Tam O’Shanter

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1791

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form

Burns drew on his vast experience gathering Scottish folk tales and songs to shape his mock-epic adventure. “Tam O’Shanter” is a traditional ballad, a story with lots of rousing action all told in tightly controlled couplets. The ballad is one of the most ancient traditions in poetry as it represents poetry’s embrace by the masses. The ballad reflects the love of a good story and the appreciation of patterned beat and regular (what is termed expected) rhyme. The tight form reflects the role that recitation played in the poetry of antiquity. The regular beat and the predictive rhyme scheme mimics the form of songs; indeed, many ballads were set to music, and itinerant minstrels, moving town to town, would perform the ballads from memory. The intention of a ballad then was to entertain with the story’s action, delight with its clever form, and leave the audience with an easy-to-grasp lesson or two.

Within this tradition, Burns’ ballad maintains the reader-friendly form. The poem is divided into blocks of narrative that are periodically broken up with quatrains (four-line stanzas) that provide a broader view of the action, most often reflecting the presence of a narrator who is retelling the story of Tam. Unlike the epic, for instance, which is typically cased in blank verse, the ballad encourages the lilting feel of a communal presentation, the form itself becoming an element of the poem’s approachability as the audience (or the reader) becomes caught up in the galloping rhythm. Thus, the form best rewards a rollicking public recitation (preferably in a pub) with dramatic flair to avoid the form becoming too monotonous and singsong-y.

Meter

The lines consist of tightly metrical rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter: each line has five units of stressed and unstressed syllables. There are the occasional shifts in the meter that enhance the action and provide a dramatic variation to the meter, but for the most part the meter remains a constant percussive accompaniment even as Tam gets involved with increasingly more chaotic and threatening conditions. The meter creates a stable anchor, a feeling that, yes, Tam is in a mess, but the overarching narrator who relates the story and abides by the meter, is there to assure that, regardless of the chaotic events, everything is actually under control. Sustained across the poem’s more than 200 lines, the meter creates its own logic and sustains itself through the action of Tam’s crazy night. The steady meter gives the poem its feeling of a story being told rather than a nightmare unfolding. The meter endows the unnamed narrator with the wink-of-the-eye, tongue-firmly-in-cheek feel appropriate to a mock-epic where the focus rests not on the characters and the action but rather on the kinetics of storytelling.

Voice

As a told poem, the action of Tam O’Shanter and his perilous ride home is related through the narrator’s agency which ultimately gives the story its moral grounding, however ironic it may be. It is the narrating voice who begins the poem, carefully setting the scene, establishing characters, and providing the essential exposition to understand why farmer O’Shanter is in the town of Ayr, that it is market day and the harvest has been good. The narrating voice, all-knowing and omniscient, even counsels the ne’er-do-well Tam to heed what his wife told him and to remember her admonition to get home. “Ah gentle ladies, it makes me cry / To think how many counsels sweet / How much long and wise advice/ The husband from the wife despises” (Lines 33-36).

That same narrator, with its wider perspective and with all the wisdom that Tam so clearly does not possess, returns in the concluding stanza to offer the wisdom of the story: do not give in to curiosity, do not be distracted by carnal inclinations. Such distractions can only lead to dire consequences. This is the compelling wisdom typical of a ballad narrator, offering pithy wisdom and a moral rationale for listening. Burns adds a twist and slightly upends that trust between the reader and the narrative voice: the narrator adds a sly wink-of-the-eye caution. Should you feel tempted to give in to the lower passions, let the memory of poor Meg and her tail-less rump be your guide, completely deflating the expectations of a heavy moral lesson. The voice, in the end, is one of us. His words say do not, but his tone says, in the end, you’re only human. Thus, the voice that tells the story is both a manifestation of and an opposition to the voice of a traditional epic verse-narrative.