Summary
Though he's heartbroken, the speaker says, he doesn't blame himself for being in love. After all, nobody would be able to resist his lover, whom he refers to as "Nancy." Anyone who saw her would love her, and only her, forever. If the speaker and Nancy had never met, fallen in love, or been forced to separate, they also would have avoided their current emotional turmoil.
Analysis
Burns, writing this poem, has an interest in preserving its unwavering rhyme and meter. For one thing, steady rhyme and meter can create a compelling, musical pattern. For another, the extreme repetitiveness of this poem reflects the speaker's emotional reality, which feels unrelenting and inescapable. Yet there's a paradox here that Burns has to navigate. He's trying to convey an extremely upset speaker overwhelmed by emotion. Consistency in poetic structure gives an impression of self-control or even artfulness. Yet the heartbroken speaker doesn't feel like he's in control. After all, he's losing the person he loves most. So Burns takes an unusual route that lets him preserve the poem's structure while simultaneously revealing the speaker's fraying mental state. He repeats words or entire lines. In the first stanza, we saw him rhyme "thee" with "thee," "her" with "her," and "me" with "me." In this second stanza, the speaker laments "Had we never lov'd sae kindly," and then repeats the line, changing only the word "kindly" to "blindly." This stylistic choice simultaneously increases the ultra-repetitive, inescapable sense created by the poem's structure, and makes the speaker appear slightly confused, forgetful, and wallowing.
Moreover, these direct repetitions drive home a certain sense of claustrophobia and loneliness. For instance, by rhyming "me" with "me," the speaker pairs himself, not with a loved one, but with, well, himself. Thus, repetition to this extreme degree also conveys a sort of radical loneliness. Once again, we see that this isn't a love poem in the traditional sense. Even while the speaker mentions how much he loved Nancy and how irresistable she was, he doesn't share specific images about how she looks or what she's like. Instead, he dwells on their mutual heartbreak. Once again, we see how incredibly isolated this speaker feels. He doesn't have a lot of memories of the person he's discussing. Instead, he's alone with his sadness (and, he assumes, so is she).
The speaker calls his lover "Nancy" in this stanza, giving us a clue that Burns may be writing autobiographically. For many years, he kept up a passionate correspondence with a woman named Agnes Maclehose. Though they addressed one another as "Clarinda" and "Sylvander" in their letters, Agnes was actually known to her friends as Nancy. She and Burns really were parted from one another when she left Scotland in order to reconcile with her husband in the then-British colony of Jamaica. In fact, some believe that Burns gave a copy of this poem to Agnes before her departure for Jamaica. Burns wrote a number of poems addressed to Maclehose throughout his writing career.
