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On Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough November 1785

First printed in the Kilmarnock edition, 1786.

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, small, sleek

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! breast

Thou need na start awa sae hasty away, so

Wi’ bickering brattle! hasty, scurry

5 I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee, would, loath, run

Wi’ murdering pattle! a wooden plough-scraper

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion

10 Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion

An’ fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; not, sometimes

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! must

15 A daimen icker in a thrave one ear of corn in 24 sheaves

’S a sma’ request;

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave, remainder

An’ never miss’t!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin! small, house/nest

20 Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin! walls, winds

An’ naething, now, to big a new ane, nothing, build, new one

O’ foggage green! thick winter grass

An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin, winds

Baith snell an’ keen! both bitter, biting cold

25 Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,

An’ weary Winter comin fast,

An’ cozie here, beneath the blast, cosy

Thou thought to dwell,

Till crash! the cruel coulter past plough blade

30 Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble, small, stubble

Has cost thee monie a weary nibble! many

Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,

But house or hald, without, holding

35 To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble, endure, drizzle

An’ cranreuch cauld! hoar-frost cold

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane, not alone

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

40 Gang aft agley, go often wrong

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, leave

For promis’d joy!

Still thou art blest, compared wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:

45 But Och! I backward cast my e’e,

On prospects drear!

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see, cannot

I guess an’ fear!

Formally, this is a companion to that other creaturely masterpiece, To a Louse. McGuirk defines them as both belonging to ‘Horatian satire, linking an exemplum of observed experience with a final sententia or maxim’ (p. 223). In terms of content, however, the two poems, presumably deliberately, could not be more different. The hypothermic mouse, houselessly unprotected, has the ice of winter penetrating its fast fading heart. The hyperactive louse, pulsing with grotesque energy and intentions, foresees a comfortable head-high residence.

This is truly one of the great animal poems of the Sentimental canon fit to stand with Fergusson’s great goldfinch and butterfly poems and Smart’s cat poem. The destructive ploughman poet’s guilt and empathy for the creature are wholly realised as is the sense of the inherent relationship of all created things. It is, seriously, The Ancient Mariner in miniature.

Crawford, in a very fine reading of the poem, rescued it from its daisy-like sentimental reputation particularly by stressing the subtle political analogy in the poem between mice and peasant suffering similar, perhaps fatal, decanting in that age of agrarian revolution. As Crawford remarks:

The mouse becomes more than any animal; she is a symbol of the peasant, or rather of the ‘poor peasant’ condition. On a careful reading of the fifth stanza, the lines ‘Till crash! the cruel coulter past/out thro’ thy cell’ affect us with all the terror of Blake’s ‘dark Satanic mills’. The coulter is in reality Burns’s equivalent of the mills – part of the metaphorical plough of social change that breaks down the houses of both Lowland and Highland cotters. This is not to claim that the poem is allegorical in any crude or literal sense. The mouse does not ‘stand for’ the mother of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ or the Highland ‘hizzies’ whom Beelzebub thought should be ‘lessoned’ in Drury Lane, but she belongs to the same world as these others and gains an extra dimension from those emotions whose intensity arises from the depth and power of Burns’s own contemplation of human wretchedness and exploitation. (pp. 166–7)

It was written in the early winter of 1785.