A baby, it turns out, can be a fine orator. The speaker of Eugene Field's "The Bottle Tree" seems to be an infant, and he asks for his milk in the high, antique language of a quest romance. He does not whimper for a feed. He announces that he "hunger[s] and thirst[s] for that precious repast," as if the bottle were a holy grail. The poem's comedy lies in that gap between the tiny speaker and his enormous vocabulary.
The imagined place is Winkyway land, where a tree blossoms with bottles and offers its fruit "to each wee, dimpled hand." The name seems to play on winking and sleeping, so the land sounds like the place a lullaby carries a child off to. Getting there takes a journey. The cradle becomes a ship, and the speaker demands "a snug little berth" on the vessel "that rocketh the Bottle-Tree babies away." The nautical word "berth" fits the picture, since a berth is a sleeping place on a ship, and a cradle is exactly that for a baby. The paradise has rules of its own. You may take fruit "as much as you list," and "colic's a nuisance that doesn't exist." The line is funny because it is a complaint from the nursery, the one grievance big enough to be worth abolishing.
The sound of the poem does as much as the sense. The rhythm is a rocking, galloping beat, mostly four stresses to the line, with a short, bouncy refrain, "Heigh-ho for a bottle, I say!", that lands like a push on the cradle. The rhyme scheme is generous and repetitive. Both stanzas run twelve lines, and in each the same few sounds keep returning: *land, hand, demand* and *expand, understand* on one side, and *say, away, day, today* on the other. Both stanzas end on the same rhymes, *fast* and *repast*, before the refrain. A baby would not notice such neatness, but a drowsy ear takes comfort in it, because every sound comes back where it is expected. The second stanza even opens by repeating a line from the first, "The Bottle Tree bloometh by night and by day," so the poem circles back on itself like a lullaby sung twice.
Field also enjoys silly archaic grammar. "Bloometh" and "rocketh" are verb endings borrowed from old-fashioned storytelling and attached to a nursery fantasy. "Rocketh" even looks a little like "rocket," which adds a faint comic launch to the cradle-ship's departure. The mock-grand diction continues in "fain," "list" and "repast," while the baby's own world supplies the homely details. The milk is "creamy and white," and the tree's fruit has a puzzling side effect: it "[m]akes bellies of Bottle-Tree babies expand." The speaker admits he has only heard this "as people say," and he calls it "a trick I would fain understand." The pose is a scholarly one, a small philosopher puzzling over the mysteries of digestion.
Underneath the joke is a quieter wish. The most repeated phrase is not about the bottle but about the holding: "cuddle me and cuddle me fast, / And cuddle me snug in my cradle away." In the second stanza it becomes "cuddle me close." The word "snug" appears twice, in the berth and in the cradle. The baby wants fruit, but he also wants to be held while he is fed. The bottle tree is a fantasy of plenty, yet the refrain suggests that what the speaker needs most is warmth and closeness, which the adult reading aloud can supply on the spot.
That double audience is part of the poem's charm. A child can enjoy the swing of the lines and the picture of a tree hung with bottles. A parent can enjoy the mock-heroic baby and the knowing joke about colic. Eugene Field is remembered mainly as a writer of verse about childhood, and this poem shows the appeal of that kind of writing. It is a small, light piece, and it does not pretend otherwise. Its achievement is to take the most ordinary event of the nursery, a baby wanting a feed, and give it the pageantry of a voyage to a promised land, while keeping the real need behind it, to be held and fed, in plain view.