WorkRobert Burns

Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge

Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge (first pub. in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Kilmarnock: John Wilson, 1786) Inferred

Robert Burns (1759–1796) · first pub. in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Kilmarnock: John Wilson, 1786

InferredFuller uses "Man was made to mourn" as a proverbial phrase, but it is the title and central refrain of Burns's eleven-stanza dirge composed autumn 1784 and published in his Kilmarnock edition. Fuller adds "but not why?"—a twist implying familiarity with the poem while questioning its conclusions.

Read

Documented 1843

Letters

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

When Fuller engaged with this work

I. Childhood

II. Adolescence

III. Self-Directed

IV. Transcendentalist1record

V. New York

VI. Europe

✦. Memoirs (1852)

1810

1820

1832

1836

1844

1846

1850

1843—

Letter to Anna Barker Ward

p166

read

“It is sad when a man lays down the burden of life frustrated in every purpose, learning only the lesson Man was made to mourn, but not why?”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. III. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.

Inferred Fuller uses "Man was made to mourn" as a proverbial phrase, but it is the title and central refrain of Burns's eleven-stanza dirge composed autumn 1784 and published in his Kilmarnock edition. Fuller adds "but not why?"—a twist implying familiarity with the poem while questioning its conclusions.