Burns begins by shrugging. Europe is watching "the fate of Empires and the fall of Kings," politicians are "quacks of State" each peddling a private remedy, and even children "lisp the Rights of Man." Into this din the speaker slips a polite little request: "just let me mention" that women's rights deserve "some attention." The phrase "mighty fuss" is a deliberate deflation. Grand political slogans have become fashionable noise, and the poem will borrow their vocabulary to make a case of its own.
That case is the poem's trick. The three "Rights" on offer are protection, decorum and admiration, which are really favours men may grant and have little to do with legal powers or freedoms. The first is shown through a picture straight from sentimental convention: a "tender flower" that "must fall before the blasts of Fate" unless "your shelter ward th'impending storm." The woman is helpless, lovely and ornamental, and the "you" is plainly a male audience invited to feel gallant. The title tells us the lines were meant to be "Spoken by Miss Fontenelle," and the direct address supports that. The poem reads like a performance aimed at a room, which makes its flattery all the more deliberate.
The second right is the most revealing, because it is never properly named. The speaker says "needless here is caution," since "each man of sense" would "die before he'd wrong it—'tis decorum." The unnamed right seems to be freedom from insult or molestation. Burns lets it hover in a cloud of politeness, and the reassurance sounds a little too eager. The men of "far less polish'd days" who would "swagger, swear, get drunk, kick up a riot" are safely dismissed as "Gothic times," and the audience is then complimented: "you are all well-bred." Good manners are presented as a woman's entitlement, but they are also something she must keep praising. A right that depends on the goodwill of the person it restrains is a curious kind of right, and the poem never quite says so.
The form helps the joke. The verse runs in rhymed couplets of roughly ten syllables, the polished measure of witty, public verse, and the stanzas swell and shrink unevenly, as if the speaker were improvising a speech. Burns leans on feminine rhymes such as "mention/attention," "connection/protection" and "constitutions/revolutions," which chime with a faintly comic bounce. Sometimes the rhyme is openly cheeky: "before him" with "decorum," and finally "summon" with "Woman." The reader feels the speaker enjoying her own cleverness.
The third stanza turns the poem's imagery from gardens to warfare. Admiration is the right "nearest" to "fluttering female hearts," and even "the Rights of Kings, in low prostration, / Most humbly own" it. Then comes a rapid list, "Smiles, glances, sighs, tears, fits, flirtations, airs," a whole arsenal of small gestures. "'Gainst such an host what flinty savage dares," asks the speaker, and the "rebel arms" are now raised by any man foolish enough to resist. The language of revolution has been turned upside down. Rebellion against the "awful Beauty" of women is the crime, and women are the established power.
The closing couplet pushes this to a climax: "truce with kings, and truce with constitutions," and then the shout of "ça ira!", a French phrase that carries echoes of revolutionary rallying, followed by capitals: "THE MAJESTY OF WOMAN!" The word Majesty, normally reserved for kings, is handed to women, and the poem ends as a toast.
What makes the poem worth reading is that you cannot easily tell who is being mocked. It can be taken as affectionate gallantry, as a gentle dig at the self-importance of political slogans, or as quiet irony about how little the "rights" it lists actually give women. The cheerful surface supports all three readings at once. Few poems about rights are so entertaining, and fewer leave the reader so unsure whether the speaker is asking for too much or settling for too little.