To a Mouse Literary Elements

First-person point of view from the perspective of a Scottish farmer who is contemplating the meaning of existence after destroying a mouse nest.

A form sometimes called the Burns stanza, which is composed of sextets following an AABAB rhyme scheme and a mix of (in this case iambic) tetrameter and dimeter.

The speaker uses metaphor to compare the mouse's nest to a human house, referring to its "silly wa's" (walls) and even noting regretfully that the mouse is without "house or hald."

The repeated "M" sound in the phrase "The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/Gang aft agley" is alliterative, and serves to draw a parallel between mice and men, emphasizing the similarity of all living things. The repeated "C" sounds in the phrase "cranreuch cauld" are also alliterative, mimicking the unrelenting cold. The "O" sounds in "Has broken Nature’s social union," meanwhile, create assonance, and collectively lengthen the sentence, making it sound slow and thoughtful.

The poem's premise is an ironic one: the mouse prepares painstakingly to survive the winter, but the farmer's own preparations for winter wreck the mouse's. Also ironic is the farmer's sudden envy for the mouse: after expressing pity for it and noting its powerlessness, he unexpectedly reveals that he longs for its blissful ignorance.

Lyric poetry, pastoral

An eighteenth-century Scottish farm in late Autumn

Thoughtful, paternal, and doting, though it eventually becomes rueful and contemplative.

The speaker is, in a sense, both the protagonist and the antagonist. His feelings are the centerpiece of the poem, but rather than blame the mouse for his troubles, he blames himself and his unalterably human flaws.

The poem's major conflict is between the farmer and the mouse, but the two bear no ill will towards one another. Rather, locked in their respective positions because of their species, they are forced to navigate the uncomfortable fact of the speaker's power over the mouse, and of human power over nature.

The climax arrives with the speaker’s recognition and acceptance of an irrefutable fact of life which impacts all living creatures: no matter how much you prepare, the future remains unpredictable.

The farmer refers to the mouse's "ill opinion" of him, a lightly humorous understatement—the mouse is in fact instinctively terrified of him.

Though not explicit, the speaker's apology for “man’s dominion," which “has broken nature’s social union” nods subtly to the biblical book of Genesis, in which animals and humans live harmoniously before man's expulsion from Eden.

The phrase “O, what a panic’s in they breastie," uses the mouse's breast as synecdoche, standing in for the mouse as a whole.

The entire poem hinges on the personification of the mouse, which is granted human characteristics and feelings—and, implicitly, language, since the poem is addressed to it.

The famous lines "The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/Gang aft agley,/An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,/For promis’d joy!" hyperbolically describe the constant foiling of hopes and plans, reflecting the speaker's momentary feeling of hopelessness and cynicism.

The word "crash" is an onomatopoetic representation of the sound of the mouse's nest being destroyed.