A man starts out with a little ambition, gets knocked down again and again, and decides to be cheerful about it. That is the whole story of "My Father was a Farmer", and Robert Burns makes it far more interesting than it sounds. The speaker is the son of a Carrick farmer, raised "in decency and order" and taught that "without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding." He heads into the world hoping to "mend my situation", but every attempt fails. Eventually he settles on a philosophy: the past was bad, the future is hidden, and "the present hour was in my pow'r, and so I would enjoy it."
The poem is honest about ambition. The speaker admits that "to be rich was not my wish, yet to be great was charming", which is a candid, slightly comic confession. He also doesn't pretend his failures are all Fortune's doing. Among the causes of his bad luck he lists "my goodnatur'd folly", a phrase that gently laughs at himself. This keeps the cheerfulness from sounding smug. His contentment comes after defeat, not instead of effort.
Fortune is the poem's invisible antagonist, and Burns gives her a personality. She has a "frown" that "hunts me down" with "all her wonted malice", as though she were a stubborn old enemy. Before the speaker gives up on her, misfortune is a "cause unseen" that "stept between" him and every goal. Against this stands his father's advice that "one... to labour bred, was a match for Fortune fairly." The word "fairly" turns the struggle into a wrestling match in which the farm-bred man at least has a fighting chance. The verbs of labour pile up to show what that means: "toil, and sweat, and moil", then "plough and sow, to reap and mow". The paired, rhyming actions have the rhythm of the work itself.
That rhythm is the poem's most distinctive feature. Each line is long, with a lilting beat, and most split in the middle on an internal rhyme: "In many a way, and vain essay", "dropt my schemes, like idle dreams", "obscure, unknown, and poor". Read aloud, each line falls into a four-beat half and a three-beat half, like a ballad or song. Then comes the refrain-like "O" that ends every line, a little exclamation that keeps the tone light and makes the poem sound as if it is being sung or told aloud by someone with no complaint worth making. It also creates a pleasing tension. The content is grim ("no help, nor hope, nor view had I"), but the sound bounces along cheerfully.
The darker note is not hidden, though. The speaker calls himself "doom'd to wander" until he lies down "in everlasting slumber." His motto, "I live to-day as well's I may, regardless of to-morrow", has a shadow behind it. He has not escaped poverty. He has decided it will not make him miserable. The claim "I am as well as a monarch in his palace" is partly bravado, but the logic behind it is simple: "daily bread is all I need, I do not much regard her." Fortune loses power over someone who stops asking her for anything.
The final stanza turns outward and becomes a challenge. Addressing those who chase "wealth and power with unremitting ardour", the speaker springs a paradox: the harder they look for bliss, the further they "leave your view" from it. He then names "the wealth Potosi boasts", an allusion to the famous silver mine, and says that even such riches would not change his preference. He would still choose "a cheerful honest-hearted clown" over them. In Burns's day "clown" meant a countryman, so the word is a proud label rather than an insult.
The poem matters because it gives a working man's view of success and then turns it into a moral argument. Burns himself came from a farming family, and it is tempting to hear his own voice in the speaker, though the poem itself only invites us to hear a fictional one. Either way, its message is memorable: honesty and good humour are worth more than getting ahead, and the person who can enjoy the present hour is the one Fortune cannot beat.