Next

As indicated by the poem’s epigraph, “To a Mouse” takes place on a farm in November 1785. That the poem specifically takes place on a farm somewhere in Scotland is clarified in the speaker’s use of the Scots dialect of English. The time and place of this setting are both significant, since they locate the poem in a moment of unrest in the Scottish countryside. Beginning in the early eighteenth century, Scottish agricultural practices underwent a profound transformation that resulted in the widespread commercialization of the landscape. As ever greater swaths of public land were enclosed and subjected to the plow, the Scottish gentry also put pressure on the peasantry by raising rents for tenant farmers. By the final decades of the eighteenth century, the undue pressure placed on peasant livelihoods hit a breaking point and caused thousands of farmers off the land they’d worked for generations. Burns wrote “To a Mouse” in the midst of these events. As such, the poem must be understood as a mournful cry for the traumatic events sweeping the Scottish countryside.

Next section Themes

Take a Study Break