Most poems about children are about what adults see. Dickinson's is about what an adult longs to hear. Its speaker asks someone to teach "Him," apparently a very small child, to shape his first spoken names so that they come out as a particular sound in her ear. The poem never says who is being asked to teach, or who "Him" is, and the text alone cannot settle either question. The details point toward an infant: "babbling," "Berry" lips, a "nest." The wish itself is clear. She wants the child's early speech to carry a message to her, and the message is "Forbid us not."
That phrase gives the poem its depth. It recalls the New Testament words about letting children come, "forbid them not," but Dickinson turns the grammar around. The speaker does not welcome the child. She imagines the child's voice pleading on her behalf, or on behalf of "us," not to be shut out. Whether "us" means the speaker and the child, or the speaker and some wider group, is left open. Either way, the poem is about the fear of exclusion and the hope that an innocent voice might dissolve it. The last line, "Some like 'Emily,'" lets the whole wish settle on one small, touching target. She does not ask for a sentence, only for a sound resembling her own name.
The poem builds this longing out of broken syntax. The opening is a command, "Teach Him," but the grammar never fully lands. "Such an one -- to say --" leaves us wondering such a one *what*. Then line 7 starts over: "As should sound" had already appeared in line 4, and here it returns, as though the speaker lost her thread and began the clause again. The repetition acts out the babbling it describes. Her sentences stumble and restart, the way a child's first words do. The dashes help, chopping the lines into breaths, hesitations and half-swallowed syllables.
The sound patterns are sparing but pointed. The only clear rhyme in the first six lines is "say" and "today," which sit in the shorter lines and pair the act of speaking with the present moment. Then "me" in line 4 finds a faint answer in the last word, "Emily." The poem opens a gap with "to me" and closes it with the name, so the hoped-for sound lands exactly where the speaker's identity is waiting. The line lengths shrink as the poem goes on. After the longer lines of the first half, we get "As should sound --," then "'Forbid us not' --," then "Some like 'Emily.'" The poem itself seems to become more childlike, reduced to brief utterances.
The images are small and tactile. "Berry -- lips --" is a delightful phrase. It suggests color, roundness and sweetness, and also staining and ripeness, as if the child's mouth were a fruit and speech the juice. It also keeps the child physical and tender rather than sentimentalized. The "nest" then moves us into bird territory, where babbling becomes birdsong and the child a fledgling. That makes the speaker an eavesdropper, and her condition is spelled out: "Were my Ear -- as near his nest -- / As my thought -- today." Her thought is close, but her ear is not. The poem's emotional engine is that gap between mental closeness and physical distance, which is why the wish has to be phrased as "were," a condition not met.
The poem matters because it shows how much feeling Dickinson can pack into a tiny, strange frame. She avoids stating her loneliness or her tenderness outright. They come through in a grammar that falters, in a conditional ("Were my Ear"), and in her choice to imagine her own name, in quotation marks, as something heard from someone else's mouth. The self becomes a sound in a child's babble, and that sound is a plea to be let in. In nine short lines, the poem asks what it would mean to be named, and so admitted, by someone who has barely learned to speak.