Burns drew on his vast experience gathering Scottish folk tales and songs to shape his mock-epic adventure. “Tam O’Shanter” is a traditional ballad, a story with lots of rousing action all told in tightly controlled couplets. The ballad is one of the most ancient traditions in poetry as it represents poetry’s embrace by the masses. The ballad reflects the love of a good story and the appreciation of patterned beat and regular (what is termed expected) rhyme. The tight form reflects the role that recitation played in the poetry of antiquity. The regular beat and the predictive rhyme scheme mimics the form of songs; indeed, many ballads were set to music, and itinerant minstrels, moving town to town, would perform the ballads from memory. The intention of a ballad then was to entertain with the story’s action, delight with its clever form, and leave the audience with an easy-to-grasp lesson or two.

Within this tradition, Burns’ ballad maintains the reader-friendly form. The poem is divided into blocks of narrative that are periodically broken up with quatrains (four-line stanzas) that provide a broader view of the action, most often reflecting the presence of a narrator who is retelling the story of Tam.