Three times Swinburne looks at a baby, and each time he looks at one part of the body: feet, then hands, then eyes. The idea is simple and almost daring in its sweetness. A newborn's body is already a glimpse of heaven. The feet might "tempt" an angel to kiss them, the hands outdo "the sweetest flowers in all the world," and the eyes let Love see "perfect in them Paradise." The poem never looks away from this one subject, and it keeps finding new ways to praise it.
The form carries much of the meaning. Each section is a roundel, a form Swinburne is closely associated with. It has eleven lines in three stanzas, a rhyme scheme of abab bab abab, and a refrain taken from the opening words of the first line. Here the refrain is just "A baby's feet," "A baby's hands," "A baby's eyes." It lands at the end of the first and last stanzas, so each section circles back to where it began. That fits the subject. A curled fist and a closed rosebud are shapes that fold in on themselves, and the roundel does the same. Using only two rhyme sounds per section forces repetition (in the first, "feet," "meet," "heat," "sweet"), which feels like cooing over the same small thing again and again. The lines are mostly eight syllables, with the b-rhyme lines often trimmed shorter. The refrain, a bare four syllables, is the smallest unit of all, like the baby it names.
The imagery of the first two sections is botanical and marine. Feet are "sea-shells pink," then "rose-hued sea-flowers" stretching "toward the heat," and the toes become "ten soft buds that part and meet." The verb "wink" makes the toes sparkle like eyes. The hands begin as "rosebuds furled" that "ope if you touch." Then the poem surprises us. The closing grip is compared to warriors who "grip their brands / When battle's bolt is hurled." The comparison is a little comic, since the fist is tiny, but it keeps the poem from going soft. The baby's hand is delicate and fierce at once. In the feet section the phrase "life's untrodden brink" also does double work. The feet are literally unwalked-upon, and the baby is standing at the edge of a whole life still to be lived.
Section III changes the method. The similes drop away, and the poem moves into abstraction with words like "speech," "pain," "sin," "Paradise" and "godhead." The eyes are described by what they cannot yet do, since they exist "ere speech begin," before lips learn "words or sighs." Yet the last stanza claims that their glance "might cast out pain and sin" and that their speech could "make dumb the wise." That is a neat paradox, because the eyes have no speech and still silence the clever. The phrase "mute glad godhead felt within" suggests the baby holds something divine that needs no language. Reading the three sections in order, the poem seems to climb from the lowest part of the body, the feet, through the active hands, to the eyes, where the physical gives way to the spiritual. This is an inference from the order of the poem, but the upward movement is hard to miss.
The title is worth a pause. "Etude realiste" suggests a realistic study, yet nothing here is gritty or plain. A baby is shown through shells, flowers, warriors and angels. One reading is that the poet treats the baby as an artist treats a model, working through the same subject three times with a different focus each time, as the word "étude" implies. The "realism" would then lie in close attention to real details, such as the splayed toes and the grasping fingers, which are lifted by the language but still come from observation.
The poem matters less for its argument than for its technique. A subject that could easily turn into greeting-card sentiment is held in a strict, repeating form, and the sentiment gains weight from that discipline. The poem also shows how much music can do. Its pleasure comes from sound, from the returning refrain and the chiming rhymes, as much as from what it says.