Tam O’Shanter

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1791

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

"Tam O’Shanter” works as a mock-epic. Given its poetic frame and its elevated rhetoric, there is the feeling that it ought to be grand, ought to be big-scale, that it ought to mean more than it does. After all, it tells of a drunken bumbling farmer whose horse gets de-tailed. Burns both uses and parodies all the trappings of a classical heroic narrative epics dating back to Antiquity: grand tales of adventure involving heroic characters of elevated stature and moral character who are tested by unexpected grand conflicts and who ultimately reveal the dimensions of their character in climactic scenes.

Burns draws on the reader’s expectations of a grand epic poem to create the poem’s comedic effect. He draws on a literary model that defined much of the poetry of Britain’s Neo-Classical era of the mid-17th century, including Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of Books. “Tam O’Shanter” parodies the defining elements of epic poetry: this is hardly an account of heroic deeds in the conventional sense. Tam, given to careless imbibing and reckless libidinous thought is hardly the heroic type, and the ending scene, a horse losing its tail, is hardly the stuff of grand climax typical of heroic epics. As with any parody, however, knowledge of the original genre helps to provide context and appreciation to the satire of Burns’ mock-epic.

Historical Context

Undoubtedly for a contemporary reader, “Tam O’Shanter” reads as archaic and difficult to parse. “But wither’d beldams, auld and droll / Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal” (Lines 164-165): when translated in a modern idiom, the lines read “But withered hags, old and droll / Ugly enough to suckle a foal.” Although there are numerous “translations” of “Tam O’Shanter” available for the contemporary reader, using that translation ignores the historical context that in fact makes the poem a cultural landmark; Burns crafted the poem intending it to be read and understood in Scotch Gaelic.

When a 20-something Burns committed himself to the ambitious project of helping to catalogue nearly four centuries of Scottish literature—its poetry, ballads, folk tales, and legends—that project defines the historical context that in time made “Tam O’Shanter” mean much more than a poem about a farmer being chased by witches. The poem’s significance rests not so much in the adventures of a drunk farmer but in the rendering of that adventure in the Scottish dialect. Burns expected his market audience to come to terms with that language and by extension to recognizes the legitimacy and consequence of the Scottish people. Although the political and economic union with England had been in place for close to a century, there was nevertheless a populist movement designed to assert the Scottish identity, an interest in the languages of the Scottish people, as well in their long history and rich traditions. Scotland, the movement asserted, was more than an extension of England. Even though for close to a century the Scottish people had largely adopted the British language as their own, the cultural movement to preserve the integrity and survival of the Scottish language encouraged Burns to use that language to create his own oeuvre, which in turn found an international readership.