Occasional Address Spoken By Miss Fontenelle - Analysis

A comic manifesto disguised as a prologue

Burns frames this as a performer’s “occasional address”, but the poem quickly becomes an argument about what kind of public speech a woman onstage is expected to deliver. The speaker wants partial favor from the audience and thinks a little theatrical add-on might vamp my Bill. Yet the real subject is the pressure to perform respectable sadness. The poem’s central claim is blunt: in a culture that rewards solemn “sentimental tears,” choosing laughter is not frivolity but resistance.

That claim arrives through a staged encounter with the Man of RHYMES, a self-important poet who assumes she must cater to gloom because these are no laughing times. He offers a ready-made script: she should dissolve in pause, speak in solemn-rounded sentence, awaken fell Repentance, and paint national catastrophe with Vengeance waving a desolating brand over a guilty Land. His imagination is crowded with capitalized abstractions, and it leaves no room for her actual face, voice, or temperament.

The hinge: refusing the tear-script

The poem pivots sharply when the speaker breaks off: I could no more. That moment matters because she doesn’t merely disagree; she rejects the whole performance of grief as an alien costume. D’ye think, she snaps, this face was made for crying? The tone flips from polite maneuvering to bright, insolent clarity: I’ll laugh, and not privately either—the world shall know it. Her goodbye to the gloomy Master Poet is clipped and formal, but the formality reads like a door shut in his face.

This hinge reveals the poem’s key tension: is laughter a denial of suffering, or a way of surviving it? The speaker insists it is the latter, but she must argue against the cultural reflex that treats seriousness as moral depth. Even her mock “creed” plays with that idea: Misery’s another word for Grief. The line is almost comically redundant, as if she’s parodying the heavy wisdom people expect. Then she offers her own oath—so may I be a Bride!—that so much laughter equals so much life enjoy’d. Laughter becomes a measurable form of living, not a distraction from it.

Misfortune with a budget: laughing at the “beldam witch”

The poem earns its cheerfulness by putting it under pressure. The first address is to the man crushed by money, under bleak Misfortune’s blasting eye, forced to make three guineas do the work of five. Burns doesn’t romanticize poverty; he specifies it as arithmetic that won’t balance. Against that, the advice Laugh in Misfortune’s face sounds audacious, even defiant, because Misfortune is personified as a beldam witch—an ugly power that expects submission. The command Say, you’ll be merry while admitting you can’t be rich refuses the idea that happiness must wait for solvency.

Love-sickness and the edge of the cliff

The second case grows darker: the wretch in love who considers a rope, or peers from bleeting cliffs toward the healing leap. The joke of calling suicide healing is grim, and it exposes how despair tries to sell itself as relief. Then the speaker abruptly scolds—For shame! For shame!—and punctures the romantic narrative: is this extremity really for a giddy, vain woman, ridiculous with Would and Would not? The bracketed outburst feels like a hand clapped over melodrama’s mouth. Her cure is still laughter—Laugh at her follies, even laugh e’en at thyself—but now laughter is not light entertainment; it is a technique for breaking obsession’s spell and re-entering proportion.

The hard edge of “be merry”: wisdom as a condition

The ending gathers her counsel into a stage-ready closing: To sum up all—be merry! Yet she adds a safeguard: may we still be wise. That final clause matters because it admits the danger on the other side of her manifesto: laughter can become thoughtless, and merriment can turn into denial. The poem’s achievement is that it keeps both truths in play. It mocks the poet of doom, but it also stares at money-trouble and suicidal love without blinking, then insists that joy is not the opposite of seriousness; it is one way of meeting it.