Burns begins with swords and ends with a snub. The opening stanza summons two of Scotland's bloodiest quarrels, the hatred at Harlaw and the discord at Langside "for beauteous, hapless Mary", and then lets the air out of them. Scot never met Scot "so hot", the speaker claims, as "Hal" and "Bob" did in a contest over "the famous job" of becoming the Faculty's Dean. This is mock-heroic writing. The grand comparison makes a squabble over a post look absurd, and the casual "Sir" at the end of the last two lines lowers the tone further, like a street-corner balladeer winking at his audience.
The poem is a satire on how institutions choose their leaders. Hal, we are told, is "among the first" in "genius, wit and lore", while Bob is merely "pious", a man who remembered the tenth commandment (do not covet) in the middle of his learning. Yet "simple Bob" wins. Burns explains this with a crude, proverb-like couplet: heaven can "boil the pot, / Tho' the devil piss in the fire." The line is slippery. It pretends to praise Providence, but it also hints that something dirty went on, and it drags the lofty language of heaven and devil down to the kitchen hearth.
The third stanza gives the real reason, and it is a sharp inversion of values. Hal's "pretensions" were "brassy", and talents are "qualifications saucy", as though ability were bad manners. The voters are "quite sick of merit's rudeness" and choose someone who will "owe it all" to "their gratis grace and goodness". The irony is that the electors are not judging a candidate but buying a dependant. Words like "saucy" and "rudeness" belong to the etiquette of servants and children, which shows how the electors want their Dean to behave.
Burns then turns to the Bible. Pisgah is the height from which Moses was shown the Promised Land, and Burns hopes that on his own "Pisgah height" Bob's "purblind mental vision" may be cleared. Even better, his mouth may be opened until people "swear that he has the angel met / That met the ass of Balaam". In the biblical story the donkey sees the angel when its master cannot, and is given speech. The joke is cruel and neat. Bob will only become eloquent by miracle, and the animal he resembles is the one in the story that has the sense. Calling him "Bobby" in the same stanza makes the insult feel almost affectionate, like patting a child on the head.
The final stanza drops the pretence. "Heretic Eight-and-Tairty" refers to the voters who made the majority, and the Scots spelling "Tairty" keeps the voice rough and local. The speaker curses them in the form of a blessing: "In your heretic sins may you live and die." Then comes the "sublime Majority" and the "congratulations hearty", where the grand adjective is pure sarcasm. The last couplet states the whole argument plainly: "The more incapacity they bring, / The more they're to your liking." The poem began with the largest comparison and ends with the smallest, flattest verdict.
The form supports all this. Each eight-line stanza follows the ballad pattern of longer and shorter lines, rhymed ABABCDCD. The first stanza's lines 5 and 7 ("Than 'twixt Hal and Bob for the famous job") gallop in a bouncing triple rhythm, so the energy of the verse matches the mock fury it describes. Burns also likes double rhymes such as "carry" and "Mary", or "goodness" and "rudeness". These are comic by nature, since they make the rhyme itself sound slightly pleased with its own cleverness.
What makes the poem worth reading is the nerve of its method. It never states its complaint in the abstract. It lets a Biblical donkey, a pot on the fire and a roll-call of old battles do the arguing, and it works because the humour is mean in exactly the right places. The occasion may be local, but the target is not. Wherever a group is allowed to choose its own leader, it may prefer someone who will never make it look small, and Burns's ironic toast to that preference still stings.