Jeremiah 15th Ch 10 V - Analysis

A biblical lament repurposed as social complaint

The poem borrows the voice of scripture to make a pointed, almost comic grievance about money and reputation. The title points to Jeremiah’s cry of being born a man of strife, and Burns keeps that phrasing: Ah, woe is me, my Mother dear! The central claim, though, is less about cosmic fate than about a harsh local economy: the speaker is treated as a public nuisance not because he has done wrong, but because he won’t (or can’t) play the money game everyone else accepts.

That mismatch between the high, prophetic complaint and the gritty talk of credit, percentages, and being blackguarded is the poem’s engine. Burns makes the speaker sound like a cursed biblical figure, then immediately forces him into the small humiliations of ordinary life.

Born for trouble, but the trouble is social

The opening stanza frames the speaker as doomed from birth: his mother has born him into a world where he must bear sair contention. The verbs are heavy, almost legal or judicial: people hate, revile and scorn him. Yet nothing specific is named—no crime, no betrayal—only the atmosphere of hostility. That vagueness matters: it suggests a community that has decided what he is (contentious, untrustworthy) and then treats him accordingly.

The five per cent problem: virtue as a social liability

The poem sharpens when it gets concrete: I ne’er could lend on bill or band That five per cent might bless him. Whether this is moral refusal (he won’t profit from interest) or practical inability (he has nothing to lend), the effect is the same: he cannot benefit from the respectable mechanisms of credit. Then comes the brutal symmetry: borrowing is no better, because The de’il a ane would trust him. He is locked out from both sides—unable to be a creditor, unable to be a debtor—so he’s excluded from the very system that grants people standing.

There’s a bitter joke in the word blest beside five per cent. Burns lets finance masquerade as salvation. In that world, interest isn’t merely profit; it’s a kind of social grace the speaker can’t receive.

Coin-denied, publicly shamed

By the last stanza the speaker names his condition plainly: a coin-denied wight, By Fortune quite discarded. The phrasing sounds like a verdict. But Burns won’t let the poem end in dignified tragedy; he pushes it into everyday cruelty: day and night he’s abused By lad and lass. The insult isn’t coming only from powerful men or official institutions; it’s communal, casual, constant, and even youthful. That detail—lad and lass—makes the scorn feel like street noise, not a serious moral judgment. It’s reputational vandalism.

The poem’s key tension: integrity without a social language

The speaker’s complaint carries a contradiction that Burns keeps alive: he sounds proud of not taking part in the interest economy, yet he also sounds wounded that the same economy has marked him as untouchable. If he ne’er could lend for five per cent, is that a quiet boast, or the confession of someone too poor to be respectable? Burns doesn’t settle it. Instead, he shows how easily a community turns financial position into moral verdict—how quickly being without money becomes being without credibility.

A sharper question the poem leaves hanging

If no one will trust him to borrow, and he refuses (or is unable) to lend, what kind of life is left that won’t be read as failure? The cruelty of being blackguarded day and night suggests that, in this world, poverty isn’t private misfortune—it’s treated as public evidence, and the crowd supplies the punishment.