The witch Nannie is closest in pursuit of Tam and Meg.

Note that tam has barely a part to play in this chase; it is the two strong females, Nanny and Meg who dominate the action. Note that the mare is now ‘noble Maggie’, the heroine of the story.

Here the paranormal turns pornographic with the witches taking off their clothes and dancing in their underwear.

The “gray hair” of the murdered father “stick” to the knife. Burns’s attention to detail in this section increases the horror.

Tam heads home on his trusted steed.

Meg has an important role in the story. She seems to have a vivid personality of her own and takes responsibility for Tam. It is as if the women — Kate and Meg — are the characters with good sense.

One wonders how many mares in Scotland have, throughout history, been named Meg after Tam’s lovely horse.

Scots for “short skirt.” It is this outburst of arousal that draws the witches' attention to Tam. Note the caesura that separates the vigorous mood of this line from the subdued tone of the next.

The Scotch whisky takes its name from the clipper ship which in turn takes its name from the poem repeated line in the poem.

The figurehead of the clipper ship depicts the witch Nanny with the mare Meg’s tail in her grasp.

This quote is where the football club takes its nickname.

Why should Ayr men be more honest than from elsewhere, as Burns implies? In other words, he’s pulling our leg.

Tam’s wife, Kate, is not pleased. Her anger is at first described using the language of weather (“gathering…storms”) to continue the natural Scottish landscape described above.

Before Rap Genius made annotation “sexy,” Yeats critiques the scholarly process of annotation, juxtaposing its scientific distance from life with the passionate response to the world by the poets themselves, “tossing on their beds.”