Higher; To a Mouse Stanzas 7 and 8: Pessimistic climax. Based on a vivid personal experience of ploughing up a mouse’s nest and of being a struggling tenant farmer, this poem epitomises Burns ...

The poem, two rhymed stanzas of alternating tetrameter and trimeter lines, gets much of its melodic power from its mostly trochaic feet, those falling sounds that Byron was always so good at. But ...