She's Fair and Fause

She's Fair and Fause - fact Summary

Personal Heartbreak Expressed

Written in 1792, this short lyric voices a speaker wounded by a faithless lover. He alternates angry self-pity and blunt resignation: mourning a broken vow and lost money, then concluding he must let the “bonie lass gang.” The second stanza generalizes the hurt into a caution about women’s fickleness while admiring physical beauty but denying moral or angelic virtue. The poem reflects Burns’s personal experiences with love and heartbreak and is delivered in the poet’s Scots idiom, mixing bitterness with wry, pragmatic acceptance.