Summary
The speaker tells the mouse that, undoubtedly, the mouse's reputation is somewhat deserved—it probably is a bit sneaky and it probably does steal from people. Yet, he reflects, that's hardly a reason to harm or look down on the mouse, given that he needs to steal to survive. A "daimen-icker in a thrave"—that is to say, an occasional bit of grain stolen from a cluster of sheaves—isn't unreasonable to take, especially since the farmer is blessed and lucky to have the rest of the grain and likely won't even notice what the mouse has taken. The farmer turns his attention to the mouse's nest, lamenting the fact that it's been destroyed. Its "silly," or unsound, walls are being blown around in the wind. Meanwhile there's no green grass available to build a new nest, and December is coming soon; its wind will be even worse, both sharp and biting.
Analysis
In these stanzas, the speaker suggests a somewhat radical orientation towards the natural world. Rather than deciding to view the mouse as his enemy, competing with him for food, he thinks of it as a being to whom he owes protection. He frets over the state of its home and, most surprisingly, sympathizes with the fact that it might steal from the farmer's stock of grain. This in itself reflects the fact of the farmer's dominance over the natural world, and of growing human dominance over animals more generally. The fact that the farmer's survival seems more or less guaranteed, and that he can stand to lose a small amount of his crop, shows that he's no longer quite a part of nature. Instead, he's somehow risen above the fray where animals like the mouse live, able to concern himself with issues other than subsistence.
The farmer's reaction suggests that, while human dominance may be more or less a fact of life at this point, there are two ways to deal with that dominance. On the one hand, the farmer could treat his power and relative wealth as a sign of his own deservingness. He could choose to hoard food and build his own wealth and security, glorying in his power over creatures like the mouse. To do this would, in a sense, mean refusing to acknowledge the reality of human dominance—it would require acting with brutality and urgency, never relaxing and thinking of himself as always fighting for survival. Instead, the farmer argues, people like him should accept and acknowledge their privileged position, giving up what they don't need and sharing it with others. Burns hints that humans have assumed a kind of Godlike power, and that this requires a learning curve for people like humble Scottish farmers, who may not even know how powerful they are.
The language that the speaker uses when talking to the mouse, meanwhile, is reminiscent in tone and diction of the language a parent might use with a small child. Phrases like "wee-bit housie" are especially striking in today's English-speaking world, where eighteenth-century Scots-influenced speech sounds somewhat exotic. Still, even to someone in Burns's milieu, the use of these phrases describing vulnerability, smallness, and weakness would have evoked early childhood. Burns wrote in a period where ideas of childhood as a time of innocence and vulnerability—now ubiquitous—were newly dominant, especially given the opposition to industrial child labor practices. Both nature and childhood, in other words, seemed like threatened phenomena to many Romantic writers in the early industrial period. Here, Burns' speaker melds the two concerns, treating the mouse both as a child in need of protection and as a representative of nature in need of conservation.
