A small child is crying, and within four lines her mother has the tear wiped away and the girl's head on her bosom. Jane Taylor, who is remembered above all for the verses now known as "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star", writes here about something much smaller and more ordinary: a tired child at the end of the day. The poem is built from a mother's soothing voice, but it slowly becomes clear that the soothing has a lesson folded inside it. Crying is allowed to be comforted, but it is not allowed to continue.
The first stanza is all tenderness. The mother's questions are gentle, and her words double as stage directions: "There -- lay down your head on my bosom -- that's right." The dashes catch her in the act of arranging the child, and the voice feels spoken rather than written. Notice, though, that Emily never answers. The mother asks "what's the matter" and then supplies the answer herself in the next stanza, "What! Emmy is sleepy, and tired with play?" The child's feelings are guessed at and settled by an adult, and the girl gets no chance to explain her own tears.
The names also shift as the mother's attitude does. The child begins as the formal "little Emily", becomes the pet name "Emmy" at the moment of diagnosis, and is later "my darling" and finally "my dear child". Meanwhile the mother refers to herself in the third person, "let mamma wipe the tear", "tell mamma", "Mamma cannot love". It is a habit of nursery talk, but it also makes her sound like an institution as much as a person. When the second stanza turns on its pivot line, "Mamma cannot love little girls that are so", the rule sounds as if it comes from the role of mother rather than from this particular woman's feelings. The word "so" is a quiet evasion, since the mother will not even repeat "fretful" and just points at it. The mention of Betty, who is told to "fetch her away", suggests a household with help, though the poem gives us no more than that.
The form fits this mixture of warmth and instruction. The poem is in rhymed couplets (cry/eye, right/to-night, play/away, know/so), and the lines bounce along in a long, lilting rhythm of roughly four beats, with the light, quick syllables of a nursery rhyme. Because the rhyme falls so neatly, the final line of each stanza lands like a small verdict. The first ends on "to-night", the second on the warning about love, and the last on the order "don't fret any more", which echoes the title almost word for word. The couplets give the sense that everything is under control, which is exactly what the mother wants the child to feel.
The last stanza is the most revealing. "She shall soon go to bed and forget it all there" treats sleep as a kind of eraser, as though the crying were an embarrassment to be wiped out along with the tears. Then the smile arrives: "Ah! here's her sweet smile come again, I declare". It sounds like a visitor returning, and it is greeted with relief and approval. The mother's next line is the sharpest in the poem: "That's right, for I thought you quite naughty before." Tears have been quietly counted as bad behaviour, and the smile is the reward for stopping. The girl was tired, which is nobody's fault, and yet she is treated as having been in the wrong.
That is why the poem is worth reading closely. On the surface it is a sweet bedtime scene, and the mother's comfort is real. But the poem also shows how a child learns that love is tied to good behaviour and that feelings should be tidied away before bed. Its title is a rule, and the poem enacts it by turning a physical need for sleep into a moral lesson. A modern reader may feel uneasy about the conditional love in the second stanza, and that unease is part of the poem's interest. It preserves, in a few light couplets, a whole attitude toward children's emotions, one that sounds gentle even as it asks for silence.