Author: Pagan, Isabel (1742-1821)
Title: A Collection of Songs and Poems on Several Occasions
Date: 1803
Descriptive and Critical Essay
In 1803, Isabel “Tibbie” Pagan published her collection, A Collection of Songs and Poems on Several Occasions. It first appeared in an edition of 1803 by the Glasgow Trongate press Niven, Napier, and Khull; it was however reprinted in 1808. The poems in her volume, then, conceivably stem from the last five decades of eighteenth century. 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 spiritual economy, and as an art of survival in various ways, but she wanted a life for it too. In “A Letter” she writes,
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 addition, a lot of Pagan’s poetry is connected to her within her community, her small village of Muirkirk in Ayrshire. 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 celebrate the seasonal huntings, visiting regiments, and other kinds of communal, shared rituals. And it’s this aspect of community which associates Pagan’s poetry with a Scottish poetic tradition of “carnival and social conviviality” popular in late medieval years and revived in the eighteenth-century. 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, as she does specifically in “The Spinning Wheel”:
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.
To no surprise many of her poems were (and still are) set to popular tunes, and her poetry is criss crossed by allusions both to creativity and to writing as the means of creation: for example, “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’. And her poem “ Song” 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.
A significant number of Pagan’s poems are grammatically composite, 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 of ‘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.
In this poem 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 of craft, the creative spinning of stories. The fact that she weaves and cards cloth while 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 requirements, which underpin this ‘honest’ trade; and to her ‘small’ but intense and productive means of activity.
It also very notable all throughout her poems that she purposely dashes out people’s full names, but leaves the first letters so that while full name is never stated, it can be deduced by readers sufficiently acquainted with Pagan and her circle to solve the puzzle. Through this deliberate (and familiar) authorial ploy she denies the person whom she is writing about the satisfaction of their name being in print while also protecting herself from getting in trouble by not revealing their names, and yet subtly hinting at who she is talking about. This practice is seen in many of her poems, for example in “Lament for the Herring”:
I will not blame J --- h, for he is my well-wisher,
He’ll do me no more harm, than he’ll do himself;
But, O, ‘tis a pity, he look’d not the herring,
--I’m sure he’ll be troubled when he hears tell.
This collection by Isabel Pagan apparently contains all of her poems and songs that she had written, and they all contain and reveal elements of her own life and her thoughts and ideas towards her town, the environment, relationships and economy. She wrote her poems with anger, but also with love and hopefulness towards all of the wrongs in the world, counting on her optimistic mindset to make it better. With this engaging collection of her work, it turned out, she was on her way to making it so and letting her work be heard.
Prepared by Marisa Viramontes, University of Nebraska, Spring 2018
© Marisa Viramontes, 2018