Summary
Next, the speaker imagines the thought process that led the mouse to take up residence in his fields. He speculates that the mouse, anticipating winter's harsh weather, sought out a cozy, protective spot and discovered one. However, the farmer imagines regretfully, the mouse's safety was disturbed by the blade, or "coulter," of a plow cutting through its home. He then dwells on just how much work the mouse put into building a nest, thinking about how much the mouse had to chew on grass and grain stems in order to build it. Now, after all that, the mouse doesn't have a place to live, and has been forced out into "cranreuch cauld"—that is, the cold mist.
Analysis
Now, most of the way through the poem, its regular formal structure has become apparent. The poem is made up of six-line stanzas, also known as sextets. Each sextet's first, second, third, and fifth lines are more or less the same length. A line like "Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!" is nine syllables, while "An’ weary Winter comin fast" has only eight, but the final syllable of "ruin" isn't stressed, and takes very little time to pronounce. In other words, most of the poem's lines have eight syllables, but might contain a ninth as a kind of barely-noticeable hanger-on. These lines consist of iambs, which are segments made up of two syllables in which the second of those syllables is stressed—therefore, in the phrase "thy wee-bit housie," the syllables "wee" and "hous" are stressed. Each of these lines is made up of four sets of iambs for a total of eight syllables (again, with an unstressed ninth syllable often popping up as well) to create a meter called iambic tetrameter. However, the fourth and sixth lines of each stanza, though they are made up of iambs, are only half the length of the others, consisting of just two choppy iambs (this meter is called iambic dimeter).
The poem's rhyme scheme works in a similar way—the first, second, third, and fifth lines always rhyme with each other, while the fourth and sixth also rhyme. Therefore, the poem's long lines all rhyme, and so do its short lines, creating an AAABAB rhyme scheme. While the long, "A" rhymes are natural-sounding, roughly the length of a sentence, the short lines are short enough to sound clipped and abrupt. The switch in rhyme exaggerates that effect even more, making the fourth and sixth lines of each stanza sound like awkward, even unpleasant disruptions. In a poem about a mouse experiencing an unpleasant disruption in the form of a plow blade, these choices concerning meter and rhyme mimic the drama being described, conveying it to the reader in an immediate, sound-based manner. This isn't the only poem where Robert Burns used this form—in fact, he was so fond of it that it has been dubbed the "Burns Stanza," though some know it as the "Habbie Stanza." The Burns stanza is a sextet with an AABAB rhyme scheme. The first, second, and fourth lines, which use the "A" rhyme, are written in tetrameter. The remaining two, which use the "B" rhyme, are written in dimeter. The form was popular in Scotland generally, though perhaps never more than in Burns's own oeuvre.
Finally, one thing that Burns toys with heavily in this part of the poem is the idea of scale. He focuses on tiny details and objects, creating empathy with the mouse simply by describing the way the world appears to it. In Burns's descriptions here, the tiny sticks that make up the mouse's nest become huge, requiring difficult labor in order to maneuver them. At the same time, even while the poem imagines how different, and how scary, the world might look to a tiny animal, it also takes pains to show that the farmer and the mouse inhabit the same reality. They both, for instance, fear winter's winds. Overall, Burns emphasizes, the human and the mouse share enough to create empathy and identification. At the same time, the farmer's kindness comes from his recognition that, while he and the mouse share certain circumstances, the mouse has his own, mouse-sized problems and fears—and, indeed, that those mouse-sized problems feel big and important to the animal.
