For a split second, the opening line sounds like a confession. "I murder..." the speaker begins, and only the next word, "hate", turns the sentence inside out. That small trick sets up the whole song, a comic manifesto that prefers making life to ending it. The speaker is "better pleas'd to make one more, / Than be the death of twenty", and the arithmetic is both the joke and the argument: one new person against twenty dead.
War is the first target, and Burns attacks its language. "Glory's name may screen us" makes glory a curtain, something to hide behind while the killing goes on. Then he borrows the vocabulary of battle and points it somewhere else: "In wars at home I'll spend my blood— / Life-giving wars of Venus." "Wars at home" can mean domestic life or the bedroom, and "spend" has a cheeky second meaning. The soldier's sacrifice becomes an erotic one. Even the speaker's gods are chosen against the usual war-gods: "social Peace and Plenty", capitalised and personified like deities. The word "social" suggests that his pleasures are shared ones, set against the lonely grandeur of the battlefield hero.
The second stanza turns from war to martyrdom. Burns lines up a small parade of famous deaths: Socrates, Leonidas, Cato. A philosopher, a warrior and a Roman statesman all stand for dying nobly for a principle, and the speaker politely declines each one. The deflation is in the phrasing. Plato, who wrote about Socrates, is reduced to "all the fuss of Plato", as if centuries of reverence were a bit of noise. The rhyme helps. "Plato" and "Cato" are made to jingle together, so great names become rhyming tags, almost nursery-rhyme material.
The refusal widens in the next couplet: "The zealots of the Church and State / Shall ne'er my mortal foes be". The speaker won't fight or die for religious or political quarrels either. Then comes the punchline: "But let me have bold Zimri's fate, / Within the arms of Cozbi!" These two come from the Bible's book of Numbers, where Zimri, an Israelite, is killed together with Cozbi, a Midianite woman, by the zealous Phinehas. The story is usually told as a warning, but Burns takes the side of the doomed lovers and calls Zimri "bold". The word "zealots" now looks like a setup, because the zealot in the Bible story is the one holding the spear. Burns chooses the victim's version, an ending in someone's arms rather than on a battlefield or at a philosopher's deathbed.
The form suits the playfulness. The poem is two eight-line stanzas, and the lines alternate between a fuller, four-beat line and a shorter one that often ends on an unstressed syllable, so the rhythm bounces like a tune. That fits the title, which calls it a "Song". The feminine rhymes, "screen us" with "Venus", "Plenty" with "twenty", and "foes be" with "Cozbi", have a comic bounce, because rhymes that land on a soft final syllable tend to sound cheeky rather than solemn. The last one is the best. The rhyme depends on the exotic name "Cozbi", so the final word arrives like a drumroll and a wink together.
What makes the poem worth reading is that the joke carries a real conviction. It would be easy to dismiss it as a bawdy trifle, but its position is quite serious: killing in the name of glory, faith or country is not noble, and a life spent loving is a better use of a body than a death spent on someone else's cause. Burns never lectures. He lets the humour do the persuading, setting some of the most respected deaths in the classical and biblical tradition beside a single human pleasure and letting the reader decide which looks more sensible. The speaker's modest wish also makes the argument. He doesn't want to be a hero, only to be alive and warm, which is a more peaceable ambition than most of history's famous ones.