The poem is set in a field on a farm. The legend of the poem holds that this poem was composed spontaneously after a real incident where Burns, while farming the land he was a tenant farmer on, accidentally destroyed a mouse’s hut with his plow. Whether or not there is literal truth to this story, it gives readers important insight into how the poem functions. This is a poem that is intimately tied to a real place, and to a real way of life specific to that place. Details in the poem help conjure the appropriate imagery: this is a poem that is of and tied to the land, for better and for worse, in both its bounty and its danger.

Specifically, the poem may be set on a tenant farm. Tenant farming was a form of quasi-indentured-servitude practiced in England from the Middle Ages...