"To a mouse" Critical Essay

“To a mouse” By Robert Burns


A poem I have read recently in class is “To a mouse” by Robert Burns. Robert Burns is generally considered a Romantic poet. The Romantics believed that inner truths about life could be discovered through the contemplation of nature. “To a mouse” is an example of such contemplation. Throughout this essay I am going to explain my understanding of the true meaning of this poem and show how even now it still relates to all of us.

“To a mouse” is an eight-stanza poem in the form of an address, which means that the speaker talks directly to a mouse throughout the poem. The poem is very carefully constructed and is written using the Burns stanza. There is a rhyme scheme within the poem: AAABAB, and all the ‘A’ lines have eight or nine syllables while the ‘B’ lines have five or six syllables. This tells us the poem has been put together very precisely.

The poem is about the speaker who was ploughing his field in late November when...