Most lullabies are sung by a parent to a child. Eugene Field turns the arrangement around: here a small boy takes his mother by the hand and offers to put *her* to sleep. His opening, "if you'll give me your hand," makes bedtime an adventure he leads, and "The Dreamland that's waiting out yonder" is a present he wants to give her.
What makes the gift touching is how he describes it. Dreamland is defined mostly by what it lacks. The second stanza is a run of negatives: "no little tired-out boy to undress," "No questions or cares to perplex you," no "bruises or bumps to caress," no "patching of stockings." These are the most concrete details in the poem, and together they sketch a mother's day with surprising accuracy: bedtime routines, endless questions, scraped knees, mending. The boy counts himself among the burdens without any sign of embarrassment. That candour is the poem's charm. It lets us see how much a child has quietly noticed about the person who looks after him.
Around this realistic centre, the first and last stanzas are all soft, dreamy imagery. Moonlight and starlight are "streaming," and flowers and birds fill the air "With the fragrance and music of dreaming." The senses blur here, so that a dream can be smelled and heard as well as seen. The "silver-dew stream" on which he will "rock" his mother joins water, dew and cradle in a single image. Even the vocabulary sounds like a child's. He strings words together into "mother-my-love," "posie-garden," "tired-out," "wide-awake," as if they came out in one breath, and the word "little" keeps turning up in affectionate, diminishing ways: the "little tired-out boy," the "little bruises," the "own little dearie."
The rhythm does much of the work of a lullaby. The lines swing in a rolling, anapaestic pattern, and long lines of four beats alternate with shorter ones of three: "O MOTHer-my-LOVE, if you'll GIVE me your HAND." Read aloud, it rocks. Many of the shorter lines end on a soft, unstressed syllable ("wander," "yonder," "often," "soften," "weary," "dearie"), so the voice seems to trail off a little each time, like someone drifting into sleep. Each eight-line stanza rhymes ABABCDCD, which keeps the pattern easy to hear.
The best structural touch comes at the end. The final four lines bring back the rhymes of the opening (hand, wander, land, yonder), and the last two lines almost repeat lines three and four of the first stanza. The poem ends where it began, like a refrain, and the small changes matter. At the start the boy says "I will lead you away," a promise. By the close it is "we'll wander," and the journey is under way, with mother and child going together "through the mist."
The third stanza also admits something the earlier ones skate over. The boy cannot keep up his role for long. "When I am tired," he says, he will "nestle my head / In the bosom that's soothed me so often," and the "wide-awake stars" will take over the singing "in my stead." The paradox of "wide-awake" stars in a poem about sleep is neat, and the delegation is both funny and tender. He is generous, but he is still a child, and he still needs her. Meanwhile the dream becomes a secret: "no one shall know... / But you and your own little dearie."
The poem is warm and openly sentimental, but its sentiment rests on specifics, not on grand praise of motherhood. The boy does not call her wonderful; he notices the stockings and the bruises and gives her a rest from them. By turning that unnoticed labour into the thing a dream can lift away, the poem pays it quiet respect. The poem is also a lullaby in itself, so the gift the child offers is the one the poem delivers: a few minutes of gentle rhythm in which someone else does the soothing.