Burns often prefaced his poems with quotations from the Bible or Pope. In this instance the quote from Gavin Douglas (1475?-1522) is from his translation of the Aenid (Eneados) This work was the first full length translation of a major classical text to be made anywhere in Britain and earns him a deserved place in the history of the Northern Rennaissance.
It shows just how well read Burns was in that he could pick a quote for each occassion.

Tam o'Shanter is Burns most sustained single poetic effort, as well as the only example among his poems of this kind of narrative poetry. It was written at a time when he was beset with all kinds difficulties and worries, after a spell of scanty production and it showed him to be a master of verse narrative as no Scots poet had been since the fifteenth century. The speed and verve of the narration, fine, flexible use of the octosyllabic couplet, the effective handling of the verse paragraph demonstrate a degree of craftsmanship that few other users of this verse form have achieved.

The first paragraph brings to life a bustling country town at the end of a busy market day. Although there is no mention of noise, we are somehow aware of the various sounds of the evening. The clatter of horse shoes, the jangling of harness and the press of many people. Almost at once, however, the poem marks the characteristically Scottish contrast between the wild weather outside and the snug fireside within. This introductory section, describing Tam drinking happily at the inn, has a structure of its own, and moves to a climax at the seventh verse paragraph. The first twelve lines give us first a brief but vivid impression of market day at a country town, with the evening closing in, and then an equally vivid picture of the farmer's wife waiting suspiciously at home for his return

There is a pause here, before Burns proceeds to nail the general description down by applying it to Tam o' Shanter, in four sturdy lines

The parenthetical remark about auld Ayr and its inhabitant adds just the note of familiarity, of personal knowledge, that the mood of the poem requires. This is an anecdote told by someone who knows the hero and his environment; Tam becomes one of us, and the casual note of compliment to Ayr puts the reader, as it were, up at the bar, having a drink with the narrator.
The perspective shifts a little in the lines that follow. After another pause (and it should be noted how effectively Burns places his pauses and varies his tempo) the narrator takes the reader by the arm and moves with him to the rear of the pub, from which they look at the back of the unconscious Tam as he drinks at the bar with his cronies, and remind themselves of his faults and of his waiting wife

And as the narrator lets himself go in depicting Tam's wife's view of Tam (which becomes as it proceeds also our view of him), he breaks out with a somewhat beery generalization

The narrator is lost for a moment in contemplation of the stupidity of men (of other men, that is). And all the time Tam, growing more and more unconscious of the demands of domesticity, morality, even self-preservation, is drinking happily at the bar with his cronies

Here there is another pause, and then the narrator again describes how the hour is growing later and the night wilder

And then we come to the climax of this interior and to the end of first section of the poem

The picture of the jovial interior is expanded, in a blaze of happy sympathy, into a celebration of Tam's mood. The double rhymes (happy and nappy treasure and pleasure) help to give the impression of a grand, carefree, snap of the fingers, while the final rhyming of "glorious" with "victorious" sounds a slightly drunken organ note which swells the climax of this account of Tam's state of mind.
There is a long pause now, and the echoes of that glorious and victorious die away in the reader's ears. Then, in a most interesting transitional passage, the tone is suddenly changed, and the narrator, using standard English and talking with deliberate sententiousness, brings the cold world of reality into this warm atmosphere. First, we have a series of deliberately poetic generalizations about the transitory nature of human pleasures, and the application is then punched home with a proverbial statement in simple, direct language and a return to Scots diction and to Tam

Mr. Edwin Muir cites the eight lines in standard English as proof of his thesis that ever since the end of the Middle Ages the Scot, because of the peculiar linguistic and cultural situation in which he found himself, has had to feel in Scots and think in English. But it would have been easy for Burns to have found a number of Scots proverbial lines which would have expressed the thought conveyed by the lines about the poppies and the borealis.
The point here is not, surely, that the poet is introducing thought and must therefore employ standard English, but that he is being deliberate, cold, and formal, in order to contrast the unwelcome truth about pleasure with Tam's cosy feeling about it.
The English in these lines is a deliberately "fancy" English, piling up simile after simile as though to draw attention to the literary quality of the utterance. Mr. Muir's explanation of these lines takes no account of this very conscious poetic diction he sees it simply as English. Burns is seeking a form of expression which will set the sternness of objective fact against the warm, cosy, and self-deluding view of the half-intoxicated Tam, and he wants to do this with just a touch of irony.
What more effective device than to employ a deliberate neoclassic English poetic diction in these lines?
The next verse paragraph builds up the storm scene until it reaches the point where the name of the Devil can be introduced. The climactic couplet which concludes it rings out as a warning of supernatural terrors to come

We return to Tam and follow him as he rides thro' dub and mire crooning to himself to keep his courage up but not forgetting to look round

And so he approaches the haunted kirk

We now move, after a pause, to another paragraph, in which Kirk AIloway is introduced as a climax of a series of horrors

Thus inspired, Tam presses forward, in spite of the reluctance of Maggie his mare

This sharp, sudden, exclamatory line is very different in movement from the slower exclamation about the effects of whisky Inspiring bold John Barleycorn!
In the later line ( And Wow!) he is not halting the narrative to make a generalization but pressing forward into his tale in a mood of sudden excitement and astonishment. There follows immediately the eerie catalogue of what Tam saw

The note of superstitious terror is exaggerated here almost to the point of absurdity, and certainly to the point where some kind of humorous effect is achieved. Here is the devil of folklore, Auld Nick, surrounded by all his traditional properties. The objects described are so monstrously horrible that they are not quite real, like the setting of an eighteenth-century Gothic novel, and so a note of comic mockery emerges, as though Burns is gently laughing at people who could believe in such things. Yet this note does not lessen the suspense.

Tam all this while has remained motionless on his mare, watching the incredible scene, and the longer the description the more interested we become in finding out how Tam has reacted. But Burns deftly increases our suspense with another exclamation, one of a series planted effectively at intervals throughout the poem

We return to Tam, whose discerning eye has picked out one of the witches as a "winsome wench and wawlie," though Burns makes clear in a parenthetical description of her that once she grew to her full witch status she would do serious damage in the countryside.

For a moment, however, the picture of Nannie dancing is human and strangely touching

The suggestion of a fall from an earlier happy, human state gives a momentary flash of pathos to the narrative, but it is modified by humor and not sustained long enough to threaten the mood of the poem as a whole
The next verse paragraph describes Nannie's furious dancing, the verse getting faster and faster

It is interesting that the change is described without taking a new paragraph, to begin a new paragraph after Tam's shout would be a pause between the shout and the resulting change, whereas the effect of sudden alteration is desired. So Burns describes the beginning of the witches' attack without taking breath and only after he has got the attack going does he pause. The next paragraph continues and elaborates the description of the pursuing witches and the fleeing Maggie

At this moment of suspense Burns deliberately tantalizes the reader again by holding up the narrative while he wags his finger and shakes his head at Tam. The poet's mock-sympathetic confidence in his hero's doom has comic implications, which are reinforced by the imagery

Maggie pushes on, after that sudden slowing down, the verse gains speed again

Tam and his mare gain the bridge, and safety, for witches cannot cross running water. But Nannie, pressing close behind, had removed poor Maggie's tail

There is an abrupt pause at this point. The story is now told, the poet's tone indicates that something more is to come. And, after the expectant pause, it does come a mock moral, a deliberately absurd oversimplification of the meaning of the tale to make it a warning against drinking and wenching

And on that note of Remember! - like the speech of the ghost in Hamlet - the poem comes to an end.
Among the many qualities of Tam o' Shanter which show Burns technical skill in handling this kind of verse narrative - the effective use of the octosyllabic couplet, the variations in tempo, the use of the verse paragraph, and the placing of the pauses - perhaps the most remarkable is his handling of the tone of the poem.

The tone is at once comic and full of suspense, shrewd yet irresponsible, mocking yet sympathetic; there is a fine balance here between mere supernatural anecdote and the precisely etched realistic picture, as it is maintained throughout the poem.
Tam o' Shanter is the work of a virtuoso. Yet it is the only verse narrative of its kind that he wrote, the product (if tradition is to be trusted) of one day's truancy from the work and worries of his farm and his excise duties during one of his most troubled periods.

Clearly, with a little leisure and a little relief from the carking cares that continually pressed on him, many other new aspects of his poetic genius might have been as profitably explored.

It is easy to see why Burns, wiser than his Edinburgh advisers, continually longed for a government job which would leave him with some time of his own.

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