Robert Burns opens with weather, and the weather is bad. Night is "gath'ring fast," the blast is "wild, inconstant," and a "murky cloud" drives across the plain. The speaker is walking alone by the River Ayr, "prest with care," and the landscape seems to have taken on his mood. Within a few lines, though, we learn that the storm is only the beginning. The poem is a farewell to home, and its real subject is how painful it is to go.
The structure is built to bring that out. Each of the four stanzas has eight lines of tetrameter couplets (fast/blast, rain/plain), and the last couplet always ends on the rhyme "Ayr": care, dare, tear, declare. The river is the anchor of the poem, and the speaker is pulled back to it at the end of every stanza. The closing line changes each time, and the changes tell the story. In the first stanza he wanders "along the lonely banks of Ayr." In the second he faces danger "far from the bonie banks of Ayr," and by the third he must "leave" them. In the last stanza he calls out "Farewell, the bonie banks of Ayr!" The place moves from "lonely" to "bonie," the Scots word for beautiful. Once he is leaving, the place no longer looks bleak. It looks precious.
Burns uses nature carefully in the opening stanzas. "The hunter now has left the moor, / The scatt'red coveys meet secure." The partridges are safe and gathering together, while the speaker has no such shelter. In the second stanza Autumn is a mourner, grieving her "rip'ning corn" torn by "early Winter's ravage." The "placid, azure sky" is crossed by a "scowling tempest," so calm and threat share the same view. The speaker's blood runs chill, and his mind jumps to "the stormy wave, / Where many a danger I must dare." The poem never states the journey outright, but the sea and the "fatal, deadly shore" suggest a long voyage from which he may not return.
The third stanza turns everything around. "'Tis not the surging billow's roar, / 'Tis not that fatal, deadly shore." Having piled up the dangers, he dismisses them with a bleak piece of logic: "The wretched have no more to fear." Someone already so unhappy cannot be much more frightened by death. What hurts is emotional. "Round my heart the ties are bound, / That heart transpierc'd with many a wound." The images get violent. Bonds of affection are tied round a heart that is already pierced, and when he tears the ties they "bleed afresh." Ties don't normally bleed, and the mixed metaphor makes the pain feel physical, as if leaving cuts into his body.
The last stanza turns to a wider goodbye. He addresses "old Coila's hills and dales," Coila being an old poetic name for the district around Ayr. The "healthy moors and winding vales" are warmly remembered, but they are also "scenes where wretched Fancy roves, / Pursuing past, unhappy loves." The place is tangled up with memory and regret, so leaving it brings relief and grief together. The most interesting line is "Farewell, my friends! farewell, my foes! / My peace with these, my love with those." Because "these" points to the nearer word, foes, and "those" to friends, he seems to be offering peace to his enemies and love to his friends. In leaving, he lets go of quarrels as well as affections.
The poem's emotional language is conventional for its period, with "bursting tears," "wretched," and a heart that "declares" itself. What lifts it is its discipline. The tight couplets and the returning "Ayr" rhyme keep the feeling contained, so the speaker seems to be fighting for composure and only just managing it. The weather pushes in from outside while grief presses from within, and the third stanza's reversal shows which of the two matters more.
The poem is significant because it shows how well Burns, a Scottish poet, could make a song carry real feeling. It turns a familiar landscape into a measure of what the speaker stands to lose, and it ends on the name of the place rather than on any grand statement about exile. The sea may be dangerous, but the poem says the harder part is the departure itself.