Littérature anglophone | "To A Mouse" By Robert Burns
Poem, Analysis and Vocabulary

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Le poem et l'analyse

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Analyse

The best-laid schemes of mice and men
Go oft awry,
Robert Burns (1785)

"To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough” is a Scots-language poem written by the well-known Scottish poet Robert Burns in 1785. It is written in the Scottish dialect. 
 
The poem deals with the speaker’s experience with a little and frightened mouse. The speaker in the poem is likely Robert Burns himself. He spends the majority of the poem apologizing to the mouse because he accidently destroyed the mouse’s nest with a plough. Moreover, the speaker argues that human beings and animals are connected since they are both part of the natural world: “nature's social union”. Indeed, they are both vulnerable to forces that are beyond their control. 
The speaker’s message is clear: people should enjoy the present moments and not worry too much about the future ones. He admits that the mouse has an advantage over him because she does not prepare for the future, but rather lives for the present. Thus, the narrator implies that the mouse is fortunate. Contrary to the mouse, he lives in perpetual frustration and disappointment because he keeps thinking about his failures and stresses over his future plans. He is eaten up by many second thoughts about the past and fears about what will happen later in his life. 

The mouse, on the other hand, takes grain without worrying about what might occur in the future. Thus, the purpose of the poem is to illustrate the fact that it is not always better to prepare for everything because our plans and nature’s plans do not always turn out the way we expected or wanted them to be.

To conclude, it is worth mentioning that John Steinbeck took the title of his 1937 novel “Of Mice and Men” from a line contained in the poem: “The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley (…)

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