Analysis Of The Poem 'To A Louse' By Robert Burns

A World of Feeling Besides words on a page, the “heaven-taught” ploughman Robert Burns exists today in metal, housed in a 70-foot tall Grecian temple in his hometown of Alloway in Ayrshire. Despite the constraints of sessile metal, the Bard of Ayrshire has no difficulties getting around: one might also find great Rabbie in San Francisco, Canada, or Australia. In fact, Robert Burns has the third-largest amount of statues built in his image than any other non-religious figure (“Commemorations of Robert Burns around the World”). While the materials used to build the statues may differ, one thing is more certain: the legacy Robert Burns has built for himself is one that stands on sentiment and sympathy. Although he was capable of writing in both …show more content…
It becomes evident why Burns employed such an emotionally charged observer as the speaker of his poem—to highlight and contrast the final turn in sentimentality. Although initially chastising, the speaker reflects on the virtues of the louse and reaches a universal tenderness by the end of the poem. In fact, the louse teaches him. It deconstructs his idea of the social world and social hierarchy because it sees all humans as just humans, that is, equally human. The importance of the woman with the bonnet is no greater to the louse than one “[…] in some beggar’s haffet squattle”, and as the speaker learns this, touched by the sentimental, he is transformed from angry to poignant, a testament to its power (13). Burns cleverly slips in a dual meaning in this final stanza, relating the “foolish notion” of importance based on social class with the studied nature of standard English. “Foolish notion” is not written in a Scots dialect, and his diction with “What airs in dress” is starkingly reminiscent of the airs the upper-class dressed their “proper” English in. Significantly, the second portion of that line, “an’ gait wad lea’e us,” states that the notion is foolish because the artificiality will dissipate, and the line transforms mid-sentence from standard English as it moves from “dress” to “an’”. This implies that what is left when that forced language dissipates are the virtues of that Scottish dialect: of simple emotions, wild, genuine sentimentality, and “ev’n Devotion!”. And indeed, as “To a Louse” follows a man choking in the airs of contrived social status to him eventually taking a breath of fresh, Scottish oxygen, the reader is left with a genuinely sentimental and universal message: to not let the constructs of society excessively impose upon the ways one views and treats