The Struggle for Ethical Compassion in Robert Burns's “To a Mouse”

Abstract As a farmer from Ayrshire, Robert Burns's subsistence depended on successful interactions with farmed animals. This close contact with nonhumans conditions his poetry on animals. Even the free-living beings he documents are mediated by his agrarian experience. If his background as a farmer allows Burns to study animals on a daily basis, his poet persona permits him to document their activities with fidelity. The ethical dilemma, though, this dual position created in Burns's poems, foregrounds difficulty in negating the imbalance of power between humans and other species. This disparity is nowhere more evident than in his verse “To a Mouse.”