Nobody in this song gets a fair hearing, least of all Willie's wife. Robert Burns, writing in the Scots of his own country, spends four stanzas demolishing a woman who never speaks, then closes each one with the same dismissive shrug: "I wadna gie a button for her!" The poem is a comic caricature, and its central idea is exaggeration for the sheer fun of it. Every detail is pushed a little past belief, and the refrain keeps the verdict cheerfully, unfairly fixed.
The opening stanza sets the scene with mock-solemn care. Willie Wastle lives "on Tweed," in a spot with the splendidly silly name of Linkumdoddie. He is "a wabster gude," a good weaver, but the next line undercuts the compliment, since he "could stown a clue wi' ony body", meaning he could steal a ball of yarn as well as anyone. His wife is "dour and din" (sullen and dingy-looking), and her mother was "Tinkler Maidgie." Before we have seen the woman herself, we have been told where she lives and who her mother was, and none of it is flattering.
Then the physical inventory begins, and it is the heart of the poem. She has one eye, "the cat has twa the very colour." Her teeth number "five rusty" ones "forbye a stump." Her tongue is a "clapper" that "wad deave a miller", which is a good joke because a miller, living among the roar of machinery, ought to be the hardest man in the parish to deafen. Her "nose and chin they threaten ither," a nicely active verb that turns two features into duelling opponents. The third stanza adds bandy legs, a limp, and a body "twisted right, twisted left, / To balance fair in ilka quarter." That is the comic logic at its best: her crookedness is so thorough that it evens itself out. The two lumps, one on her breast and one on her shoulder, are described as twins, as if they were a matched pair of ornaments.
The cat returns in the last stanza, and this time it wins the comparison outright. "Auld baudrons" sits by the fire washing her face with her paw, while Willie's wife is "nae sae trig" and wipes her "grunzie" (a word for snout) with a "hushion." Her fists are "like midden-creels," baskets for carrying dung, and her face "wad fyle the Logan Water." The final image is the grandest. A household insult swells into a landscape one, and a whole river is imagined polluted by one face. The stanzas also travel in a rough arc, from setting and family, through face and body, to hygiene and hands, then out to the countryside.
The sound of the poem matters as much as the images. The second and fourth lines of each stanza share a rhyme with a bouncing feminine ending (Linkumdoddie/body, shorter/quarter, washin/hushion), and the sixth line rhymes with the refrain's "her." The effect is a lilting, tune-like swing, which suits a text called a song. That cheerful rhythm sits against harsh vocabulary: "dour," "din," "deave," "grunzie," "fyle." Many of these Scots words have a grating, spitting quality, so the sound itself seems to pull faces. The refrain is a masterpiece of understatement too. After such hyperbole, a button is the smallest price anyone could name, and the bathos is funny.
Part of the poem's significance is how it shows Scots as a language made for this kind of vivid, physical comedy. Few English words could do what "grunzie" and "midden-creels" do so economically. Modern readers may also feel some discomfort. The joke is entirely at the woman's expense, and her appearance is the only thing she is given. That tension is worth discussing, because the poem's energy comes from a cruelty we may not wholly share, even while admiring the skill of the writing. Whatever we make of its target, the poem is a lively demonstration of how rhythm, rhyme and invention can turn a simple insult into a performance.