Which Robert Burns poem inspires Holden's catcher fantasy?

Robert Burns's poem “Comin' Thro' the Rye” inspires Holden's fantasy of being the catcher in the rye.

Holden tells his younger sister Phoebe that he imagines himself standing in a field of rye, catching children before they fall over a cliff. He has misunderstood or reshaped a line from Burns's poem, hearing the idea as children being “caught” rather than people meeting while passing through the rye. Phoebe corrects him by explaining what the poem actually says.

That mistaken version gives the novel its title and reveals Holden's desire to protect children from the painful compromises of adulthood. The cliff is commonly interpreted as a symbol of growing up, while Holden's imagined role expresses his wish to preserve innocence. His fantasy is tender, but it also shows how impossible his goal is: children cannot remain suspended forever outside adult experience.

Burns wrote the poem in Scots, and its refrain became widely known as a song. The title is therefore not taken from an original phrase describing a guardian. It comes from Holden's emotionally important mishearing of the poem, which turns an ordinary rural image into the central metaphor of the novel.