Most poems that tell children off lean on threats. Ann Taylor's poem about a girl who has hit her sister does something gentler and stranger: it scolds, but the punishment it hands out is a kiss. An adult voice catches Mary in the act of bullying her little sister, and almost every line is a command to put things right. "Go, go, my naughty girl, and kiss / Your little sister dear" opens the poem, and the last stanza loops back to the same remedy, "make it up with kisses." The central idea is that a quarrel over something trivial should be mended by affection, not prolonged by temper. The cause, we learn, is only a doll.
The speaker is the poem's most vivid presence. We never hear Mary reply; she is a silent figure being steered around the room by a stream of imperatives: "Go," "See, see," "Come," "Go, Mary." The scolding is full of staged outrage. "What! little children scratch and fight" and "Oh! Mary, it's a shocking sight" sound like a real adult drawing breath. Yet the speaker is not entirely sincere in her bafflement. "I can't imagine, for my part, / The reason for your folly" is a rhetorical pose, because the next two lines give the reason at once: the little sister had been "playing with your dolly." The point is that there is no good reason, and the speaker lets the smallness of the cause make Mary's violence look ridiculous. The first stanza also reveals what bothers the speaker at the outset: "I must not have such things as this, / And noisy quarrels here." Household peace comes before any moral principle.
The form is as tidy as the behaviour the poem demands. Each stanza is a quatrain rhymed ABAB, in lines that alternate between eight and six syllables. It is the rocking, ballad-like rhythm of a nursery song, which makes the scolding easy to memorise and to recite. The rhymes are plain and domestic: "dear" and "here," "fight" and "sight," "cry" and "eye." Taylor lets the pattern slip once, with the near-rhyme of "part" and "hurt," and the slip lands exactly where the speaker pretends to be puzzled. In the last stanza the lines acquire an extra unstressed syllable, and the rhyme becomes "kisses" and "this is." That final rhyme is slightly awkward, almost comic, and it softens the ending. The poem finishes with a small, informal shrug rather than a solemn lesson.
The word choices carry the moral. "Little" keeps returning: the little girl of the title, the "little sister," "little children," "little tears." The repetition shrinks the whole affair to nursery scale while making the victim seem more fragile. The one concrete image of suffering is the sister's crying, "the little tears that run / Fast from her watery eye." It is sentimental, but it works, because it gives Mary something to look at besides her own grievance. Notice too that the "sweet innocent" told to stop crying is, most plausibly, the hurt child, so the speaker consoles her before sending Mary to repair the damage. The most interesting word is "pet," in the closing line: "never turn a pretty play / To such a pet as this is." A "pet" here means a fit of sulky temper, and the phrase sets two kinds of behaviour against each other. Play is "pretty," meaning pleasant, while temper is ugly. The earlier word "mild," the quality children "ought to be," names the ideal the whole poem is nudging Mary towards.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it shows about how adults imagined correcting children in verse of this kind. Judging by the text, the method is persuasion by embarrassment and sympathy rather than fear: no rod, no sermon, no warning about the future, only a vivid picture of an "angry child" and a hurt one. Its picture of family life is also surprisingly lifelike. There is a doll, a fight, a wail, a parent half-exasperated and half-amused, and a quick, rhymed settlement. Even now the poem is recognisable to anyone who has been told to say sorry to a sibling, and it is easy to see why a lesson so short and rhythmical would stick.