Four lines are enough for Burns to bury a schoolmaster and tease him in the same breath. The speaker stands at the grave of Willie Michie, but instead of praying for the dead man's soul he turns to Satan with a business proposal: when you collect him, put him in charge of your children's schooling. The reason arrives in the last line like a drumroll: "For clever deils he'll mak them!" Everything before it quietly sets the trap.
The joke hangs on how slippery "clever" is. On the surface it is praise. Michie must be a gifted teacher if even devils come out of his classroom sharper than they went in. But the compliment curdles at once, because the cleverness he produces is cleverness in wickedness. Either his teaching is so effective that it improves Hell's workforce, or his pupils are the kind who need no encouragement to be devilish. The poem never says which, and that ambiguity is its charm. There is a sly reversal in picturing Satan as an anxious parent with "weans" to educate, as though Hell were a respectable household worried about its offspring's prospects. The poem also takes Michie's damnation for granted. "When ye tak him" is not an *if* but a *when*, which is a bold thing to say over a grave.
The form is compact and driven by sound. The rhyme scheme is ABAB: "banes" pairs with "weans", and "him" with "them". The two pairs behave differently. "Banes" and "weans" are single stressed syllables that land with a thud, while lines two and four end on a light, unstressed word and trail off. That makes the final "them" a soft landing for a sharp joke. The second and fourth lines also mirror each other in grammar: "tak him" and "mak them". The verbs rhyme outright and the pronouns almost do, so the Devil's act of taking and the teacher's act of making are tied together by sound. One is done to Michie, the other by him. The lines are short, seven or eight syllables with a bouncing beat, closer to a schoolroom chant than a solemn inscription, which suits a poem about teaching.
The language does a lot of the work. The opening "HERE lie" borrows the stone-cut formula of a real epitaph, and then the voice swerves. "Banes" is blunt and bodily where "remains" or "dust" would have been dignified. "O Satan" seems to echo the formal "O" of prayer, but it points the wrong way, turning devotion into a cheeky request. "Gie" is casual, like handing over a chore as a favour. The dialect gives the whole thing the sound of something said aloud with a grin, not carved in marble. A Scots reader hears "weans" as warm and homely, a word for small children at the kitchen table, so the movement from "weans" in line three to "deils" in line four turns a domestic picture into a diabolical one in the space of a breath. The final word, with its exclamation mark, is where the poem springs shut.
The poem is worth reading because it does so much with so little. The epitaph is a genre built on respect for the dead, and Burns keeps its shape but empties out the piety. Nothing in the four lines is wasted: each prepares for the last, and the last changes how we hear the first. It also leaves the reader to decide what kind of joke it is. Michie could be a master so skilled that Hell would be lucky to have him, or a dubious influence on the young, or both. A poem that can be read as a compliment and an insult at once, and be funny either way, shows exactly how much wit a few Scots words can carry.