Broom Besoms - Analysis

A marriage vow reduced to appetite

The opening claim is deliberately blunt: I maun hae a wife, and the only real requirement is that she be a woman. Burns builds the speaker as someone who treats marriage less like companionship than like a basic need, almost a purchase. Each “if” clause sounds like a negotiation, but it’s a rigged one: whatsoe'er she be, he’ll take her. That insistence makes the poem’s central tension clear: the speaker pretends to be flexible and easygoing, yet his “easygoing” is really a refusal to see a wife as a full person—she’s a body, a caretaker, a producer of children, a drinking partner, a warm presence at night.

The hawker’s chorus and the marketplace of women

The repeated cry Buy broom besoms! keeps dragging the poem into the sound-world of street trade. The wife is never openly called a commodity, but the refrain makes that idea hard to avoid: desire is spoken in the same breath as selling fine heather ringers. Even the language of “quality” slips in—better never grew—as if the poem can’t stop comparing people and goods. The chorus also gives the piece a public, performative feel, like a song tossed off for laughter, which matters because it explains how cruelty can hide inside a catchy tune.

Comic indifference that keeps turning sharp

The speaker’s list of preferences pretends to cancel itself out: bony or ugly, green or gray, black or fair—anything will do. But the “jokes” keep revealing what he wants to take. If she’s ugly, he shrugs, where's the odds at night?, reducing her to darkness and use. If she’s old, he says, the sooner she will die, a line that turns the poem’s playfulness briefly vicious: the wife becomes disposable, and death is treated like convenience. Even fertility is framed as workload management—fruitfu' means joy, but barren means less will be my care. The contradiction is that the speaker claims he is undemanding, yet his “undemanding” stance is a form of domination: whatever she is, he will still arrange the meaning of it around himself.

Drink as intimacy, selfishness as punchline

The “drappie” couplet tightens that self-centered logic into a neat, nasty symmetry. If she likes a drink, she and I'll agree; if she doesn’t, there's the mair for me. On the surface it’s a pub-ready quip, but it also shows how the speaker imagines partnership: agreement is useful, disagreement is simply ignored and turned into personal gain. The tone here is jaunty, but the joke works by shrinking the wife’s will to an obstacle that can be sidestepped.

The hinge at Part II: bravado collapses into complaint

After the marker II, the poem swings into a different voice and mood. The swaggering buyer of wives becomes an aging man measuring his decline: Young and souple was I becomes Now I'm auld and frail, and he can’t step a syke. The repeated chorus still rings out, but now it sounds less like sales patter and more like a stuck refrain—life’s vitality has gone, yet the song keeps going. The place-name Lautherslack grounds this turn in lived memory: he used to leap ditches; now he lies at Nansie's back, a blunt image of dependence, perhaps sexual exhaustion, perhaps simply being bedridden and tended. Where Part I treated women as interchangeable, Part II implies a specific woman’s presence, and the body that was once hungry is now failing.

Regret disguised as a joke about butter

The final couplet—Had she gien me butter when she gae me bread—sounds comic, but it carries a small, bleak moral economy. He imagines that a little more care would have made him looked baulder even with his beld head. It’s an oddly domestic image after all the earlier sexual bargaining: bread, butter, baldness. The poem’s deeper sting may be that this speaker can only translate intimacy into provisions and consumption. Even regret arrives as appetite: he doesn’t say he loved her poorly; he says he wasn’t fed well enough.

One sharp question lingers: if the chorus turns marriage into buying and selling, then what does Part II suggest about the buyer—when he’s auld and frail—except that he, too, becomes something handled, moved, and maintained by someone else?