My Love Shes But A Lassie Yet - Analysis

A love song that keeps slipping into a marketplace

Burns’s speaker begins as if he’s offering patient, almost protective affection: My love she’s but a lassie yet. But the poem quickly reveals a sharper central claim: in this world, “love” is talked about in the same breath as waiting, bargaining, buying, and drinking, and that mixture makes romance feel both comic and slightly grim. The repeated lines have the sound of a chorus you could sing in company, yet what they repeat is not devotion so much as appetite—an appetite that keeps changing disguises.

A year or twa: patience that sounds like possession

The first stanza pretends to be restraint. He’ll let her stand a year or twa until she’ll be no be half sae saucy. The phrase is teasing, but it also frames her growing up as something that will make her easier to manage. Calling her saucy suggests a young woman with spirit; postponing the courtship reads less like tenderness than like a plan to wait out her independence. The tension is immediate: the speaker says my love while treating her youth like an obstacle to be timed and corrected.

From wooing to buying: the cruel joke at the center

The second stanza turns the screw. I rue the day I sought her O sounds like heartbreak, but the next lines strip sentiment down to transaction: Wha gets her doesn’t need to claim he woo’d—he can say he bought her. Burns lets that word land hard. It’s the poem’s ugliest clarity, and it reframes the earlier “waiting” as part of the same economy: time, desire, and a woman’s future are all being priced. The contradiction is bitterly funny: the speaker performs the role of lover, yet his language makes the beloved sound like goods that change hands.

The tavern as philosophy: pleasure found here

Then the poem swerves into a toast: Come draw a drap o’ the best o’t yet. It’s more than a change of subject. The speaker offers drinking as the place where the searching mind can stop searching: Gae seek for Pleasure whare ye will / But here I never misst it yet. That here matters. It makes the tavern (or the drinking circle) a substitute for the uncertainties of courtship and the compromises of “buying.” If love is tangled with money and social arrangement, at least drink promises pleasure that doesn’t pretend to be noble.

Hypocrisy uncorked: the minister can’t preach

The final stanza pushes the joke into social satire: We’re a’ dry wi’ drinking o’t—an impossible complaint, since the more they drink, the “drier” they feel, as if thirst is the real engine underneath the revel. And then comes the punchline: The minister kisst the fidler’s wife, and He could na preach for thinking o’t. Burns makes desire contagious; it hops from the singing group to the figure meant to police their morality. The kiss isn’t treated as tragedy; it’s treated as evidence. The poem suggests that the difference between the crowd and the minister isn’t virtue, only circumstance and self-control—and even that collapses the moment he starts thinking about it.

The uneasy laughter: who gets to be the joke?

The poem wants you to laugh, but it keeps offering reasons to notice what the laughter covers. If a woman can be described as someone a man might bought, and if the minister’s authority melts into the same helpless thinking as everyone else’s, what’s left of the moral stories society tells about courtship and chastity? Burns’s chorus-like repetitions feel communal, yet they also feel like a way of rehearsing excuses—sing it again, and the sharp edges start to sound normal.