The best-phrased words of mice and men gang up on your aft with glee.
John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novelette Of Mice and Men takes its name from an eighteenth-century poem: “To A Mouse, On Turning Her Up In Her Nest With The Plough.” This preceding classic was written by Robert Burns (an auld acquaintance who should not be forgot, for reasons we’ll see in a moment).
Today, many of us know a line of the Burns poem as “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray,” which is close to its original meaning but hardly its original wording. Steinbeck’s rephrasing translates a bit of Scots vocabulary into more readily understood English. Burns first wrote: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft agley.”
The translation (and the need for same) is understandable, because “gang aft agley” isn’t particularly common elocution these days. And the word schemes, synonymous with the word plans in the Merry Olde Back Then and still so today, has a negative connotation on this side of the pond. Besides, some words from Burns’s time exist only if they have a beat and you can dance to them—words like “auld lange syne” on New Year’s Eve, thanks to (among others) Guy Lombardo and the guy who’s working to catch up to being older than Guy Lombardo, Dick Clark.
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Bill Brohaugh
But none of the specifica above are 40 truly related to my point that everything you know about “the best-laid plans” is wrong. If I were to concentrate on the shift in the specific words used, I would be engaging in no more than the “bickering brattle” exhibited by the Mouse when the poem’s narrator farmer digs up Her Nest while Ploughing. In a quiet moment, I suggest that when we quote “The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray” in either incarnation, we are blunting a mournful, philosophical poem. We usually use the phrase as kind of a poetic “Oops,” a learned “That’s Murphy's Law for you,” an erudite “Shit happens.” And in so doing, viewing this line as mere grousing and brattle about present misfortunes, we sap the poem of its regret, its melancholy, its trepidation, as delivered in the final stanza:
But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may he vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still thou art blest, compar’d wi' me
The present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
Regret and melancholy and trepidation—auld acquaintances that are too quickly forgot when we twist Mr. Burns’s poem and Mr. Steinbeck’s inspired reiteration into a simple “oops.”
40 Yes, “none are,” as none in this case is not intended to be “not one,” but negation of a plural group.