Burns opens with a goodbye, but it is a strange one, because the speaker never really leaves. "Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North" sounds final, yet by the fourth line he has sworn that the hills are loved "for ever", and in the chorus he announces that his heart "is not here" at all. The body goes; the heart stays behind. That split between where a person is and where they belong is the poem's central idea, and everything in the song is arranged to make us feel it.
The rhythm does much of the work. The lines roll along in a lilting, four-beat pattern, with two light syllables between the stresses, so that they feel like a tune rather than speech. It is easy to hear it as a walking pace, or even the gallop of the chase the chorus describes. The rhymes are simple couplets that land like chimes: North and Worth, rove and love, snow and below. In the chorus the rhyme of "here" with "deer" is quietly clever. It ties the dull place where the speaker stands to the wild place he longs for, so that even in sound the two cannot be kept apart.
Repetition gives the poem its emotional pull. "Farewell" appears six times, and in the last stanza it begins four lines in a row. The effect is less of leaving than of lingering. The speaker touches each part of the landscape in turn (mountains, straths, forests, torrents) like someone who keeps turning back at the door. Every goodbye is also an inventory of what he loves. The refrain works in the same way. "My heart's in the Highlands" returns three times in the chorus, and the closing "&c." in the text shows it coming back after every stanza, as if the thought will not stay away.
The imagery moves from idea to substance. The first stanza is abstract: the Highlands are the "birth-place of Valour" and the "country of Worth", with the capital letters turning virtues into things the land itself produces. It is a proud, idealising claim. From then on the poem drops into the physical world, with mountains "high-cover'd with snow", "green vallies below", "wild-hanging woods" and "loud-pouring floods". The compound adjectives pack in movement and sound. Woods that hang suggest trees clinging to steep slopes, and floods that pour loudly make us hear the water. This is a rugged, noisy landscape, not a tidy pastoral one. The poem is written mostly in standard English, so "straths", the broad river valleys, stands out as a distinctly Scottish word and gives the list a local touch.
The verbs set up a contrast between the speaker and his heart. The man himself can only "wander" and "rove", and the chorus ends with the aimless "wherever I go". His heart, meanwhile, is busy and purposeful: "a-chasing the deer", "following the roe". The old-fashioned "a-" prefix makes the chase sound endless, still going on while he speaks. The repeated word in "Chasing the wild-deer" picks up from the line before, so the sentence seems to run on like a breath. The heart is the hunter, free and moving. The speaker is the one who feels stuck, and the poem never says why he must go. Judging by the text, Burns leaves the cause blank on purpose, so that anyone who has been away from a loved place can fill it in with their own story.
That is a large part of the poem's significance. Burns is Scotland's best-known poet, and this is a song, not a piece meant only for the page. Its vocabulary is plain, its rhymes are obvious, and its refrain is easy to remember. Yet it gets at a feeling that is hard to put into words, the way a place can stay lodged in a person long after they have left it. The refrain turns that feeling into something a whole room could sing together, which may be why the line "My heart's in the Highlands" still works as a way of describing homesickness. The poem says goodbye six times and still cannot let go, and that is exactly what it is about.