"Crabbit ", also variously titled "Look Closer", "Look Closer Nurse", "Kate", "Open Your Eyes"Joanna Bornat, "Empathy and stereotype: the work of a popular poem".
"Perspectives on Dementia Care", 5th Annual Conference on Mental Health and Older People, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, 3 November 2005. or "What Do You See?", is a poem written in 1966 by Phyllis McCormack, then working as a nurse in Sunnyside Hospital, Montrose. The poem is written in the voice of an old woman in a nursing home who is reflecting upon her life. ''Crabbit'' is Scots for "bad-tempered" or "grumpy". The poem appeared in the ''Nursing Mirror'' in December 1972 without attribution. Phyllis McCormack explained in a letter to the journal that she wrote the poem in 1966 for her hospital newsletter. This story was corroborated by an article from the ''Daily Mail'' on 12 March 1998, where Phyllis McCormack's son wrote that his mother composed it in the 1960s, when she submitted it anonymously with the title "Look Closer Nurse" to a small magazine intended just for Sunnyside. The next year, the poem was published in

Chris Searle Chris Searle (born 1 January 1944) is a British educator, poet, anti-racist activist and socialist. He has written widely on cricket, language, jazz, race and social justice, and has taught in Canada, England, Tobago, Mozambique and Grenada. He h ...

's poetry anthology ''Elders'' (Reality Press, 1973), without title or attribution. Subsequently, a wealth of urban legend has sprung up surrounding this humble work. Most of the legend associated with this poem attributes it to a senile elderly woman in a Dundee nursing home (or sometimes an Irish nursing home), where a nurse found it while packing her belongings following her death. Searle himself was quoted in 1998 as saying of the poem's authorship: "I don't think we'll ever know. I accepted it as authentic." (i.e. as the authentic writing of an infirm old woman). The poem, which paints a rather sad picture of a decrepit woman's final days in care, has been quoted in various works written for and about the caring professions in order to highlight the importance of maintaining the dignity of the lives of elderly patients. It is also included in the

Edexcel Edexcel (also known since 2013 as Pearson Edexcel) is a British Multinational corporation, multinational education and examination body formed in 1996 and wholly owned by Pearson plc since 2005. It is the only privately owned examination board ...

IGCSE The International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE) is an English language based examination similar to GCSE and is recognised in the United Kingdom as being equivalent to the GCSE for the purposes of recognising prior attain ...

English Literature English literature is literature written in the English language from United Kingdom, its crown dependencies, the Republic of Ireland, the United States, and the countries of the former British Empire. ''The Encyclopaedia Britannica'' defines E ...

poetry anthology. Several variants exist including, "A Nurse's Reply" and "Cranky Old Man".

Notes

The poem can be seen in the background in the

Magnetic Scrolls Magnetic Scrolls was a British video game developer active between 1984 and 1990. A pioneer of audiovisually elaborate text adventure games, it was one of the two largest and most acclaimed interactive fiction developers of the 1980s. ''Magnet ...

logo.

References

{{Reflist 1973 poems