Poetry Analysis: “To A Mouse” by Robert Burns

The occasion of thinking on this poem has to do with a recent event in our household that has, as it turns out, some correspondence to the event that inspired the poem.  In the wee hours of Monday morning (overnight Sunday into Monday) I heard a big crash and ruckus in the hallway outside my bedroom.  I initially thought that Matthew had gotten up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and stumbled into something.  Then I heard another crash and ruckus.  I got out of bed to investigate.  Tiger, our cat, was chasing a mouse that had gotten inside the house.  He was swiping and lunging at him with incredible violence, and at one point got him under his paw.  The mouse played dead—he was motionless and I thought he was killed—but when Tiger lifted up his paw the mouse scooted away.   This was all on the upstairs bedroom floor.

For the next day and a half Tiger was on the hunt trying to sniff him out and wait for him to come out.  When my wife got home Wednesday afternoon at about one o’clock she found him just inside the vestibule on the main floor, downstairs from the bedrooms, lying dead.  There must have been a battle.  I guess he ran to try to get out but Tiger caught him.  Here’s a picture.

Poor little mouse. I thought him cute.  I put the body across the street at an unkempt yard where feral cats live.  Tiger as a kitten came from there, nine and a half years ago.  

This made me recall the Robert Burns’ poem, “To a Mouse,” where the poet felt a compassion for a field mouse he had disturbed.

 

To a Mouse

By Robert Burns

On Turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November 1785.

 

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!

 

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!

 

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen-icker in a thrave

          ’S a sma’ request:

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,

          An’ never miss ’t!

 

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!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,

          Baith snell an’ keen!

 

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,

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.

 

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble

Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!

Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,

          But house or hald,

To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,

          An’ cranreuch cauld!

 

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men

          Gang aft agley,

An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

          For promis’d joy!

 

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 occasion of the poem was said to be Robert Burns overturning a mouse’s nest while plowing a field.  Both Burns’s event and my event disturb a mouse’s life in November.  His mouse I think lived, unlike the unfortunate end of the mouse in my house.  Both Burns and I connected with the mouse on a compassionate level.  We both meditated on our own mortality from a poor mouse’s life and fate.  If Burns’ mouse lived after the scene, she will probably not survive the winter given the disruption of the nest.

Some of Burns’ diction is a bit hard to grasp.  One can almost make out the Scots words but it would be helpful with annotations of the Scottish.  I don’t know if the Scots used here is considered its own language, a slang, a dialect, or a creole (probably a dialect), but it does mix English words with what I take are Scottish versions of English words.  Some words seem to be purely Scotts Gaelic (“cranreuch,” “daimen”) and some are English words transcribed from a Scottish dialect (“sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie”).  Wikipedia has what it calls an English translation of the original Scots,  which I’ll post here.

 

Little, sleek, cowering, timorous beast,

Oh, what a panic is in your breast!

You need not start away so hasty

With bickering prattle!

I would be loath to run and chase you,

With murdering paddle!

 

I'm truly sorry man's dominion

Has broken Nature's social union,

And justifies that ill opinion

Which makes you startle

At me, your poor, earth-born companion

And fellow mortal!

 

I doubt not, sometimes, that you may thieve;

What then? Poor beast, you must live!

An odd ear in twenty-four sheaves

Is a small request;

I will get a blessing with what is left,

And never miss it.

 

Your small house, too, in ruin!

Its feeble walls the winds are scattering!

And nothing now, to build a new one,

Of coarse green foliage!

And bleak December's winds ensuing,

Both bitter and piercing!

 

You saw the fields laid bare and empty,

And weary winter coming fast,

And cozy here, beneath the blast,

You thought to dwell,

Till crash! The cruel coulter passed

Out through your cell.

 

That small heap of leaves and stubble,

Has cost you many a weary nibble!

Now you are turned out, for all your trouble,

Without house or holding,

To endure the winter's sleety dribble,

And hoar-frost cold!

 

But Mouse, you are not alone,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best-laid schemes of mice and men

Go oft awry,

And leave us nothing but grief and pain,

For promised joy!

 

Still you are blessed, compared with me!

The present only touches you:

But oh! I backward cast my eye,

On prospects dreary!

And forward, though I cannot see,

I guess and fear!

 

Like most translations of poetry, the beauty of the sounds of the language is lost in translation.  Still it helps.  Let’s analyze the poem, but I won’t go into the social and economic context of the times in which the poem was written.  You can find that online if you want to.  I’ll stick with the immediate poem. 

There are eight stanzas of six lines of iambic tetrameter, each stanza with an unusual rhyme scheme of A/A/A/B/A/B.  The fourth and sixth lines—the lines with the “B” rhyme—do not have eight syllables of a tetrameter line but either five syllables or four syllables.  Why sometimes five syllables and other times four?  I can’t see a pattern, so perhaps for oral articulation or perhaps just out of convenience.  Nonetheless, I really like this stanza form.

The divisions of the poem I see in this way. 

Stanzas one and two provide situation of the event.  The poor mouse is in a panic, jabbering at the person who disrupted his modest home, and scooting hastily about.  The second stanza I would say is the statement of the poem’s theme, the breaking of some sort of an unspoken agreement between man and nature.

 

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!

The last two lines characterizing the mouse as a “poor, earth-born companion/An’ fellow-mortal” lift the little mouse, one of the most insignificant and despised of animals, to an equality with humanity.

Stanzas three through six characterize the impact to the mouse of the overturning of her nest.  The mouse’s home is in ruin; she is now exposed to the winter elements; the plowed field has removed any source of food.

The seventh stanza connects the mouse’s futility with humanity’s, “In proving foresight may be vain,” giving us that great line that is truly a memorable quote, “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/Gang aft agley” (“the best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry”). 

The eighth and final stanza, Burns concludes with a distinction between man and beast.  The mouse is blessed because, as an animal, he can only live in the present.  He will move on from this event and forget about it.  The poet, on the other hand has memory that will bring back sorrow every time he remembers such a catastrophe and, disrupted, will live in constant fear of the future.  It is interesting that though not an overtly religious poem, a blessing is mentioned twice (third and eighth stanzas). 

This is ultimately a nature poem, with man as an agent for disrupting nature for his purposes.

There are some great lines in this poem.  I already mentioned “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men/Gang aft agley” from stanza seven.  I would say the first four lines are just so charming: “Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,/O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!/Thou need na start awa sae hasty,/Wi’ bickerin brattle!”  The first four lines of the fourth stanza are so musical: “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!”  As are the first four lines of the eight stanza: “Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!/The present only toucheth thee:/But Och! I backward cast my e’e,/On prospects drear!”

Such a lovely poem.  You can hear it read in both the Scot’s dialect and a modern translation on this clip.

 

What about my poor, little mousie?  Well, though I feel for his plight, I’m not exactly to blame.  He intruded my space, and he faced a natural enemy, Tiger!  Behold the mighty hunter!

 

I was wondering how I was going to get the mouse out.  Tiger saved me the trouble.

Poetry Analysis: “As Imperceptibly as Grief” by Emily Dickinson

I’ve been really captured by this Emily Dickinson poem, and I have been meditating on it for a while now.  Let me share my thoughts.  Like most of Dickinson’s poems, this poem is untitled.  The poems were ultimately numbered when published in the scholarly collection by Thomas H. Johnson in 1955.  Dickinson knew nothing of the numbering.  My Johnson edition reaches a number of 1775 poems, an incredible opus, all but ten unpublished in Dickenson’s lifetime.  If you are not familiar with Dickinson’s biography, you can read the Wikipedia entry.  In summary, she was a reclusive woman, unmarried, living in Amherst, MA, writing poetry all of her life and saving them in boxes with few people even aware of them.   Like all her untitled poems, which I believe were almost all, the opening line usually serve as the poem’s title.  “As Imperceptibly as Grief” is number 1540, written in 1865 when Emily was about 35 years old.  The numbering does not reflect a chronological ordering.  Here is the poem.

 

As Imperceptibly as Grief (1540)

By Emily Dickinson

 

As imperceptibly as Grief

The Summer lapsed away —

Too imperceptible at last

To seem like Perfidy —

A Quietness distilled

As Twilight long begun,

Or Nature spending with herself

Sequestered Afternoon —

The Dusk drew earlier in —

The Morning foreign shone —

A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,

As Guest, that would be gone —

And thus, without a Wing

Or service of a Keel

Our Summer made her light escape

Into the Beautiful.

 

So what initially captured me was this amazing simile in the poem’s first two lines: “As imperceptibly as Grief/The Summer lapsed away —“  That is a stunning enough simile but there’s more.  The rest of the poem is roughly a description of how summer ends but because Dickinson inverts the normal simile structure—here normal would be “the summer lapsed away as imperceptibly as grief”—the poem becomes just as much about the nature of grief as the end of summer. 

The poem is made up of sixteen lines, four quatrains in common meter.  This is also called a common measure in that the meter alternates between iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet) and iambic trimester (three iambic feet).  Common meter is used in a lot of English hymns such as “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,/That saved a wretch like me!//I once was lost, but now am found,/Was blind, but now I see.” 

Quite a few of Dickenson’s poems are written in this common measure form, and one can’t but help feel the allusion to the themes of hymns.  But there is one important distinction that Dickinson makes in her use of the form from hymns.  While the form calls for a rhyme in the second and fourth lines, Dickinson refuses to give us full rhymes, but ends the lines with slant rhymes, sounds which are of similar sound but not identical.  Here are the rhymed sounds of the four quatrains: away/perfidy, begun/afternoon, shone/gone, keel/beautiful.  Away/perfidy, keel/beautiful don’t even half rhyme but end in the same letter, the first a vowel, the second a consonant. 

One can write a book about Dickinson’s use of slant rhyme, and I would not be surprised if there are several, but to what end are her use of slant rhymes?  First they add tension.  Given the expected rhythm you expect a full sound rhyme, but the unfulfilled sound adds tension which she can either resolve as in a musical piece or leave in tension.  Second I think the slant rhymes provide a contrast to the idealism of hymnal subject matter and make her subjects less idealized and more grounded in a non-perfect reality. 

Her use of capitalization is also odd, and in this poem she capitalizes even more than typical.  There are fifteen capitalized nouns in the poem, one for each line but the third.  This use of capitalized nouns was common in the 17^th and 18^th centuries (see poems by John  Milton, George Herbert, or Alexander pope) and as far as I can tell there were four reasons for capitalizing nouns mid-sentence in those centuries.  (1) It was a cultural absorption from early European printing conventions; German still capitalizes some mid-sentence nouns.  Emily Dickinson is supposed to have known German, but this still doesn’t explain why she uses it.  (2) Nouns of personification were capitalized.  There are four or five nouns of personification in this poem: “Nature,” “Dusk,” “Morning,” “Grace,” and possibly “Guest,” which could ambiguously be a personification or the name as a proper noun.  (3) Nouns were capitalized because it emphasized important concepts, and, more specifically along that line of thinking, (4) nouns were capitalized because they had a religious association. 

By the 19^th century this use of capitalized nouns mid-sentence had pretty much disappeared.  Dickinson is reverting back to something archaic and obsolete.  Why?  You could make the argument that Dickinson has all four points in mind, but I think the allusion to a religious dimension is paramount on her mind.  The capitalization of “Quietness,” “Twilight,” “Dusk,” and “Morning” I think is her attempt to elevate the nouns to a religious phenomenon.  She even calls the “Morning” a “courteous and harrowing Grace.”  So with that, I think the poem should be read within a hermeneutic of nature endowed with the numinous.  Even “Wing” or “Keel” or “Summer” itself, and, therefore, even “Grief” take on a religious connotation.

Her overly use of dashes are also idiosyncratic.  Here I think they are used not for thematic reasons but for mechanical reasons.  Her use of dashes are all at the end of lines—in other poems she uses them internal to lines as well—and function as a means to slow the reader down.  Where she places a dash, she wants to prevent the reader from reading the next line as if it were an enjambment, one line flowing into the next continuously.  Dickinson wants to ensure an end stop, for instance, at “the Summer lapsed away” before moving to “too imperceptible at last.”  The third quatrain has the most dashes, three of the four lines.  Here she is segregating parallel thoughts “The Dusk drew earlier in —The Morning foreign shone —A courteous, yet harrowing Grace…”  It’s not surprising that the first three quatrains all end with a dash, and that the fourth has no dashes because she wants the speed of the lines to accelerate to a climax.

The aesthetics of the poem is shaped around a duple rhythm.  Just as Dante’s aesthetics for his Divine Comedy is shaped around a scheme of three (for the Trinity and other reasons) Dickinson’s aesthetic form here revolves around two, not the twoness of duality (which would imply opposition) but the twoness of doublings which implies a yoking together of concepts.  The rhythm is a perfect unstressed/stressed iambic throughout, and each quatrain divides perfectly into two halves, and each half of a quatrain segments its thought in half.  You can find twos everywhere.  Even the image of a keel in her final quatrain implies a yoking together of two parts, whether she is drawing from the construction of a boat or more likely here the breastbone of a bird, also referred to as a “keel,” which anchors both sets of  a bird’s wing muscles.  This aesthetic of twoness—duple rather than dual—reflects and accentuates the yoking together of grief and of fading summer.

The poem is a dramaturgical unfolding of the dissipation of summer ending and simultaneously the dissipation of grief ending.  Let’s look at summer first.  The opening quatrain is a statement of theme: imperceptibly and with sudden awareness, summer has ended.  It has ended so gradually that one can’t even attribute a sense of betrayal (“Perfidy) or treachery.  Why should there have been betrayal?  Because one doesn’t typically want summer to end.  If spring is the budding of life, summer is the blossom of fulfillment.  As William Carlos Williams said, "In summer, the song sings itself."  As Wallace Stevens said, "The summer night is like a perfection of thought."  Or perhaps most simply as Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys said, "Summer means happy times and good sunshine."  And so, if summer leaves abruptly, it is a treachery; if summer leaves imperceptibly, the deceit is unnoticeable.

The next two stanzas dramatize the process of summer fading away.  Dickinson captures a perfect late summer moment: “a Quietness distilled.”  Can quietness actually be distilled?  It’s either quiet or not, but her use of “distilled” is her means of alluding to the sublime and to the transcendence.  There is a religious allusion to this moment, and perhaps to the process—"Nature spending with herself/[a]Sequestered Afternoon.”  Dickinson in three successive lines slips in the treachery.  The summer twilight moment goes from afternoon to dusk to morning.  Her use of verbs and gerunds emphasize the transience of the moment: “lapsed,” “distill,” “spending,” “drew,” and “gone.”  And so just as one day passes to the next, the summer has passed, as a “guest” that leaves in the morning.  And this passing is a “harrowing Grace,” which could be rephrased as an “acutely painful blessing,” an oxymoron.  What nature lovingly provides is a grace, but, to our heart’s discontent, it is transient, it has passed.

The final quatrain dramatizes the “Summer’s light escape” with a flight imagery, even though summer takes off without a wing or a keel.  (Keel could also be a boating image but keeping with the wing I think it coordinates best with bird flight.)  Dickinson offers a final surprise and projects in the last line the flight into the “Beautiful.”  This is to put the summer experience into its final transcendence, captured as a Keatsian (the poet John Keats) sublimity.  Indeed, Dickinson’s poem seems to owe something to Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”  (“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,/Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,/But on the viewless wings of Poesy”)  There too grief and summer and transcendent beauty come together, though grief there is in opposition to beauty,  Dickinson’s summer flight into the “Beautiful” enshrines the summer into memory.  How many songs are there about the memory of a summer love?  Many.

As I said, this poem is just as much about the passing of grief as the passing of summer.  Substitute grief in the poem for summer.  In the first stanza, the passing of grief is a perfidy just like that of summer.  How can the passing of grief be a treachery?  Wouldn’t you want the grieving to go away?  Not necessarily.  Often, maybe most often, people hold on to grief as a companion.  When we grieve, our grief is all we may have left of our loss. And once the loss is no longer felt, we are taken aback, and we might see that as a treachery.  The middle stanzas dramatize the transient nature of the passing of grief.  I don’t know if Dickinson could have been aware of the five stages of grief, but today we do understand that grief goes through temporal stages.  The poem is possibly suggesting the final stage—acceptance.  The acceptance of grief is also a “harrowing Grace,” a painful blessing.

Finally in the last quatrain, grief too takes flight into the beautiful.  It too, Dickinson suggests, moves into the sublime.  But how and why?  It comes down to love.  We only grieve for the loss of someone or something we love.  That love is tied to the grief, and so that love and grief is fixed in the heart and we do not want to lose it.  We ultimately hold it dear because the person we lost is dear.  Think of someone you’ve lost and grieved for.  In time that pain is consoled, and the beauty of that grief remains in some timeless space, forever to be cherished.

Here we are in late September, and the summer has passed, just as imperceptibly as grief.

Poem: To See the Summer Sky by Emily Dickinson

I was perusing Emily Dickinson’s The Complete Poems and came across this little one.  Well, just about all of Emily’s poems are little, but this is especially so: just three lines and seventeen words. 

To see the Summer Sky 

by Emily Dickinson

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie --
True Poems flee --

You may not notice it, but there’s craft there.  The first two lines rhyme with sky/lie.  Then there is the rhyme of syllable in “poetry” to the closing word, “flee.”  Six syllables in the first line are followed by a doubling of twelve syllables in the second line.  This sets up the really curt three syllables of the third line, which punctuates the central thesis, which is that nature itself is the truest poetry.  So she builds the lines on multiples of three syllables: 6, 12, 3.  That’s not an accident.  But also notice how, though not a rhyme, there is a sound relationship between the “lie” and flee.”  Both have that strong “l” sound in the opening consonant and both are monosyllabic.  The sound “ei” shifts to “ee” making it appear as a sort of sound inflection, such as sing/sung.  “Lie” appears to inflect to “flee” which gives the summer sky movement.  Excellent.