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Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. 

Fear

“To a Mouse” both begins and ends with references to fear, which frames the whole poem in terms of alarm. In the opening six lines, the speaker, having just hit a mouse’s nest, addresses the frightened creature:

     Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
     O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
     Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
               Wi’ bickerin brattle!
     I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
               Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

The trembling and fearful (i.e., “cowran, tim’rous”) little mouse is clearly panicking as though the speaker were trying to murder it. Here, the speaker tries to assure the mouse that he intended no harm. Then, in the next stanza, he adopts self-consciously philosophical language to rationalize the mouse’s fear by describing how “Man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union” (lines 7–8). Though it saddens him, the speaker admits that the mouse’s fear is justified. The mouse’s fear then recedes into the background, and it isn’t until the end of the poem that the specter of alarm reappears. This time, however, the speaker addresses his own fear. Specifically, he describes his fear of the future in lines 45–48:

     But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
               On prospects drear!
     An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
               I guess an’ fear!

Though he cannot truly see into the future, his knowledge of the past gives him some idea of what his future may hold, which in turn causes him to “guess an’ fear.”

Ruin and Waste

Whereas the speaker opens and closes the poem by dwelling on fear, he spends many of the middle stanzas concerned with images of ruin and waste. Perhaps most obviously, he’s preoccupied by the destruction of the mouse’s nest. In lines 19–22, he laments the ruined nest and mourns the fact that wintry conditions will make it difficult to rebuild:

     Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
     It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
     An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
               O’ foggage green!

The approach of December means that there’s not even coarse grass (i.e., “foggage green”) available for the mouse to rebuild. It also means that the very field the speaker is plowing has been “laid bare an’ waste” (line 25), and hence offers little promise of future comfort. In lines 26–30, still disturbed by his accidental destruction of the mouse’s nest, the speaker replays the event:

     An’ weary Winter comin fast,
     An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
               Thou thought to dwell,
     Till crash! the cruel coulter past
               Out thro’ thy cell.

In these lines, the speaker imagines how horrible the event of destruction must have been from the mouse’s point of view. Uttering these lines at the poem’s halfway point, the speaker both literally and figuratively centers the act of ruination.

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