Who is speaking?

In Burns’s poem, a gentleman is speaking to a female (his lass). The first stanza is a brief general statement to whoever may be near, including the speaker’s lass herself. In stanza two, and in the remainder of the poem, the speaker addresses the lass directly, explaining to her that even though he must travel, she will always be foremost in his thoughts because he attributes to her the beauty of both flowers and music. The speaker asserts that seas must dry and rocks must melt before his love will end. These are both figures of overstatement, and they suggest a strong commitment. More serious as a figure is the metaphor of the “sands o’ life,” which compares life to an hourglass that will eventually run out of sand. Though the concluding metaphor of lengthy travel (we might remember that at the time a trip of ten thousand miles might have taken three or four years) is also hyperbolic, the sands metaphor suggests that the speaker, underneath his exaggerations, is not without his serious side.