To a Mouse: Themes | SparkNotes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Life’s Unpredictability

Perhaps the most central theme in “To a Mouse” relates to life’s fundamental unpredictability. The poem opens the moment after the speaker has destroyed a mouse’s nest while plowing his field. This encounter between the speaker and the mouse was entirely accidental, and yet the consequences of the encounter are no less troubling because they’re unexpected. Indeed, it is precisely the unexpected trauma of his encounter with the mouse that occupies the speaker throughout the rest of the poem. The speaker spends several stanzas attempting to imagine what the mouse must be going through. In expressing sympathy for the mouse’s unfortunate fate, the speaker implicitly suggests that his own circumstances could have a similarly tragic end. He makes this notion explicit in lines 39–42, where he utters an aphorism that asserts the unpredictability of all forms of life:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

In other words, any plan or “scheme” made by either mouse or man can easily go awry and lead to a swift reversal of fortune. Thus, despite searching for greater happiness in life, one can just as easily end up with little more than “grief an’ pain.”

The Uncertain Kinship between Humans and Animals

The speaker’s lengthy address to the mouse demonstrates his broader sense of the kinship between humans and other animals. Throughout the poem, he shows a high level of sympathy for the mouse. He also concludes the poem with an aphorism that rhetorically links “Mice an’ Men” (line 39) and underscores how both face life’s fundamental unpredictability. Equally significant is the passage in lines 7–12, where the speaker adopts a philosophical tone to address the possibility that the kinship between humans and animals has been broken:

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

These lines contain an allusion to the English poet Alexander Pope’s 1733 verse epic, Essay on Man. Epistle III of that work features a personified Nature that speaks directly to “man.” Nature instructs him to avoid relying on reason and instead learn the art of living from other creatures, who can teach him about “all forms of social union.” This is precisely what the speaker references when he laments how “Man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union.” The speaker implies that “Man” has failed to heed the advice Nature gave in Pope’s poem. As such, the mouse’s unfortunate fear of her “earth-born companion”—that is, the speaker—is justified.

The Vulnerability of the Poor

Burns wrote “To a Mouse” at a time of great upheaval in Scotland. Specifically, he wrote at a moment when increasing rents were forcing tenant farmers off their farms by the thousands. As a farmer himself, the speaker feels uncertain about his ability to maintain his livelihood. He indicates as much in lines 43–48:

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

The speaker has an awareness of the past, and of how the machinations of the Scottish Agricultural Revolution have made life for tenant farmers so unpredictable. He also has the capacity to imagine the future, and though he can’t predict what will happen, he very well knows—based on recent events—what could happen. And what could happen to the farmer is precisely what has just happened to the mouse: that is, he could be turned out of his home and forced to build a new life elsewhere. As a tenant farmer who doesn’t own the land he’s plowing, the speaker lacks the security of the landed gentry. He is poor, and he is vulnerable. And if, as he claims, he bears a greater degree of vulnerability than the mouse, it’s only because he’s more aware of it.