[A Scottish-born writer and critic, Highet was a classical scholar and distinguished educator. His important studies Juvenal the Satirist (1954) and The Anatomy of Satire (1962) were scholarly works that received wide recognition in the literary community. Below, Highet examines Burns's use of Scottish dialect and meter in his odes "To a Mouse" and "To a Louse."]

Two of the most sympathetic poems in our language are about vermin. One is about a mouse; the other is about a louse. They are in the same pattern of meter, run to approximately the same size, and were written by the same author. In their own tiny way they are masterpieces of wit and charm. I think the poem about the little mouse might just conceivably have been composed by several other poets, but I do not believe that anybody else in the world at that time could have produced an address to a louse and filled it, in spite of its repulsive subject, so full of grace and sympathy.

The poet was Robert Burns. The pieces are his ode 'To a Mouse,' which he published when he was twenty-six, and his ode 'To a Louse,' produced in the following year. Not many of us know the complete poems nowadays, because they are written in southern Scottish dialect, and in old-fashioned dialect which is now opaque even to the Scots themselves. (I remember how terribly puzzled I was at school, when I first read the mouse lyric, by hearing Burns say, 'A daimen icker in a thrave 's a sma' request.' It means 'An odd ear of corn in a whole sheaf is a small request' from a mouse to a farmer; but it contains three obsolete words.) Still, everyone who is not illiterate knows something of these poems: the two famous quotations—'The best laid schemes o' mice and men / Gang aft agley' (meaning 'go often awry') and 'O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!' To take subjects so unpromising as a mouse and a louse, and to build them into poems containing wisdom so memorably expressed as these two sentences, was the work of a true genius.

True genius; but misunderstood, and despised. Burns was writing in 1785, during the proud and pompous eighteenth century, when a man scarcely dared to appear in decent society without silver buckles on his shoes, and when only lofty subjects and elevated language were thought worthy of notice either in conversation or in poetry. There is a ridiculous story in Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson about a hack poet of that age who determined to compose an improving poem in the manner of the great Roman Vergil. In his Georgics Vergil had demonstrated that it was possible, with skill and taste, to write fine poetry about a subject so simple and prosaic, and even squalid, as farming. The eighteenth-century hack determined to rival Vergil in English, and chose a subject which he thought was both novel and important: the sugar industry of Jamaica and the other British West Indian islands. He was successful enough, no doubt, when he described the graceful rows of waving sugar canes, the rich earth, the warm, glorious sun. But then he had to deal with the various enemies of sugar cane, and give directions for combating them. One of the worst of these enemies is naturally vermin. The poet felt bound to discuss this unamiable subject, and began a new paragraph:

Now, Muse, let's sing of rats.

When he read it to his friends, they could not keep from laughing: he altered it; and in the final version the rats are thus eloquently periphrased:

Nor with less waste the whiskered vermin race,
A countless clan, despoil the lowland cane.

Surely, he thought, that would be noble enough to make the rats poetical.

Burns was not a conventional hack. Revolution bubbled in his soul, and occasionally boiled over. He therefore chose subjects which were, as the critics of his time put it, 'low.' If he had written of princes leading their armies into battle on mettlesome steeds, or described the grandeur of a regal stag hunt, with dukes and duchesses galloping through mighty forests after the noblest of game, he would surely have been much respected in his own day. Since he wrote about mice and lice, he was admired by only a few, and snubbed by others.

To make things worse, he did not write in the 'pure' language of southeastern England, but in the southern Scottish dialect—and this at a time when even English itself was sometimes thought to be rather vulgar, and anyone who wished to be cultured larded his own language with phrases of French from time to time. Society preferred to speak and read southeastern English, and a poet who wrote in Scottish dialect was—almost by definition—not a poet. (This particular type of snobbery has persisted down to the present time. Many living Scotsmen and Scotswomen can remember that they were forbidden, at school, to use Scottish words and phrases, not because they belonged to a dialectal pattern different from southeastern English, but on the ground that they were 'wrong' and 'common'—as it is genuinely wrong and common in English to say 'the ryne in Spyne' rather than 'the rain in Spain.')

Burns had a further handicap. He did not usually write in the accepted English meters, the neat couplets of Mr. Dryden and Mr. Pope (which were ultimately derived from Greek and Latin via Italian and French). He liked to use Scottish measures, cheerful little lilts which did not sound like a rococo chamber orchestra performing a measured gavotte, but like a village fiddler batting out a jolly strathspey and reel. Many of his finest poems were set to the rhythm and music of old Scots folk songs, which meant that—although they were often cleaner and wittier than the original folk-song words—they still reeked of the soil. They wore not satin and buckled shoes, but hodden gray and muddy boots. They had the sweaty hair of a farmer, instead of the powdered wig of a gentleman. They were not Polite. They were Coarse. Some traces of that feeling still linger. It is still a little shocking to think of a poet writing about a piece of body vermin. Our ancestors had far more body vermin than we have; but they prided themselves far more upon their delicate spiritual feelings. That sensitivity made them look askance on Burns for his coarseness, even while they were admiring his poems for the fiery genius that glowed through every one of them. Though his contemporaries made him into a celebrity in Edinburgh, they did not accept him. Without putting the feeling into words, they knew that he was a revolutionary poet.

The poems that Burns wrote about the mouse and the louse are revolutionary poems. They do not preach the forcible overthrow of an established political order and the violent eradication of all those attached to it; but they are utterances which were, in the time of Burns, quietly new, gently shocking, and ultimately destructive of long-accepted aesthetic and social standards.

The poem on the louse is, I suppose, technically an ode: it is all addressed to the little insect, and it is in a lyric meter. But in fact it is a dramatic monologue, and should be imagined as a Breughel picture put into motion. Its title is:

'To a Louse, on seeing one on a lady's bonnet, at church.'

The old Scottish words sometimes sound puzzling, but they give it energy, while the general meaning of the poem is entirely clear. Burns is sitting at service in the little kirk of Mauchline. He is behind, and very close to, the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. Naturally. As he gazes at her, a louse slowly emerges from her dress at her neckline, walks up her hair, and climbs up her hat to the very top, where it sits, surveying the congregation, and inspiring Rabbie with one of his finest lyric poems.

It is a clever and charming poem. It particular, it is delightful to see how Burns, in stanza after stanza, traces the steady, relentless movement of the louse from the first moment when it emerges from the poor girl's dress and begins to make its way up to the pinnacle of its Everest. It was a surprise to Burns, and we hear his surprise echoed in his opening words: 'Ha! whare ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?' I suppose he would have been still more astounded if the louse had looked around and explained that it was going to climb to the very tip top of the young lady's hat. Why? Because it was there! Nevertheless, it is irresistibly comic to watch the horrid little beast making its pedestrian, pediculous way through the complicated ribbons and lace and gauze of a fantastically fashionable Italian creation, until it achieves the supreme pinnacle, high above the pretty girl's head, where others in the congregation can see it, while we must sit and watch it in civil, reverent silence. It would be against religion to interrupt the church service by speaking to a neighbor; and it would be frankly impossible to say, 'Excuse me, Miss Jenny, but you have a louse on your hat.' (She might reply, 'You have a bee in your bonnet.')

But there is satire in the poem as well as outright comedy. Burns addresses the louse, and explains to it that, on a well-dressed girl with some social aspirations, it is quite out of place. On a dirty, verminous beggar, it would be at home; or on a self-neglecting old woman, or on a badly reared child; but not on a member of good society. This is the same Rabbie Burns who wrote 'A man's a man for a' that.' He said, and he believed, that rank was but the stamp on the coin; what mattered was the metal, false or true gold, of which the coin was made. And the famous final stanza:

—that stanza reminds us that Burns wrote many of his most telling poems against the misuses of religion. He knew perfectly well that Miss Jenny, when she dressed for church that Sabbath morning, was thinking less about the psalms she would sing and the doctrinal content of the sermon she would hear than about the effect of her fine new hat on all the men and all the other women. In eight short stanzas, less than fifty lines, Burns has given us a brilliantly comic little drama, a gentle assertion of social equality, and a nipping satire on religious hypocrisy.

The other poem is as pathetic as the louse poem is comic. Burns was plowing on the farm which he and his brother Gilbert had rented. The soil was not good, the weather was wretched; the whole Burns family, poor already, could well be destitute in a year. As Rab drove the plowshare through the sour, wet earth one bleak November day, it smashed through the nest of a little field mouse. The homeless creature ran away in panic and despair. It was gone in a moment, soon to die of cold and wet; but it lingered in Burns's mind. In his poem he speaks to it from a heart full of love and sorrow and genuine sympathy. The conclusion is world-famous:

Burns ends by saying that the tiny creature, miserable and terrified, is still less unhappy than he himself, with nothing but dreary memories and a grimly threatening future. Only a few months later, he was so desperate that he resolved to leave his home forever, and emigrate to Jamaica. In order to raise the nine pounds he required for the fare, he published a collection of his poems. Quite unexpectedly, it was successful, and brought him some money, and some temporary distinction. But it was not to last. In a few years, too few years, he died as pitifully as a mouse in a flooded ditch.

It is a true poem, Burns's address to a mouse; but it was also, in his time, a new poem. Very few other poets would have thought of writing a serious piece on such a trivial subject; and of all the hundreds of millions of men who have plowed the soil and disturbed small vermin, very few have ever felt much sympathy for them, none have expressed it as warmly as Robert Burns. The country tenant-farmer with the big heart and the eloquent voice—he belonged to a new age altogether, the age which was coming and which he did not live to see. I wish he had escaped from Britain, and crossed the Atlantic, not to Jamaica but to the newly independent United States of America. He would have had a longer and happier life, even if he had written no more poetry. And he might have done greater things than he did. The plowman with his head full of immortal eloquence, hating hypocrisy and loving liberty, was an elder brother of our seventh President, Andrew Jackson, and of a still greater man with a still nobler heart, who was born in a log cabin and went to his grave from the White House.