Wha The Deil Can Hinder The Wind To Blaw - Analysis

A winter-night frame for an indecent fable

Burns stages this poem like a folk tale overheard on a dark walk home, then lets it skid into outright obscenity. The opening is almost pastoral: blythe new-year, starns were clear, and the frost rang underfoot. That crispness matters because it sets up a comic contrast: the “wind” that will not be stopped isn’t the weather, but the body. The poem’s central claim is bluntly physical: nature—especially sexual and bodily nature—doesn’t obey rules, scolding, or dignity.

The carlin’s “relief” and the poem’s hard-edged comedy

The scene the speaker “hears” is already a collision of pity and ridicule. A carlin cries relief! while a birkie lies atweesh her trams. The phrasing makes the woman’s body the setting, and the man’s position reads as both opportunistic and unromantic. Burns makes the sex transactional in a grotesque way: the man wan a quarter in her beef despite a' the jirts she gives—her discomfort is real, but the poem’s gaze is unsentimental. The comedy depends on that tension: we’re meant to laugh, yet what we’re laughing at is an older woman’s distress and a young man’s insistence.

From “Venus’ Law” to a body that won’t be governed

The second stanza intensifies the farce by describing the man’s thrusting—he strak frae as if he’d nail'd her through—alongside the woman’s unstoppable flatulence: ilka fart could have fill'd a pockie. Burns turns the body into a noisy engine, and that noise becomes a kind of argument. When the young man commands, Temper your tail, he tries to impose “law” on flesh, invoking Venus' Law as if sex came with etiquette and compliance. The woman’s answer refuses the premise: Double your dunts—keep going—and then the poem’s punchline, Wha the deil can hinder the wind to blaw? Pleasure and involuntary function are fused; what’s “natural” is both erotic and humiliating.

Who holds power: the striker or the wind?

One of the poem’s sharper contradictions is that the woman is physically “under” the man—pinned, struck, “nailed”—yet her body controls the atmosphere of the encounter. The man’s energy is portrayed as forceful, but the carlin’s wind is the unstoppable force that turns his “law” into a joke. Even her plea for relief becomes slippery: is she begging for mercy, or begging for release in a more complicated sense? Burns keeps it ambiguous enough that the refrain can be read as earthy wisdom or as a shrug that excuses everything.

A proverb that laughs—and also evades responsibility

The closing question is shaped like common sense, but it also functions like an alibi. If no one can stop the wind from blowing, then no one can be held accountable—neither for the body’s noises nor for the aggressive sex that frames them. Burns’s tone is swaggering, delighted by embarrassment and by the collapse of polite speech into blunt matter. The winter night at the start—clear stars, ringing frost—ends up feeling like misdirection: the real “weather” in this poem is what the body does when desire pushes forward and dignity gets blown away.