To a Louse

Summary

To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church, is a comic companion to To a Mouse, printed in the same Kilmarnock volume of 1786. The speaker sits in church behind a fine young lady named Jenny, who is wearing a fashionable gauze-and-lace bonnet of the kind called a Lunardi, after the balloonist whose ascents in Scotland were the rage. A louse is crawling up it. The speaker addresses the creature with mock outrage: how dare it set its foot on so fine a lady, when it should be living among beggars, where comb and bone never disturb its thick plantations? He watches it climb to the very topmost height of the bonnet and wishes he had some strong powder to kill it. He would not have been surprised to see it on an old wife's flannel cap or a ragged boy's waistcoat, but on Miss's fine Lunardi, never. In the seventh stanza he warns Jenny not to toss her head and show off her beauty, for she does not know what the creature is doing, and the people behind her are already winking and pointing. The final stanza draws the famous moral. If only some power would give us the gift to see ourselves as others see us, it would free us from many a blunder and foolish notion, and from airs in dress and walk, and even in devotion. The poem mocks vanity without cruelty and lands its point on the speaker and reader as well as on the lady: everyone carries something unseen that others notice. Its closing prayer has become one of the most quoted couplets in Scottish poetry, and it is a favourite for teaching both humour and humility.

Top Lessons

• Seeing ourselves

  The closing lines pray for the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us. Self-knowledge is the cure for many follies.

• Vanity in church

  The setting matters: the lady's pride appears in the place of worship, and the poem ends with airs even in devotion.

• Comic satire

  Burns mocks without hatred. The mock-heroic address to a louse makes pride look small.

Verified Quotes