter far than mine,
Because I'm much on the decline.
I hope the public will excuse
What I have done here by the Muse;
As diff'rent men are of diff'rent minds,
My metre is of diff'rent kinds.
Pagan makes herself as creatively emergent at the moment of their ‘expiration’. It pays the obligatory debt to Burns in rather a deft and economical way. Comparing her ‘natural’ skill to the ‘learned’ Burns, Pagan almost manages to unpick Burns, ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ (Henry Mackenzie’s famous phrase, of course), from the ‘state of nature’, or the discourse of ‘naturalness’ with which contemporaries associated him. It’s also interesting that it’s only Burns and Allan Ramsay whom she invokes; so two out of the trinity of eighteenth-century Scottish vernacular poets which one might have expected — Burns, Ramsay, and Robert Fergusson. Perhaps Pagan cites Burns and Ramsay, and omits Fergusson, because the former poets were specifically (though not exclusively, of course) song-collectors and songwriters. Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany (first published in 1724) is especially important in the early printing history of Scottish song collections. Pagan therefore locates her work within a printed vernacular song tradition which challenges the identification of Scottish music with an idealised, rural nostalgia, and successfully re-establishes through print its dynamic roots in living oral traditions. For Pagan, then, the allusion perhaps seeks to alert her readers to the ways in which her own collection shares in this significant post-Union history of intersections between oral and print, ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ cultures. Many of her poems are set to popular tunes, and her poetry is criss-crossed by allusions both to orality and writing as the means of creation: eg. ‘Sometimes I do amuse myself / With making of a song’; ‘These lines I will conclude, and lay down my pen, / Left these simple verses should any offend’; ‘I wish that my tongue could express, / What the swift writer's pen it could write, / I would tell you some more of his fame’; one poem depicts her contentedly returning home after an evening’s singing and poetry-making:
Now these lines I will conclude,
My song made out I will go hame;
The road's not far, the night is good,
This I will sing, and gang my lane. (‘The Duke of Gordon’s fencibles’)
Pagan’s poetry oscillates between languages and registers, resisting a fixed poetic location. Of the 46 poems in Pagan’s published collection, there are more English than Scots poems (in reference to those texts written exclusively in either language). Surprisingly, perhaps, it demonstrates her poetic fluency in conventional English amatory and pastoral verse. The Isabel Pagan of vernacular folk tradition, whom witnesses allegedly heard ‘scrieching out poetic verse’, is hard to hear in a poem such as ‘A Love Letter’:
I will guard thee round about,
Myself, I'm sure, shall be the door,
And if thy heart chance to steal out,
I vow I'll never love thee more.
Though father fret, and mother scold,
Although that all my friends should frown,
All that I have thou art sure of,
And well may think it all thine own.
I have not time to make more rhyme,
So well's my judgment could express,
But I am thine, and heart and mind,
Sincerely hope the Lord will bless.
A significant number of Pagan’s poems are linguistically hybrid, either through the scattered ‘irruption’ of Scots words into standard English poetic discourse, or through a more sustained interweaving of both. We can see this in the opening stanza to her poem, ‘The Spinning Wheel’:
When I sit at my spinning wheel,
And think on every station,
I think I'm happiest mysel,
At my small occupation.
No court, nor freet, nor dark debate,
Can e'er attend my dwelling,
While I make cloth of diff'rent sorts,
Which is an honest calling.
Here Pagan constructs an authorial persona who performs a kind of choric role. The spinning wheel is an appropriate symbol, representative of a female craft and trade but also evocative of another kind ─ the creative spinning of stories. But that she weaves and cards cloth whilst she narrates also makes this a kind of ‘working song’ too. Pagan’s persona draws attention to location, task, and place; to the social and economic imperatives which underpin this ‘honest’ trade; and to her ‘small’ but intense and productive means of activity. Furthermore, Pagan’s ‘bivocality’, as it were — her simultaneous inhabiting of two interrelated linguistic and cultural worlds — often serves to blur the ideological borderlands which they might ostensibly represent [vernacular for comic, parodic verse; English for moral or ‘serious’ subjects]. Pagan’s English verse can be political and satirical , and her Scots verse moral; both accommodate ‘serious’ as well as comic and occasional subjects. English is maintained in the closing stanza of ‘The Spinning Wheel’, marking the lyric’s culminating satirical and political point in exposing corrupt practice occurring during the Napoleonic war:
Kind Providence sent a good crop
For to support our nation,
But Satan's crew sent it abroad,
Which is a sad vexation,
That e'er such blackguard vagabonds
Should have a habitation
Below our British government,
That takes this occupation.
Pagan’s poetry often has a needle-sharp resonance:
There is such taxations
We scarcely can bear,
Which makes the whole country
To be in a steer.
For men to be made soldiers,
The trade is broken down,
And leaves families mourning
In many a town.
‘A New Song’
Paula Feldman makes a telling remark in relation to Pagan’s poetry when writing of ‘the delicate balancing act between insubordination and subordination that marks her work’ (Feldman, p. 541). Stephen Behrendt observes that Pagan’s self-depiction in her poetry frequently portrays her as ‘both a member of a happy company and a self-conscious outsider’ (p. 21). This is interestingly seen in one reflection on marriage:
I have no reason here to fret,
That I was never married,
Since I a free possession get,
Of freedom I'm not wearied.
‘The Spinning Wheel’
Here I think she alludes to the free tenancy which she has secured (she refers elsewhere to the fortunate relationship she has with a landlord) and how, free of the legal, social, and moral obligations of the nuptial debt, she has possession or ‘ownership’ of herself. In a sense, then, her poetic craft enables her to resist the very real marginality which she faced; and being in-between social discourses and identities in her poetry gives her singular poetic voice. Pagan manages to write from a position which seems to be at the very centre of Muirkirk and Ayrshire, alive to their busy social and political energies, but also alert to the world of war, conflict, and poverty beyond. The noisy, ‘witchy’ poet described by Paterson is always a shrewd observer, placed right at the heart of things.
References & selected further reading:
All quotations from Pagan’s poetry are taken from the first published edition: A Collection of Songs and Poems on several occasions (Glasgow: Niven, Napier, and Khull, 1803).
Behrendt, Stephen C., British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010)
Bold, Valentina, James Hogg: A Bard of Nature’s Making (Oxford ; Bern : Peter Lang, 2007)
------, ‘Beyond “The Empire of the Gentle Heart”: Scottish Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century’, in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Dorothy McMillan and Douglas Gifford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 246-61
Ewan, Elizabeth, Sue Innes, Sian Reynolds, and Rose Pipes, The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007)
Feldman, Paula R., British Women Poets of the Romantic Period. An Anthology (Baltimore, Md. ; London : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
McCue, Kirsteen, ‘Women and Song 1750-1850’, in A History of Scottish Women’s Writing, edited by Dorothy McMillan and Douglas Gifford (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), pp. 58-70
McCulloch, Margery Palmer, ‘The Lasses Reply to Mr Burns: women poets and songwriters in the Lowlands’, in Corssing the Highland Line. Cross-Currents in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Writing. Selected Papers from the 2005 ASLS Annual Conference, edited by Christopher MacLachlan (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 2009), pp. 137-52;
----------, ‘Women, Poetry and Song in Lowland Scotland’, Women’s Writing, 10.3 (2003), pp. 453-68.
Paterson, James, The Contemporaries of Burns, and the more recent poets of Ayrshire, with selections from their writings (Edinburgh : Hugh Paton, 1840).
Web Resources
http://www.muirkirk.org.uk/muirkirk-people/tibbie-pagan.html
http://tibbiepagan.blogspot.co.uk/ [a blog which contains some poems and tunes compiled by Sarah Weinhart in Nebraska].
http://alexanderstreet.com/products/scottish-women-poets-romantic-period