The Guidwife Of Wauchope House - Analysis

A boast that begins as a suspicion

The poem’s central move is a loving kind of accusation: the speaker praises the ploughman-poet by insisting he can’t really be what he claims to be. From the start she addresses him as My canty, witty, rhyming ploughman, then immediately says she hafflins doubt his rustic origin. That doubt isn’t hostility; it’s a compliment in the form of disbelief. His fluency, range, and sharpness feel too large to have come from being ploughman school'd and fed like other laborers. The poem keeps returning to this idea: his mind seems to outgrow the story attached to his job.

Food, schooling, and the politics of who gets to know

The speaker measures class and education through what people eat and what they’re denied. She contrasts the poet’s saul and body, which she believes were better fed, with those who sup sour milk and bummil through single caritch—a blunt picture of narrow subsistence and narrow opportunity. The argument isn’t that ploughmen are stupid; it’s that the system starves them, literally and intellectually. That’s why she jokes that any real ploughman would be unlikely to sort out Homer or endure a single line of Virgil. Her point is social: the classics belong to a gatekept world, so a laborer who speaks with ease across that world looks like a kind of miracle—or a secret graduate in disguise.

From ancient poets to living power: the reach of his talk

The admiration sharpens when she turns from Greek and Latin to contemporary politics. The poet can crack your jokes about Willie Pitt and Charlie Fox, and can descrive Our great men so well that someone might swear he lived among them. That claim matters because it flips the usual direction of representation: instead of the powerful defining the poor, the poor man depicts the powerful. The speaker’s tone here is delighted and slightly incredulous—like someone watching a friend walk into a room he’s not supposed to enter and speak as if it already belongs to him. The poem’s praise depends on that social trespass: his wit lets him cross boundaries without asking permission.

The poem’s turn: rank stops mattering, company starts

A clear shift comes with But be ye ploughman, be ye peer. After all the teasing doubts about his background, the speaker abruptly declares the question irrelevant. What matters is the pleasure and warmth of his company: she’d ride twenty miles over moss and muir just to crack a winter-night with him and hear his sangs and sonnets. The tone becomes more intimate and domestic, anchored in travel, weather, and conversation rather than the prestige of books. If earlier she tested him against school and empire, now she places him in a cottage-world of shared time, where art is not an ornament but a way to make winter bearable.

Herring versus turtle: a moral economy of taste

The poem sharpens its values through food again, but now as a judgment on elite culture. A guid saut herring and a cake with sic a chiel would be a feast—while turtle dine with dull lairds is something she’d refuse. Even serving him rumming yill or eating cheese and bread outranks aristocratic wine and forced conversation, where one must ferlie at their wit. This isn’t rustic sentimentality; it’s a claim about what taste should mean. True refinement, she implies, is liveliness of mind and speech, not imported luxuries. The tension underneath is pointed: the poet’s abilities could win him a seat at those tables, yet the speaker insists the better table is the simple one, because it’s honest and reciprocal.

A plaid for the body, a brotherhood for the nation

The closing moves from personal admiration to national belonging. The speaker longs to know whare ye baide so she can send a marled plaid to keep his shoulders warm and braw, suitable for kirk or market. It’s a tender, practical gift—art translated into care. Then she widens the circle: A' honest Scotsmen love the maud, and she is Right wae they are far apart, yet proud to call him brither. The poem’s final claim is that shared language, humor, and integrity can make a kinship that outruns distance and rank. The earlier doubt about whether he’s truly a ploughman ends as a deeper certainty: whatever his schooling, he belongs—because he speaks for and with his people.