Compare and contrast Joanna Baillie's poem 'A Mother to her Waking Infant' with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem 'Frost at Midnight'. Discuss and compare the form and content of the two poems, then say which poem you prefer and why.
             Childhood as a subject for poetry has been a meaningful representation or a construct employed in poetic writings during the Romantic Age. Likewise, Baillie and Coleridge have used the idea of childhood in their poems, 'A Mother to her Waking Infant' and 'Frost at Midnight' . Both poets have used different forms, styles, and techniques to convey inner thoughts, struggles, and hopes. Their poems have not ultimately focused on the theme of childhood but the effects of childhood on themselves, thus, casting different perspectives upon reading their poems.
             Coleridge's poem is a descriptive, unrhymed blank verse that adds to the conversational, informal style of the poem. It consists of five stanzas – each of the first four stanzas is made up of twenty to twenty-three lines, while the last stanza has only 10 lines. The effect seems to signal the ending of the poem. By clearly dividing the stanzas of the poem into the present, past, present and future helps track the poet's present calm, happy thoughts, his unseemingly unhappy childhood memories, the present situation for his child, and the future that awaits him.
             On the other hand, Baillie's poem is written in eight six-line stanzas with rhyming couplets except the fifth stanza has eight lines. The poem appears to take the form of a ballad, as it points out 'That I should sing of thee?' in the beginning stanza; and 'Thou dost not need my lay' in the last line. The speaker does appear to identify similar feelings of a parent as that of Coleridge. In fact, the term of 'A Mother' in the poem's title is quite impersonal, and generally al...