A pack of children burst in with an "unco shout": the deuks, they cry, have knocked their daddie over. What follows is not a rescue but a quarrel. Their mother, the "feirrie auld wife," shrugs it off. "Fien-ma-care" is roughly "the devil may care." She then turns the accident into a verdict on her husband's whole character. He is a "paidlin' body," someone who potters about, and a "fusionless carlie," a man without pith or sap. The ducks are only the occasion. The real subject is a marriage in which one partner feels the other has run out of energy.
Burns does a lot of comic work with word choice. "Paidle" is close to English "paddle," and the poem seems to want us to hear the ducks in it: "He paidles out, and he paidles in, / An' he paidles late and early." The repeated verb moves the way the man does, back and forth with no destination, and its soft, slurred sounds make a dawdler audible. The wife counts her grievance as well as voicing it. "This seven lang years I hae lien by his side" turns her patience into a measured sentence, served and now complained about.
The construction suits something meant to be sung, and the heading calls it a song. The lines alternate between a longer one of about four beats and a shorter one of about three, so the opening line lilts: "The BAIRNS gat OUT wi' an UNco SHOUT." Every even-numbered line ends with a tacked-on "O," and the rhymes all fall on the same -ie sound: daddie, body, early, carlie in the first stanza, then Nansie, donsie, early, sairly in the second. The unrhymed lines in between keep the talk sounding like speech. That bouncing chime means the sharpest remarks, such as "fusionless carlie," arrive on a tune that sounds almost jolly.
In the second stanza the husband answers. "O haud your tongue" is a plain order to hold her tongue, but the next word is her name, "Nansie." It is the only personal name in the poem, and it comes from him. He is trying to remind her of an intimacy as well as shush her. His defence rests on shared memory, and the repeated "I've seen the day, and sae hae ye" makes it a pact between equals: you remember too. Then comes a homely image of love. "Ye butter'd my brose" is care expressed through food, the oatmeal dish made richer for him.
The poem's neatest move comes next. "Late and early" was her complaint about his aimless hours. When he repeats it, it describes her devotion: "cuddl'd me late and early." The same phrase now means something warmer, and her contempt is answered in her own words. The comedy turns here, because he does not win the argument by denying anything. He concedes. "Downa-do's come o'er me now" is a bashful, slightly comic name for failing powers, literally the "can't-do's." The last line, "And oh, I find it sairly, O!", is the only true exclamation of feeling in the song. The "O" that has been a mere refrain all the way through suddenly sounds like a sigh.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it refuses to settle on one reaction. We laugh at the ducks, the shouting children and the wife's brisk "fien-ma-care." By the end we are sympathising with an old man who knows exactly what he has lost and says so without self-pity or bluster. The wife is not made a villain either. Her sharpness reads as the frustration of someone who remembers livelier times too. In sixteen lines the poem makes two people sound like a real couple, and the Scots does much of that work. Words like "fusionless" and "downa-do" have no tidy English equivalents, and they carry the household's own voice. A quarrel that begins as a farce about ducks ends as a quiet, honest admission of what it costs to grow old together.