The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft…

The lines come near the end of Burns’s poem, dated November 1785. Ploughing a field, the poet has overturned the nest of a field mouse, and he speaks to the terrified creature: he is “truly sorry man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union”. She may steal a few ears of grain, but what of it? Now her little house is ruined just as “weary winter” comes, and she must endure the sleet and the frost. Then comes a consolation that is none: she is not alone (“no thy lane”) in finding that foresight may be vain. In the last stanza, he envies her: the present only touches her, while he looks back on “prospects drear” and forward in fear.

Burns was then farming at Mossgiel, in Ayrshire, and published the poem in 1786 in his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. The lines became proverbial in English as “the best-laid plans of mice and men”, and gave John Steinbeck the title of his 1937 novel Of Mice and Men.

To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough, stanza 7, 1785

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