Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Wi’ bickering brattle!

These lines open Robert Burns’s Scots poem “To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough” (1785). Burns, then a tenant farmer at Mossgiel in Ayrshire, wrote it after accidentally destroying a mouse’s winter nest while ploughing. The poem reflects the close, sometimes harsh contact between human labor and the lives of small animals in rural Scotland. Burns addresses the frightened mouse directly in vernacular Scots, blending humor, sympathy, and moral reflection. The piece was first published in the Kilmarnock edition of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), helping establish his reputation as a poet of common life and feeling.

Burns’s affectionate apostrophe—“wee, sleekit… tim’rous beastie”—humanizes the mouse and immediately reverses the usual hierarchy between farmer and “pest.” The speaker recognizes the animal’s panic as a natural response to sudden violence, and his plea that it need not flee “sae hasty” carries an undertone of guilt. The opening sets up the poem’s larger meditation on vulnerability: the mouse’s precarious home mirrors human insecurity in the face of accident, weather, and fate. By using Scots diction and intimate address, Burns turns a minor incident into a moral and emotional insight about shared creaturely fear and the limits of human control.

Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!