Point of View

The poem’s point of view is first-person present tense. This perspective establishes a sense of realism and immediacy for readers. For a poem that is about the responsibilities — and failures — of humanity, this choice helps challenge readers to confront the difficulties of their relationship to non-human animals and of their own lives.

Generally, literary critics caution readers not to conflate the poem’s speaker with the author, particularly when the poem is written in first person. However, in this case, some degree of conflation between the speaker and Burns is more accurate. First, the speaker seems to be someone occupying Burns’s exact social position and his personality as it is known: a tenant farmer, one capable of poetic and literary insight beyond the station he has been assigned by society, and possessed of enormous compassion for the world around him and a deep-seated...