First printed in Stewart, 1801.
Curs’d be the man, the poorest wretch in life,
The crouching vassal to the tyrant wife,
Who has no will but by her high permission;
Who has not sixpence but in her possession;
5 Who must to her his dear friend’s secret tell;
Who dreads a curtain-lecture worse than hell.
Were such the wife had fallen to my part,
I’d break her spirit, or I’d break her heart;
I’d charm her with the magic of a switch,
10 I’d kiss her maids, and kick the perverse bitch.
This is given without comment in Kinsley’s Dubia section, leaving readers to ponder whether he considered it to be an undated composition by Burns or that he rejected it. Mackay accepts it as a work of Burns. It was first printed in Glasgow in 1801 among Poems Ascribed to Robert Burns. There are several short pieces on the theme of tyrannical wives preserved at the British Museum’s archive of single sheet poetry from the 1790s. Burns may have seen some of these.