Today’s Poem: To a Mouse

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

Hieronymus Bosch, detail from the central panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1500 (Wikimedia Commons)

To a Mouse

by Robert Burns

On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,	◦ little, sleek, cowering, timorous 
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
 	Wi’ bickerin brattle!			        ◦ noisy rush
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
	Wi’ murd’ring pattle! 			        ◦ pattle = paddle = plow’s blade

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
	Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
	An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave			        ◦ a stray-grain in a large store
	’S a sma’ request:				                  of twenty-four sheaves
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,			◦ lave = remainder
	An’ never miss ’t!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!		◦ silly = feeble
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane, 	◦ big = build
	O’ foggage green!			                ◦ foggage = coarse grass
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
	Baith snell an’ keen!			         ◦ snell = bitter

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
	Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past		◦ coulter = plow
	Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
	But house or hald,
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,		◦ thole = endure
	An’ cranreuch cauld!			        ◦ cranreuch = hoar-frost

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,		◦ thou art not thyself alone
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
	Gang aft agley,			                ◦ go oft astray
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
	For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
	On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
	I guess an’ fear!

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For achieving literary fame, Robert Burns (1759–1796) had the advantage of coming early: a proto-Romantic to whom the Romantics would turn, a genial promoter of Scotland whose work would seem nation-defining to later Scottish nationalists, a poet who could write in English with a light Scots dialect that would endear him to the English-monoglot descendants of Scots scattered around the world.

In fact, that latter may be his most interesting gift. Only the young Rudyard Kipling had as fine an ability to use unfamiliar words (Hindi typically, in Kipling’s case) and not define them — but give just enough surrounding information that the reader can triangulate the meaning.

Still, Burns’s poetry does sometimes require the occasional note in the margin that, say, Chaucer’s lines might need. Even one of his most famous verses — Today’s Poem, “To a Mouse” — needs a little glossing. “Thou need na start awa sae hasty” is easy enough, but “A daimen-icker in a thrave” needs a little help to understand as “an occasional-grain out of a large store of twenty-four sheaves,” though we can triangulate that general sense from what follows: “’S a sma’ request,” since whatever the mouse takes would prove a small request.

Robert Burns (Wikimedia Commons)

Of course, Burns had yet another advantage — the advantage of being good, a craftsman with a talent for memorability and a gift for making the poetry seem easy. “To a Mouse” employs, with a seemingly effortless ease, a difficult form that’s worth noticing. In each of his eight six-line stanzas, he uses only two rhymes. The a-rhyme comes in lines 1, 2, 3, and 5, the four tetrameter lines in the stanza (with one of the four often a slant rhyme). And the b-rhyme comes in lines 4 and 6, the two dimeter lines in the stanza. The four a-rhymes would pall, if they came in row, so line 4, the first two-beat line, breaks them apart, while the sixth line is only two beats again, picking up the b-rhyme and giving the stanza the sense of an ending in a shortened last line that you can find in, say Keats’s 1820 “La Belle Dame sans Merci” or in sapphics.

The mention of “Nature’s social union” in the second stanza of Burns’s 1785 poem is often taken as an echo of Adam Smith’s 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, as it may well be. But the poem ends on the proto-romantic note that, even driven from its winter-prepared nest, the mouse is better off than the human, who must live not just in the cruel present but also the shameful past and the fearful future.

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