There Was Twa Wives - Analysis

A bawdy comedy about the body winning

Burns’s poem is built on a blunt, almost gleeful idea: wit and willpower don’t matter much when the body decides to take over. It opens by praising its two characters as twa witty wives—women defined by quick tongues and sexual experience (houghmagandie is a deliberately cheeky signal). But the story that follows doesn’t reward cleverness; it humiliates it. The poem’s pleasure comes from watching a confident social self—sharp enough to fight, flirt, and drink—get yanked back into pure physical necessity.

The humor isn’t delicate; it’s aggressively literal. Yet that literalness is part of the point: the poem insists that the supposedly low, private facts of the body are not minor details. They can interrupt argument, overturn dignity, and become the real plot.

From verbal combat to sudden exit

The first scene is social and talkative: the wives coost oot (fall out) out o'er a drink o brandy. The argument matters less than its energy: the poem starts in a world where words are weapons, where Mary is left flytin (scolding). Maggie’s move—Up Maggie rose, and forth she goes—looks like a classic storming-off gesture, a bid for control. She chooses departure rather than staying to be nagged.

Then the poem immediately undercuts that control. Maggie doesn’t leave because she’s above the fight; she leaves because she’s gaun a shiten. The grand gesture becomes an emergency. The comedy is sharp because it flips what we assume about motive: the social drama is revealed as a thin layer over something more pressing and more animal.

The “byre-en” becomes the poem’s stage

Once Maggie is outside, the poem turns the farmyard into a kind of runway for indignity: byre-en, stable, and later yon dyke-back. This isn’t a private bathroom; it’s a working landscape with edges and boundaries, places where other people, animals, and mess all belong. That setting matters because it makes the body’s breakdown feel public, exposed, almost performed.

The repeated line She farted by the byre-en' is comically insistent, like a refrain that refuses refinement. It turns a moment most people would hide into something announced, located, and narrated. Burns gives the body a geography: the sounds follow her across the yard, so her attempt to escape the argument becomes an even louder announcement of herself.

Speed, panic, and the betrayal of “nimble steps”

Maggie’s motion is described with an odd admiration: thick and nimble were her steps, As fast as she was able. The poem briefly frames her like a determined runner, which heightens the fall when it comes. The praise of her quickness is not there to honor her; it’s there to intensify the sense of panic—someone moving urgently toward a goal that’s embarrassingly basic.

The key tension is between agency and helplessness. Maggie can choose to leave Mary, choose a direction, choose speed. But she cannot negotiate with what’s happening inside her. Even her body’s outputs are described as if they’re acting on their own: the farting arrives like a companion or a heckler that won’t stop.

The collapse at the dyke-back

The poem’s “turn” is the moment of physical failure: Till at yon dyke-back the hurly brak. The phrase sounds like a rupture—something breaks, and with it her last hope of managing appearances. Even the detail that she is raxin for some dockins (reaching for dock leaves, a rough substitute for toilet paper) makes the scene more exposed: she’s improvising, caught between need and shame, using whatever the edge of the field offers.

The final image is both disgusting and strangely precise: The beans and pease cam down her thighs, and she cackit a' her stockins. Naming beans and pease turns the accident into evidence of ordinary eating—daily life returning as farce. And the ruined stockins land the humiliation in clothing, in the part of the self that faces the world. The poem ends not on reconciliation or moral learning, but on the fact of mess, the social self literally soiled.

A sharper question under the slapstick

The poem laughs at Maggie, but it also quietly laughs at the idea that anyone is safely above this. If the wives are introduced as unusually witty, and even they end in chaos, what does that say about all the little performances of dignity—especially after drink, after desire, after argument? Burns makes the body not just a punchline, but a kind of rude democracy: it levels everyone, no matter how clever they are.