Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow’r,
Thou’s met me in an evil hour;
For I maun crush amang the stoure
Thy slender stem:
To spare thee now is past my pow’r,
Thou bonie gem.

These lines are from Robert Burns’s Scots poem “The Daisy” (also known by its opening line, “Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flow’r”), written in 1786 during the period when Burns was gathering and revising poems for his first major publication. The speaker encounters a small daisy while moving through dusty ground (“stoure”) and, in the press of circumstances, must trample it—an “evil hour” for the flower. Burns uses the incident as the poem’s initiating scene before turning to reflection, a characteristic move in his nature lyrics: a brief, concrete rural moment becomes the occasion for moral and emotional meditation.

On the surface, the stanza laments an unavoidable act of harm: the daisy’s “slender stem” will be crushed despite the speaker’s wish to spare it. The diction of compulsion (“maun,” “past my pow’r”) frames the violence as forced by circumstance rather than malice, inviting sympathy for both the fragile flower and the reluctant destroyer. In Burns’s hands, the daisy becomes an emblem of vulnerable innocence exposed to indifferent pressures—social, economic, or emotional. The tenderness of address (“bonie gem”) heightens the pathos and prepares the poem’s broader movement from natural observation to human analogy: small lives and hopes can be broken not by cruelty, but by the sheer weight of necessity.