Robin promises a whole winter's food and turns up with three goose-feathers and a pocket knife. That last stanza of Burns's song is the sharpest joke in it, and the rest builds toward it. The speaker is a young woman looking back, half indignant and half amused, on how she was talked round by a man with big words and empty hands.
The story is told in quick, plain strokes. She goes up to Dunse to "warp a wab o' plaiden", that is, to set up the threads for a length of coarse woollen cloth. At Robin's father's gate, "wha met me but Robin?" The question is the whole seduction in a breath: an errand that should have been ordinary, and a man standing in the way. In the second stanza she is still stung by his nerve. "Was na Robin bauld", she says, and then stresses her own respectability: she is "the El'er's dochter", a church elder's daughter. The poem never says exactly what "sic a trick" was, but the hints are strong. Judging by the wording, she has been tricked into something she regrets, and the vagueness is part of the humour, since everyone listening can fill in the gap.
The refrain gives the song its character. "Robin shure in hairst, / I shure wi' him" means that Robin reaped at harvest and she reaped beside him. Then comes "Fient a heuk had I", which loosely means "I hadn't a sickle, not one," followed by "Yet I stack by him." She did the work with no tool, and she stuck by him anyway. Read on its own, that sounds like loyalty, but after the verses it sounds more like stubborn, rueful comedy. Harvest vocabulary also lets the line carry a second meaning, and it's easy to hear one in the sickle-less reaping. The sound of "stack" is close to "stuck", which may be another pun. Each time the chorus returns, the context has shifted, so the same words get funnier and sadder.
The form suits that effect. The lines are short, usually two or three beats, so the poem moves at a skipping, dance-like pace. The rhyme is loose and works mostly on the second and fourth lines of each stanza: "plaiden" with "Robin", "cotter" with "dochter", and in the last stanza a clean pair, "vittle" and "whittle". That clean rhyme arrives exactly when the joke lands, and it is the most satisfying sound in the song. "Vittle" (food) is a homely, comfortable word. "Whittle" is its small, shabby echo, a little knife. The promise and the reality sit one rhyme apart.
The vocabulary does a lot of the work as well. "Fient a" and "Fient haet" are mild Scots oaths meaning roughly "devil a bit", and they give the speaker a salty, spoken voice. Many of the nouns come from a working farm: cloth, gate, harvest, sickle, food for winter, geese. These are the things that decide whether a poor household survives, which is why Robin's gifts are so cruel a joke. Three feathers is hardly even a pillow's worth. The speaker's anger is practical, not romantic. She wanted to be fed.
One puzzle is the title. Nothing in the words shows a henpecked husband. What we hear is a woman's grievance about a man who promised more than he had. Perhaps the title belongs to the song's place in a collection, or perhaps it hints at what happens after the story ends, but the text itself does not say. A reader should be aware of the gap and enjoy what is actually on the page.
What makes the song worth reading is how much it does in so few words. Burns is remembered as Scotland's national poet, and part of his reputation rests on his gift for Scots song, for catching the rhythm and bite of speech. Here a whole small drama is packed into three stanzas and a refrain: temptation, social pride, a broken promise, and a woman who sees through it all and sticks around anyway. The deflating final detail leaves her without a sickle and without a winter store, but with her sense of humour intact.