The Modiewark - Analysis

A mole in the garden, or a body in trouble

Burns builds the whole poem on a joke that keeps deepening: the modiewark is, on the surface, a mole that has burrowed under the speaker’s clothes, but the language steadily pushes the reader toward a bawdier, bodily meaning. The opening complaint—below my apron it has biggit a hill—can sound like garden damage translated into domestic terms. Yet an apron is also where a pregnancy bump might be hidden, and a hill under it is hard to read as mere landscaping for long. The central claim of the poem is not just that the speaker has been “wronged,” but that desire (or sex) behaves like a burrowing creature: once it gets in, it makes new shapes, new “hills,” and leaves the speaker scrambling to name what’s happening.

The comic “consultation” that isn’t really about medicine

The repeated line I maun consult some learned clark pretends at modesty and propriety. The speaker frames the matter as a problem requiring a professional—someone educated, male-coded, and official. But the refrain keeps calling the creature wanton, a word that already implies sexual unruliness rather than a simple pest. That’s the poem’s key tension: a public voice of complaint and decorum (consult the “clark”) set against private, physical comedy that keeps slipping out in spite of itself. The tone is mock-earnest—like someone performing concern while enjoying the scandal of the telling.

The route of the “wanton” creature

The poem becomes more explicit by tracing the modiewark’s path: it gets between my taes, goes o’er my garter, and finally below my sark. The specificity of clothing and body parts matters: this is not random burrowing in a field, but a guided, intimate trespass. The speaker’s language stages a struggle—something “weary,” something persistent—yet the rhythm of the complaint has a winking momentum, as if each boundary crossed is also an escalation in the joke. What begins as “ill” done turns into a narrative of arousal and invasion told with an almost sing-song relish.

Blindness that knows exactly where to go

The line tho’ it be blin’ is one of the poem’s sharpest contradictions. A mole is literally blind-ish, but in the poem it behaves with uncanny accuracy: If ance its nose you lat it in, then to the hilts it’s out o’ sight. The phrasing makes the double meaning hard to dodge—nose, within a crack, to the hilts—as if the speaker can only tell the truth by pretending not to. The poem’s comedy depends on this: the speaker insists on the creature’s animal nature at the very moment the language describes human sex with startling precision.

Marjorie and Willy: the “dark” that explains the whole joke

The brief vignette about Marjorie and Willy turns innuendo into near-confession. Once they’re in bed—when a’ was dark—the only thing “heard” is kicking at the modiewark. The darkness acts like a social cover: what can’t be admitted in daylight is acted out at night, and then displaced onto the “mole.” This moment also shifts the poem from a single speaker’s “problem” to a shared folk knowledge: everyone knows what the modiewark really is, and everyone knows why it’s “weary” and “wanton.”

The joke’s edge: complaint as disguise

Under the laughter, the poem keeps a live question: is the speaker merely teasing, or is she trying to manage consequences? The repeated “consultation” could be read as a coy gesture toward pregnancy, reputation, or shame—especially after the hill under the apron. Burns lets the poem hover in that uneasy space: the speaker both blames the modiewark for “doing ill” and narrates its progress with suspicious fluency. The refrain returns like a practiced cover story, but by the end it sounds less like protection than proof that the body’s “wanton” truth has already surfaced.