As Joshua has completed reading the novel "Of Mice and Men" , today we studied the eponymous poem "To A Mouse" by Robert Burns. Joshua identified the poem's narrator and "plot" and discussed why Steinbeck titled the novel using a famous line from the poem"The best laid schemes of mice and men go oft awry." We focused on the similarities between the plight of the mouse in the poem and the novel's characters who also have "promised joy" destroyed by external deterministic forces leaving "only grief and pain." I further noted how Steinbeck's observations apply generally only to the condition of the underclasses in American society. As Joshua enjoys older English poetry, I then distributed another Burns poem, "Comin Through the Rye" and we analyzed how and why JD Salinger used lines and ideas from this poem in his famous novel"Catcher in the Rye."