To a Mouse

Robert Burns, often called either Rabbie Burns or the National Bard of Scotland, is one of the most influential Scottish poets. Though Burns died in 1796 at the age of 37, his works of poetry and Scottish cultural preservation have made him a literary icon among people of Scottish heritage across the world. Burns is perhaps best known for his sentimentality and his use of the Scots dialect.

Poems like 1786’s “To a Mouse,” published in Burns’s first collection Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, demonstrate Burns’s engagement with nature and his empathy for non-human life. These qualities align him with the Romantic movement, a literary movement that places an emphasis on the natural world, folk literature, individualism, and the power of emotion. Burns, a farmer, is alleged to have composed “To a Mouse” after accidentally destroying a mouse’s nest with his plow. The poem is a strong exemplar of his empathy and connection with nature. Though many of the larger names in Romanticism, such as William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelly, came a full generation after Burns, Burns’s work laid many of the movement’s foundations.

Poet Biography

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland on January 25, 1759.