Here Awa There Awa - Analysis

A love that tries to pull a body across distance

The poem’s central impulse is simple and urgent: Nanie wants Willie back in her arms, and she speaks as if desire itself could work like a tide or a wind. The repeated call Here awa', there awa' sounds like someone scanning a horizon, restless and unsatisfied with any single direction. Even the command haud awa' hame carries a contradiction: she tells him to stay away from home so he can come home to her, as if home means the wrong place unless it’s her body, her bosom. The tone is intimate and insistent, a voice trying to close physical space by sheer address.

Winter parting, summer return: making feelings look like weather

Burns lets the emotional story ride on seasons. The speaker remembers the separation in a hard line of climate: the winter blew cauld at parting. Yet she corrects the obvious explanation for her tears: 'Twas na the blast that made her cry. That small refusal matters. It insists the pain wasn’t caused by impersonal weather but by personal attachment. When she welcomes Simmer, she frames Willie’s return as a second summer: The Simmer to Nature, my Willie to me. Nature gets its season back; she gets her person back. The pairing makes love feel as necessary and cyclical as climate, but also exposes the ache underneath: seasons are reliable, lovers are not.

Ordering storms to sleep: the fantasy of control

The third stanza pushes hardest on the poem’s wish-logic. Nanie speaks to the elements as if they’re servants: Rest, ye wild storms, then Wauken, ye breezes! and row gently, ye billows! The verbs are domestic and tactile; even the sea is asked to behave like something that can be tucked in and soothed. What she wants is not metaphorical—she wants the weather to waft Willie ance mair into her arms. The lover’s journey, implied to be across water, turns the natural world into a gatekeeper. Her tenderness becomes a kind of spell, and the poem briefly lets that spell feel plausible.

The turn: the sea becomes a barrier she chooses

Then the poem pivots sharply with But oh. The voice that begged for gentler billows suddenly imagines the opposite outcome: if he's faithless and forgets his Nanie. In that case, she reverses her earlier commands and asks the ocean to do what it naturally does—separate: Flow still between us, thou wide roaring main. The same water that could carry him home can also keep him away. The tone shifts from summoning to bargaining, from confident address to fearful conditional. Her desire isn’t only for Willie’s body; it’s for a Willie who returns unchanged, my Willie the same, still belonging to her.

Wanting the comfort of belief more than the risk of knowledge

The last lines tighten the poem’s deepest tension: truth versus survivable feeling. She says May I never see it and may I never trow it—not just may it not happen, but may she never have to know. The closing wish is startlingly extreme: dying, believe that my Willie's my ain. She prefers a faithful illusion at death to a faithful accounting in life. That isn’t simple naïveté; it’s a recognition that betrayal would re-write every earlier image—the winter tears, the welcomed summer, the gentled waves—into something humiliating. If love has been her weather, then faithlessness would be a climate change she cannot bear to inhabit.

A sharp question the poem leaves hanging

When Nanie asks the sea to keep flowing between them if he’s untrue, is that protection or punishment? The line makes separation sound like mercy: better a wide roaring main than the sight of Willie returned but emptied of loyalty. In that sense, the poem suggests a hard truth about longing: sometimes what we want most is not reunion, but the ability to keep wanting without being disproved.