Though it’s unlikely he sat down to write with an aesthetic challenge in mind, Robert Burns’ great statement of egalitarian politics, “Is There for Honest Poverty,”[i] owes its power to his having confronted a challenge that is central to all poetry and heightened in this poem in particular: how to orient language so that it carries with it the richness of its worldly usage, while also accentuating those properties, both sensuous and semantic, that fulfill the poem’s imaginative endeavor. The problem is exacerbated in this poem because of the phrase to which Burns returns: “a’ that,” a Scots dialect equivalent of, obviously enough, “all that.” To speak this brief phrase is to make a guttural gesture; in English, “all” swallows whole the entirety of the world, whereas in Scots dialect, the “a’” suggests an abrasive expulsion of breath that scoffs (and coughs) at it: 

Is there for honest poverty

         That hings his head, an' a' that?

The coward slave, we pass him by—

         We dare be poor for a' that!

                For a' that, an' a' that,

                        Our toils obscure, an' a' that,

                The rank is but the guinea's stamp;

                        The man's the gowd for a' that,

What tho' on hamely fare we dine,

         Wear hoddin-gray, an' a' that?

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine—

         A man's a man for a' that!

                For a' that, an' a' that,

                        Their tinsel show an' a' that;

                The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor,

                        Is king o' men for a' that.

Ye see yon birkie ca'd a lord,

         Wha struts, and stares, an' a' that;

Tho' hundreds worship at his word,

         He's but a coof for a' that.

                For a' that, an' a' that,

                        His ribband, star, an' a' that,

                The man o' independent mind,

                        He looks and laughs at a' that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,

         A marquis, duke, an' a' that,

But an honest man's aboon his might—

         Guid faith he mauna fa' that!

                For a' that, an' a' that,

                        Their dignities, an' a' that,

                The pith o' sense an' pride o' worth

                        Are higher rank than a' that.

Then let us pray that come it may—

         As come it will for a' that—

That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,

         Shall bear the gree, an' a' that;

                For a' that, an' a' that,

                        It's comin yet for a' that,

                That man to man the world o'er,

                        Shall brothers be for a' that.

The scorn of the phrase is the point of the poem, since it rejects all of those who would mistake the “dignities” of possessions and worldly honors for the “dignity” of what in humankind is “independent” of such dross—and independent of the shame that the poor are made to feel for what they do possess. In the first stanza, it attaches exclusively to the poor, to the “toils obscure,” to the man who hangs his head, to homely food and plain clothing. Only in the second stanza does it take in the stuff of the rich: the wine, the silks, the tinsel. 

When looking back on the poem, I find it natural to associate the phrase with the latter: a dismissal of the hollow honors of wealth and social status. But attaching it first to the shame of the poor prevents it from seeming to convey awe or from being read as a measure of immense riches when it appears in subsequent stanzas. Instead, it rolls into itself both the high and the low, both ends of the hierarchy of social dependence that the poem rejects. The phrase strikes out along a different, perpendicular axis of value, against which “a’” is the infinity of points extending high and low on the vertical, against which any range of “that” can be placed. The same phrase takes hold at different points of the social scale, dismissing high as well as low. Whereas their social value depends on their difference, the repetition of the phrase renders them equivalent, indistinguishable, and flattened.

The flattening force is greatest in the refrain, “For a’ that, an’ a’ that” since the repeated “a’” makes the pair feel redundant: it not only does not discriminate between “this and that,” but it suggests two sets, distinct but interchangeable, each sufficiently full to warrant the “a’,” but each worth so little as to be rendered in such vague and careless terms. 

On these occasions of dismissive scorn for the entire scale of high and low, Burns finds power in the faded semantic hues of colloquial speech; they’ve been through the wash so many times that they lose precision and vibrancy. “A’ that” means something, but nothing that can be specified or spelled out. Burns absorbs social rank and honor into its void; it operates as a bleach.

The bleach is applied by means of prepositions. “For,” which means “in spite of,” is also potentially shadowed by the other senses: the object of an effort (its purpose or goal) or the object of giving. We need to feel the potential for those shadows to realize that they are excluded and inverted: not “for the sake of all that,” not “on behalf of all that,” and not “as someone given to all that,” “laid at the feet of all that.”  Since “for” can always mean both “despite” and “in service of,” it is always capable of irony, but in a poem that rejects claims and acceptance of subservience, the irony is fully developed—until the final stanza, that is. 

In the last stanza, “for a’ that” takes on a different shading: “As come it will for a’ that” means chiefly “despite all of that nonsense of rank and title,” but it also might mean “it will come to take back what rank and title have wrongly claimed” (as in “I’m coming for you”). The “sense and worth” of the line that follows is a redemption of value and meaning. At this moment, it could be said that “for a’ that” has its own sense and meaning restored: “May bear the gree” means “win a victory,” so that when we read “for a’ that” afterwards, it indicates that any victory should be taken with a grain of salt (lest the victor claim supremacy beyond what is due) but also suggests a broadening of “an’ a’ that” to include all sorts of good things that such a victory would entail. They are not listed because they need not be stated; they are relished quietly, without the pride that the poem combats.  When, in the next lines, “for a’ that” returns, it has tilted: it still means, in part, “despite all that has bogus honor of riches and title,” but it more predominantly anticipates what will come in a future where “dignities” have been replaced by “dignity.” “Shall brothers be for a’ that” can be heard as saying once again “despite a’ that,” but given what has transpired over the past five lines, the word “for” here seems to suggest instead “on account of,” an entirely new meaning in the poem, where “a’ that” refers to the victories and bounty of a better future.

What Burns has done in the final stanza is to take a phrase that initially expressed scorn, both for those with shame and for those with excess pride in their station in life, and has transformed it so that it now embodies the dignity of the brotherhood that sees all men as equal. in the final line, rather than turn the phrase derisively upon the false hierarchy of rank, Burns has made it a properly proud stamp of the human dignity, the “gowd” (gold) of mankind that all individuals share. It is as broad in its sense in hope for the future; it is as undefined as dignity itself, since it is a true dignity that will be won when men reach across to one another in solidarity. And at this final moment, it is more important than ever that the phrase is in dialect. 

Earlier in the poem, the dialect served to indicate an outsider status, one who would be placed beneath those who spoke aristocratic English, even as the dialect showed itself capable of redressing what was wrong with the aristocratic measure of worth; the dialect contains the means to properly weigh and contain all that is wrongly reckoned a source of human value. But now, at the poem’s end, the dialect phrase is a refusal to abandon the locality and specificity of the voice even when proclaiming a universal “brotherhood” (the French Revolution is likely in Burns’ mind). It recognizes that such brotherhood depends on solidarity across local peoples, rather than a hierarchy that would subsume all beneath its power: “an a’ that” takes in “a’ that” but does not presume to speak for all. Burns finds in the phrase a means of asserting dignity denied, and not merely negatively rejecting the false dignities of others. He has trusted in the phrase to bring him to this place, felt its sharp edge to be sufficient to clear a path through the muddle of worldly pride. We might ask: brothers be for all what? But it’s not saying exactly what, gesturing without claiming to know just what “a’ that” of human dignity consists of any more than that phrase can make sense of just what it is in the tinsel of riches that inspires the esteem of so many. It is despite all the latter and for the sake of the former that mankind shall be brothers—but the uncertainty of what “a’ that” really is or means does not matter, since in the future that Burns envisions, it is the fact of equivalence of worth, rather than the meaning of worth itself, that gives dignity its meaning.

 --By Owen Boynton