The Cottager To Her Infant - Analysis

A lullaby that argues with winter

The poem reads like a mother’s whispered persuasion: the cottager tries to talk her infant into sleep by insisting that the whole world has already agreed to rest. Its central claim is simple but felt: sleep is not just the child’s need but a kind of shelter the mother wants to build against the cold season. From the first line, The days are cold and the nights are long, the speaker names a winter that seems to stretch time itself, and the lullaby becomes a small domestic counter-spell against that length.

The house as a map of quiet (with one small exception)

To make sleep feel inevitable, the speaker inventories the cottage’s stillness: The kitten sleeps upon the hearth; The crickets long have ceased. Even the wind is given a voice—The north-wind sings—as if nature is performing a mournful song that the mother must gently override. But her argument depends on an honest admission: there is, technically, something awake. The poem’s tiny comic detail, the 'wee', hungry, nibbling mouse, proves the speaker is not pretending everything is perfectly serene; she is noticing the one small movement in the house and using it to ask the child, almost playfully, why so busy thou?

Fear, light, and the mother’s quick reassurance

The tonal turn arrives with Nay!—a sudden, protective interruption. The speaker anticipates the infant’s startle at that sparkling light and immediately reinterprets it: 'Tis but the moon on a window pane bedropped with rain. That phrase makes the scene tactile: wet glass, bright moon, winter darkness. The reassurance is tender, but it also reveals a tension beneath the lullaby: the world outside is strange and potentially frightening, and the mother’s voice must constantly translate it into safety.

Rest versus hunger: the poem’s quiet contradiction

The poem keeps saying All merry things are now at rest, yet it cannot fully erase need. The mouse is hungry, and the infant’s wakefulness suggests a similar bodily insistence that doesn’t obey bedtime. In that light, the closing request—sleep again, / And wake when it is day—is less a command than a hope that time can be made orderly: night for sleeping, day for waking, winter for endurance. The mother’s lullaby doesn’t deny the cold; it tries to set a warmer rhythm inside it, with the child upon my breast as the poem’s safest center.