Robert Burns

Life and writing

The Poetry Foundation gives Burns’s lifetime as 1759–1796 and locates his early life in Alloway, Scotland. Its account connects his writing with farming, local experience, culture and social distinctions, alongside his later excise work. Those facts provide separate life context; they do not establish a proverb’s country of origin or a quotation’s composition date. The related collection includes Allan Cunningham’s life and notices as editorial material, which must remain distinct from Burns’s poems and their speakers.

In To a Mouse, the damaged plans lead into a comparison between the animal’s present and the speaker’s remembered troubles and anticipated fears. The anthology and linked text differ in Scots spelling and wording, including naught/nought. The selected stanza from A Man’s a Man for a’ That opposes social display to personal worth; its counterpart also differs, including hodden/hoddin and silk/silks. Such differences belong to edition comparison. The profile retains the archive’s words and does not silently modernize Scots or assign Cunningham authorship of the verse.

Reading this voice

Read To a Mouse through its final comparison of human memory and fear with the mouse’s present. Then read the social-rank stanza in A Man’s a Man for a’ That with the surrounding argument about character. Both linked English/Scots counterparts differ from the archive. Cunningham’s life and notices are editorial additions to the collection, not Burns’s own verse. Keep the source spellings in view rather than replacing them with a standardized or supposedly original form.

Subjects to explore

Words to begin with

• The best laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley; And leave us naught but grief and pain For promised joy.
• What though on hamely fare we dine, / Wear hodden gray, and a' that? / Gie fools their silk, and knaves their wine, / A man's a man for a' that.