Tam O’Shanter

"Tam O’Shanter” works as a mock-epic. Given its poetic frame and its elevated rhetoric, there is the feeling that it ought to be grand, ought to be big-scale, that it ought to mean more than it does. After all, it tells of a drunken bumbling farmer whose horse gets de-tailed. Burns both uses and parodies all the trappings of a classical heroic narrative epics dating back to Antiquity: grand tales of adventure involving heroic characters of elevated stature and moral character who are tested by unexpected grand conflicts and who ultimately reveal the dimensions of their character in climactic scenes.

Burns draws on the reader’s expectations of a grand epic poem to create the poem’s comedic effect. He draws on a literary model that defined much of the poetry of Britain’s Neo-Classical era of the mid-17th century, including Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of Books. “Tam O’Shanter” parodies the defining elements of epic poetry: this is hardly an account of heroic deeds in the conventional sense. Tam, given to careless imbibing and reckless libidinous thought is hardly the heroic type, and the ending scene, a horse losing its tail, is hardly the stuff of grand climax typical of heroic epics.