"God gave to me a child in part" is a sentence that undoes itself as it goes. The first line sounds like a blessing, and the second turns it into a complaint: the child was given only "in part", yet the father's heart was given "wholly". Everything after grows from that imbalance, a love that arrived complete and a life that barely arrived at all. Stevenson, best known for *Treasure Island* and *A Child's Garden of Verses*, writes here about childhood from the opposite direction. Instead of remembering being a child, the speaker mourns one who never got the chance.
The poem defines the child almost entirely by what was missed. The child is "unborn, unmothered"; no breast was kissed, no "dear knees" climbed, and there was no "kindly feel of home". Even the poem's one vivid picture, the "privileged babbler" scrambling onto a parent's lap, is introduced by "no". It is a scene the father can see clearly because he imagined it so often, and its failure to happen is the loss. He is remembering a future. The phrase "no man wist" (no one knew) adds that the child's brief coming and going left no public mark, so the poem becomes the only record that the child was ever expected.
The diction is deliberately old-fashioned. "Whither", "goest thou", "wist", "clomb" and "kist" lift the grief into a prayerful, almost scriptural register, and the opening question, "whither now... goest thou?", treats the child as a soul in transit. Notice, though, that the stiff "thou" lasts only through the first stanza. After that the speaker says "you", and the tone moves from invocation to something closer to private speech, a father leaning towards a cradle that isn't there.
The form works in a similar way. The poem is built from rhyming couplets (part/heart, now/thou, then/men), and the first stanza is tight and chant-like, in neat eight-syllable lines. Later the lines stretch. "On no dear knees, a privileged babbler, clomb" and "Sat hand in hand with love, and all day through" overflow the earlier measure, as if feeling is pushing against the frame. The couplets promise a tidy closing click that the content refuses to supply. One pairing is quietly painful: "clomb" rhymes with "home", so the only action the child is imagined performing is tied to the place the child never reached.
The third stanza contains the poem's boldest move. The father starts calling himself "a father's voice" and "that poor father", looking at himself from outside, as the child might. He is asking the child for pity, which reverses the usual order, with the parent seeking comfort from the one he should have protected. The line "whom you never knew" holds a mutual strangeness too, because the father never knew the child either, and the poem is that missed meeting.
In the last stanza the past tense meets the present. Once he "sat hand in hand with love" and felt "immortal among mortal men", and the paradox is sharp. Happiness made him feel exempt from death, and the child, who never lived, proved otherwise. Now "alone he sits". The word "unmothered" earlier and this loneliness hint that the mother is no longer beside him, though the poem never says why, and any explanation would be a guess. The final line, "With your dear mother wondered over you", ends on "you". The relationship between parent and child consisted entirely of that wondering, with its double sense of curiosity and awe, and the poem stops there without consolation or promised reunion.
That restraint is much of what makes the poem matter. It does not say whether it comes from life, and it doesn't need to. It names a grief rarely given words: mourning for a person one never met, felt from the father's side. Its plain language, its short lines that give way to longer ones, and its refusal to comfort itself let a few sentences hold a whole imagined life that was lost.