Robert Burns Writes 'To a Louse' After Seeing a Louse on a Lady's Bonnet
Poet involved
What happened
Robert Burns published 'To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church' in the Kilmarnock Edition of his poems in 1786. In the poem, Burns addresses a louse crawling on the bonnet of a proud woman in church, using the creature as a democratic leveller that exposes the pretensions of social vanity. Written in Scots dialect, it ends with one of Burns's most celebrated moral observations: 'O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!' The poem is a masterpiece of comic observation and democratic sentiment.
Literary impact
Burns's 'To a Louse' is perhaps the most celebrated parasite poem after Donne's 'The Flea,' and the most explicitly democratic. By positioning a louse — the most stigmatised of human parasites — as the natural enemy of social pretension, Burns aligned himself with Enlightenment ideals of human equality while rooting those ideals in the visceral reality of everyday Scottish life. The poem's concluding moral became a touchstone for poets, philosophers, and political writers seeking to puncture human vanity through natural observation.
Source: Wikipedia
