Education of Barbara

A child, your child or mine,

A bud, a flower, a flame-

How shall we make her shine

To her belovéd name?

Shall we presume to bend

With our unsteady hands

Unto a common end

What neither understands?

Show, rather, how the hills

Are like old melodies,

And how a sea-shell wills

Itself to symmetries.

Show her the valley worn,

A river's right of way,

With birds upon a thorn

Singing on Easter day.

Guide to clear fields her feet,

And there between the showers

She well may learn the sweet

Old-fashioned love of flowers.

The ivy and the oak

Their fable will disclose:

She'll learn what words he spoke,

The thistle to his rose.

And let her glimpse perhaps

In some malignant marsh

That unharmonious lapse,

Sweet voices turning harsh.

And then the steady snow

Which on our hemisphere

Sometimes will half foreshow

Where no one's voice is clear.

But never let her think

Too separately her fate,

Nor overlook the brink

Where coiled conjectures wait.

For reason lies and lies;

But if your soul, beset,

Shall question it, it dies.

Be not amazed then-let

Old virtues hedge her round

That will not hedge her in.

Where all is holy ground

There is no room for sin.

So, tethered to the stars,

She can not run astray;

And all that makes or mars

Shall find, and leave her, gay.

Structure

48 lines · 2 stanzas