Summary
After a farmer destroys a mouse's nest with his plow, he addresses the mouse, who is cowering and terrified. He notes the mouse's panic, but tells it that there's no need to scurry noisily away. The farmer has no desire, he says, to chase murderously after the mouse with a "pattle" (a type of spade-like tool). He then apologizes to the mouse, confessing that he feels sorry for the way that human domination over the natural world has destroyed the harmonies between species. In fact, he says, that domination means that the mouse has every reason to be afraid of a human like the farmer, even though the two of them are both living beings.
Analysis
The first thing likely to catch most readers' eyes in this poem is Robert Burns's use of Scots, a language related to but distinct from standard English (some consider to it a dialect of English, others a separate language). While Burns's Scots vocabulary can initially look intimidating and foreign to English speakers, many of the unfamiliar words used in these stanzas are similar to English equivalents, and can be understood through context clues. The mouse is described as "sleeket," or small and sleek, and "cowran," or cowering. Many other words reflect phonetic pronunciation in Scots (and, in fact, in Scottish English). The sentence "Thou need na start awa sae hasty," for instance, upon examination, simply means "you needn't start away so hastily." Because of this phonetic aspect, reading "To a Mouse" out loud is an especially helpful way to become comfortable with the linguistic challenges it presents.
Then again, the moment readers become accustomed to the poem's dialect at the end of its first stanza, Burns dispenses with much of it, switching to a far more standard and formal variety of English in his second stanza. This shift in dialect goes along with a shift in the speaker's register. His attitude towards the mouse in the first stanza, when he apologizes for scaring it and reassures it that he means it no harm, is intimate and vulnerable. He appears genuinely surprised and even hurt to see that the mouse is afraid of him. In this stanza, when the speaker is immersed in his intuitive sense that he and the mouse are equals, he uses Scots. In the second stanza, though, he seems to remember that they aren't actually equals, and that there's a huge difference in power between a mouse and a human. Distancing himself from the mouse—not in an unfriendly way, but, rather, in a manner that seems almost politely formal and sincerely apologetic—the farmer switches into English. It is intriguing that he uses a standard English rather than Scots at precisely the moment that his language becomes less intimate, and at the moment when he becomes hyper-aware of his own power over the mouse. After all, Burns wrote in an era when the dominance of England over Scotland—politically and culturally as well as linguistically—was under constant discussion by Scottish intellectuals. The fact that he uses a less Scots-influenced English when reflecting on his own dominance suggests that, for the speaker, English language and culture are tied to formality and domination, as well as to the inversion and destruction of natural harmonies between people and countries.
The farmer's awkward encounter with his own dominance shows us that Robert Burns will be using an exceedingly simple everyday event—the destruction of a mouse's nest by a plow—as an entry point to talking about some enormously complicated and abstract events. Burns wrote this poem in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution, when people in England, especially, were making enormous changes to nature and moving into cities in unprecedented numbers. The poem deals with these large-scale changes by focusing on a small-scale conflict, using a tiny, easy-to-comprehend mouse as a tool to illustrate the wider changes taking place in European society at this time.
