Christopher Smart turns a birthday greeting into a royal proclamation. The speaker calls on the "nymphs of the Parnassian plains" to sing, then sends the news out stanza by stanza: tell the Graces, tell Venus, tell Pallas, tell Diana, tell Cupid, Hymen and Jove. Every message amounts to the same thing, that Nancy equals or beats the goddess in question, and every stanza closes on the same claim: she "was born for me." Nancy is named in the title as the speaker's wife, and the poem's central idea is that an ordinary domestic occasion deserves the full machinery of classical myth. By the end, the speaker admits that his own life depends on her.
The form suits that cheerful mood. The lines are short, mostly eight syllables of iambic rhythm, so the poem skips along like a dance tune: "'Tis Nancy's birth-day--raise your strains." Each stanza is two rhyming couplets, and the second couplet always ends with "me." The first couplet changes (strains/plains, bound/round, rove/grove), but the closing rhyme keeps returning to the same sound: glee, free, fee, agree, thee, be. The refrain behaves like a chorus, and it ends every stanza on the speaker's own pronoun. However many deities march past, the last word belongs to him.
Smart chooses his goddesses carefully, and together they add up to a portrait of the ideal woman. The Graces stand for ease and charm, and "elegantly free" praises a natural grace. The "buxom round" probably suggests a circling dance, a lively picture. Venus brings beauty, but the language turns oddly commercial: she "must share her golden fee," as if Nancy were owed a cut of her takings. Pallas brings wisdom, and here the tone sharpens. The "Athenian school" and "ev'ry trite pedantic fool" may all agree to give Pallas "the palm," yet the prize is "Nancy's." The joke is that even the experts' verdict gets overturned. Diana, "spotless" and ruling the "up-land grange," represents chastity. Grace, beauty, wit and virtue are the qualities the poem credits to Nancy. It never describes her face, her voice or her habits. We know her only by the rivals she defeats, which makes the poem more an act of homage than a portrait.
Two moments break the pattern. In the Diana stanza the speaker stops sending messages through a third party and addresses his wife directly: "she yields to thee, / O Nancy." That small turn from "tell" to "thee" brings a flash of intimacy into the formal praise. The last stanza then drops comparison altogether. After the Graces, Venus and the rest, the speaker gathers "all the pow'rs of life and love" and confesses something personal: "I'd disdain to breathe or be, / If Nancy was not born for me." "Disdain" is a proud, almost haughty word, and it makes the confession striking. A man who has been ordering immortals around now says he would scorn to exist without her. Today the phrase "born for me" can sound possessive, but the final stanza balances it, because the speaker stakes his own existence on her.
What makes the poem worth reading is its mix of swagger and sincerity. The gods are treated like messengers who must be informed, which is funny, yet the feeling beneath the joke is steady. A conventional classical vocabulary of nymphs, Graces and Olympian powers carries a plain statement of love for a wife, not a courtship. Repetition could have made the poem monotonous, but the building list, the sly jabs at pedants and the last-stanza confession keep it lively and warm.