When Facebook fails to inspire, fall back on what you remember from high school literature classes. Works every time.

Why the need for inspiration? Well, when life drags you down by handing you ordinary problems, like mice in your new RV, it’s best to get some inspiration from the degradation no matter what. Otherwise, you simply get reduced to mouse trapper. There’s more to life.

Think about Robert Burns’ “To a Mouse” with the famous line “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men … Gang aft agley.” (I stuck in … to indicate a line break. Creative grammar. I don’t think the newspaper wants me to use slash marks. I could be wrong.)

Burns must have been out plowing to see a mouse dwelling ripped into by the coulter (which is exactly what they call those little plow-things on wheat drills, in case you didn’t know). Did Burns do some plowing? He wrote “To a Mouse” in 1785. Probably lots of people marched behind coulter plows back then, even poets.

The setting sounds a big field, but he could have been plowing a little garden plot. Let’s give him poetic license.

Ah, one Burns poem and it’s working already. Those RV mice have already become bit players in the great drama of life. 

BURNS RESEARCH.

Sure enough, Robert Burns was the eldest son of tenant farmers. That translates plowboy. Maybe you knew that. Here’s a little excerpt from biography.com:

 “Since he was a boy, Robert Burns found farm work demanding and detrimental to this health. He broke up the drudgery by writing poetry and engaging with the opposite sex.”

 I’d forgotten all that about Burns. It’s been a while since high school. College too.

As for that line about things often going agley (meaning askew or awry) for both men and mice, they do indeed. We all know that.

But Burns shows his genius by going beyond that bare truth to say the mouse has a better deal because he lives in the present whereas he, the poet, looks back “on prospects drear” and looks to the future blindly, guessing and fearing what’s to come.

 What seems odd to me is that he would use the term “prospects drear” to talk about the past. That said, I myself look back ruefully on some oil prospects that looked good at the time and turned out to be dreary. Money lost. Maybe that’s his drift.

 Anyway, even though I don’t truly understand all Burns’ lines, not being an English major, I feel better already about the RV mice. Mainly I feel better because my husband and I plugged all the mouse holes in the framework under the RV. We really did. And I feel better too for letting Burns distract me from harsh reality.

 As for those mice, now homeless, do they really scheme, as Burns implies? Or do they live only in the present, as Burns implies?

 I’ll ponder his doubletalk when the next invasion occurs. I will need a distraction.