MICHAEL BRUCE – ‘THE GENTLE POET OF LOCH LEVEN’

MICHAEL BRUCE, who came to be known as “The Gentle Poet of Loch Leven”, was born in the Kinross-shire village of Kinnesswood on 27^th March 1746, three weeks before the Battle of Culloden brought to an end the second Jacobite Rising. He was the fifth of the eight children of Alexander and Ann Bruce, his father being a handloom weaver, an elder of the Secession Church and a man of great intelligence.   Their two-storey home on “the loan to the hill” housed a loom on the ground floor, which was entered from the cobbled lane, while the family occupied the upper rooms.

Assisted by a small legacy of 200 Scots merks (c.£11) and additional support from a local farmer, Michael Bruce was able to attend classes at Edinburgh University for four sessions, studying literature, philosophy, mathematics and classics during the period of the Scottish Enlightenment.  When his legacy was exhausted, he returned to his home county of Kinross to become a teacher at Gairney Bridge school. 

Sent to school at the age of four with a Bible as his first class-book, Michael went on to study Latin and Greek in preparation for a career in the church.  Although not strong from birth he herded cattle on the Bishop Hill behind the village during the summer months and there wrote what is now the 18^th Paraphrase Behold the Mountain of the Lord. The aspiring young poet drew on nature and the surrounding landscape for inspiration.

In preparation for the ministry, Michael Bruce continued his studies under the tuition of Professor Swanston at the Secession Theological Hall in Kinross and when the college closed in the summer of 1766, due to the ill-health of Swanston, he returned to teaching in the small hamlet of Forrest Mill near Alloa.  Unhappily describing the school and the surrounding countryside as “unfertile wilds” and “unpoetic ground” in his epic poem Lochleven, and suffering from increasing ill health, he made his way back to the family home in Kinnesswood in February 1767. With his lungs riddled with tuberculosis, Michael Bruce composed his last poem – Elegy Written in Spring – only weeks before his death on 5^th July at the early age of 21.

During his short life Michael Bruce wrote twelve Scottish Paraphrases known as ‘Gospel Sonnets’, and over forty poems including The Ode to the Cuckoo.   For nearly 200 years some of the works of Michael Bruce were wrongly ascribed to the Rev. John Logan who borrowed manuscripts from Bruce’s parents, publishing some under his own name.

Several lines written by Michael Bruce later inspired the poet Robert Burns who was well acquainted with the tragic story of the “Gentle Poet.”  From Bruce’s mock-Homeric Musiad, which tells the tale of a mouse killed by a farmer, we can trace the origins of Burns’ To a Mouse and from Bruce’s lines in praise of the Corsican hero Paoli – “Thy sons shall lay the proud oppressor low! And break the head of tyrant kings” – Burns pens the classic Scots Wha Hae as “Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe.” Living in hard times during the mid 18^th century, Michael Bruce – The Gentle Poet of Loch Leven – was inspired to write his poems and Gospel Sonnets by a strong religious conviction. He was also inspired by nature and landscape from his earliest days herding cattle on the slopes of the Lomond Hills from where there are stunning views over Loch Leven.

“Sing Nature’s scenes with Nature’s beauties fired;
Where poets dream’d, where prophets lay inspired.”

Damon, Menalcas and Melibœus by Michael Bruce