| The Friends of Robert Fergusson began to raise funds four years ago to put up a statue of Robert Fergusson, and the result of all their work was unveiled in a ceremony on Sunday 17 October by the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, Lesley Hinds, and Dr George Philp.
Commissioned by The Friends of Robert Fergusson and sculpted by David Annand, the bronze figure commemorates the poet who is buried in the Canongate Churchyard. Despite dying at the age of only 24 in 1774, Fergusson left behind him poems which are full of energy, and which created one of the most influential models in any century for writing poetry in the Scots language. His work, and in some measure his brief and calamitous life, was greatly revered by his younger fellow poet Robert Burns, who called him "my elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the Muse", and erected a monument on the pauper's grave in which Fergusson was buried after his death in the Bedlam hospital in Edinburgh.
Fergusson's importance as a poet was felt by writers from Robert Louis Stevenson to Robert Garioch; contemporary writers including Kathleen Jamie and John Burnside re-examine his life and work in specially-commissioned poems and essays for a book called Heaven-Taught Fergusson (Tuckwell, 2003), and James Robertson edited a recent edition of Fergusson's Selected Poems (Birlinn, 2000).
The unveiling of the statue was marked by a poem written specially for the occasion by the Edinburgh Makar, Stewart Conn.
Robert Fergusson (1750-1774)
on the unveiling of his statue in the Canongate,
Sunday 17th Oct 2004
The image uppermost in my mind
was of him crouching in his cell, in squalor,
his head adorned with a crown of straw
neatly plaited with his own hand.
Now we see this trig figure
caught in mid-stride among the thrang,
a reminder that guid gear can gang
in sma' bulk – not just in literature.
Though too late to revivify a spirit broken
in his lifetime it rekindles recognition
of his artistry, humanity and vision –
and the plain braid Scots he spoke in.
Besides cocking a snook at the literati
of his day, his presence will regenerate
the native vigour of the Canongate
(no need to muster the black banditti).
Long may those sturdy 'wee rosiers'
spring from his grave; his affinity
with common folk, his ribaldry and pity,
move us to laughter and to tears.
So let us – in fancied ritual – celebrate
his genius by washing down our oysters
with reaming noggins … raised in roisterous
praise of Auld Reikie's peerless laureate.
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