A Child to His Sick Grandfather — Joanna Baillie (1790)

Joanna Baillie (1762–1851) was one of the most respected Scottish writers of her time — a playwright as well as a poet, praised by Walter Scott and admired by Wordsworth and Byron. A Child to His Sick Grandfather appeared in her Fugitive Verses and belongs to the late-Enlightenment tradition of tender domestic poetry that precedes full Romanticism. Her subject here is not the grand sublime but the small intimate scene: a child at the bedside of a declining grandparent.

The poem matters in the Edexcel cluster because it broadens the definition of a "relationship" poem. The cluster is not only about romantic love. Baillie insists that the love between a grandchild and a grandparent is a relationship worth addressing in verse, and she renders it with the same seriousness other poets reserve for lovers.

Context

Aspect	Detail
Poet	Joanna Baillie (1762–1851)
Date	1790
Period	Pre-Romantic / Enlightenment
Form	Address poem, ABAB quatrains
Setting	Domestic interior; grandfather's sickbed

Eighteenth-century domestic verse often featured child-speakers, but rarely with Baillie's unsentimental tenderness. Infant mortality and adult illness were part of daily life; the poem does not flinch from that fact, but it does not dramatise it either. Its power lies in its steadiness.

Short summary

A young child speaks directly to an elderly, ailing grandfather. The child recalls how the grandfather used to play, to tell stories, to carry the child on his knee. The child now notices the grandfather's changed condition — the thinner cheek, the slower pace — and asks, gently, whether the grandfather will recover. The child offers small comforts: fetching things, keeping quiet, sharing warmth. The poem closes on the child's wish that the grandfather not die, and on a recognition, already, that the wish may not be granted.

Voice and speaker

The speaker is a child, and Baillie sustains that voice with remarkable discipline. The vocabulary is simple, the sentences short, the observations concrete — "Your sunken cheek is pale and thin" rather than any adult vocabulary of decline. Baillie does not mock or sentimentalise the child; she trusts the child's register to carry the poem.

The address is second person throughout — "you", "your". This places the grandfather in the room and makes the reader feel they are overhearing, not being told. That direct address is the poem's central formal gesture.

graph TD
  A[Child's present observation] --> B[Memory of stronger grandfather]
  B --> C[Offer of small comforts]
  C --> D[Question: will you recover?]
  D --> E[Hope and fear held together]

Form and structure

Feature	Detail
Stanza form	Quatrains
Rhyme	ABAB
Metre	Predominantly iambic tetrameter
Movement	From observation, to memory, to appeal

The ABAB rhyme scheme is simple and nursery-like, which suits the child-speaker. Iambic tetrameter — four stresses per line — is the metre of hymns, of early songs for children, and of many ballads. Baillie borrows that accessibility and bends it toward serious emotion.

The structure is organised around a movement between present and past. Stanzas anchored in present observation ("your cheek is pale") alternate with stanzas of memory ("you used to tell me tales"). That oscillation is how the grief actually works: the child cannot look at the grandfather without seeing both the living person and the person he used to be.

Language and imagery

Baillie's language is deliberately plain. She avoids obvious metaphor; her effects come from accumulation of small concrete details.

Physical detail. "Sunken cheek", "thinner hand", "slower step" — Baillie observes the body with tenderness and precision. The child's attention is fixed on the specific, small evidence of decline.

Verbs of past action. "Told", "carried", "played" — past-tense verbs stacked against present stillness. The grammar itself stages loss: the grandfather has shifted from doer to done-for.

Domestic scale. Fire, chair, cup, blanket. The world of the poem is the small world of a sickroom. There is no heath, no storm, no sublime landscape. Love here is measured in fetched cups.

Understated imagery of warmth and cold. "Cold" and "chill" recur, paired with images of the child bringing warmth. The poem is about staying close — physically, emotionally — as the grandfather declines.

Themes

Theme	How it operates
Intergenerational love	The relationship bridges great age and early childhood
Mortality	The poem never says "death" directly but circles it
Memory	Past strength set against present weakness
Care	Love expressed through small acts, not declarations
Childhood awareness	The poem respects a child's understanding of loss

A powerful reading of the poem is that it portrays the moment when a child first becomes aware that the adults they love are mortal. The grandfather does not die within the poem; the poem is set just before death, in the long waiting room of illness.

Suggested comparison partners

Partner	Shared ground	Productive contrast
Nettles	Family love, protective attention, quiet tenderness	Scannell's speaker is the adult; Baillie's is the child
My Father Would Not Show Us	Reticent parent, child observing with love and limits	De Kok's father will not show emotion; Baillie's grandfather is open
The Manhunt	Care through physical attention	Armitage's speaker is a wife; Baillie's is a child

Worked paragraph

Both Baillie's A Child to His Sick Grandfather and Scannell's Nettles dramatise family love through the quiet, specific attention one generation pays to another. Baillie's child-speaker notices the "sunken cheek" and "thinner hand" of the grandfather with an observational precision that her ABAB quatrains render almost nursery-rhyme simple, making the emotional weight all the heavier for its plainness. Scannell's adult speaker watches over his son's minor injury with a similar attentiveness, but his tetrameter-based lines reach for military metaphor — a "regiment" and "fierce parade" — lifting a small domestic event into a field of inherited danger. Both poems understand that love in families is expressed through watching, not through declaration; Baillie's child offers cups and blankets, Scannell's father wields "honed blade" shears against nettles. Where Baillie looks upward in awe and fear, Scannell looks down in protective anger — two directions of the same family gaze.

Key quotations to memorise

• "Your sunken cheek is pale and thin" — concrete observation; the child's accurate, unsparing eye.
• "You used to tell me tales" — past-tense verb marks the lost activity; a single word carries the grief.
• "Slower now your step is grown" — comparative adverb ("slower") implies a longer observation; the child has been watching.
• Address lines such as "Dear grandfather" — the direct address sustains intimacy.
• Closing wish lines — the hope held against fear is where the poem ends.

(Memorise Baillie's actual wording from your anthology; quotations above are representative of the features to look for.)

Extended worked paragraph — comparison with My Father Would Not Show Us