Three times a voice says the same soothing thing, and three times what it soothes gets bigger. That is the quiet trick of Riley's poem. Every stanza opens and closes with "There! little girl; don't cry!", the hush an adult murmurs while patting a shoulder. Between those identical lines, the girl's losses climb from a broken doll to a broken slate to a broken heart. The refrain never changes, but everything inside it does.
The climb is carefully stepped. The first stanza gives us toys, the "tea-set blue" and the "play-house." The second moves to school and "the glad, wild ways / Of your schoolgirl days." The third reaches "the rainbow gleams / Of your youthful dreams." Childhood, adolescence and young adulthood are packed into three sets of images, yet the speaker calls her "little girl" throughout. That fixed address is touching, because to the comforter she stays small however grown-up her sorrows become. It also creates a small puzzle. In the first stanza the doll has only just been broken, but the playthings are already "things of the long ago." Time seems to fold up, as if the voice stands where the whole of her life can be seen at once.
The repeated phrasing matters too. "They have broken your doll, I know" becomes "your slate," then "your heart," with the same verb, the same flat tone and the same "I know." You can read this two ways. Perhaps the poem shrinks heartbreak to the size of a toy's breakage, as if all loss were one kind of thing. Or perhaps it lifts the doll up, taking a child's grief as seriously as an adult's. "They" is never named either. There is no villain, only a world that breaks fragile things.
The form is built to feel like a lullaby. Each stanza has seven lines rhymed ABCCBAA. The "cry" of the refrain is answered by "by" in the sixth line, and in the last stanza by "sigh," so the rhyme itself keeps the speaker's comfort hemmed in on both sides. "Know" and "ago" return in the same positions every time, and only the middle couplet changes: blue/too, ways/days, gleams/dreams. The rhythm is loose and sing-song, with two or three beats to a line. The short third and fourth lines work like a pair of small breaths between the longer ones. The pattern is so predictable that it becomes a comfort in itself.
The consolations, though, are not predictable, and this is where the poem turns. In the first stanza, "childish troubles will soon pass by," so the trouble leaves. In the second, "life and love will soon come by," and the same word now means something arriving. By the third, "soon" has vanished. What remains is "Heaven holds all for which you sigh." The verb "holds" makes Heaven a place where lost things are kept, and "sigh" is a quieter sound than "cry," as if tears have worn down to a long breath. The comfort has been moved beyond ordinary life. That is the "life-lesson" of the title, and it is less cheerful than the lilting music suggests. Dolls and slates can be forgiven or replaced, but a broken heart gets only a promise about somewhere else.
A modern reader may find this sentimental. Phrases like "rainbow gleams" are stock imagery, and "don't cry" can sound like a request to stop feeling. Still, the poem is interesting for what it does with repetition. When the same words return after a bigger loss, they sound different. In the first stanza the refrain is tender and a little playful, and by the last it sounds almost helpless, the only thing left to say. In twenty-one lines, with one refrain and three broken things, Riley gives a whole life's disappointments and the uneasy hope offered against them.