Wishing for wings is about as childish as wishes get, and the title admits as much before the first line begins. "Something Childish, But Very Natural" is half apology, half defence: yes, this is a simple daydream, but longing for someone far away is the most natural thing in the world. The speaker never says who "my dear" is or why they are apart, and that silence helps. We are given only the distance and the ache, so any reader who has missed someone can step straight in.
The poem moves through three stages, one per stanza: wishing, dreaming, and a kind of clever cheating. The first stanza states the wish in the conditional ("If I had but two little wings") and dismisses it almost at once: "thoughts like these are idle things, / And I stay here." The second offers a real route to the loved one, since in sleep "I'm always with you." Then the dream collapses: "But then one wakes, and where am I? / All, all alone."
The construction is simple and very tidy. Each stanza has five lines, and each rhymes the same way. The first and fourth lines pair up (wings/things, fly/I, bids/lids), the third and fifth pair up (dear/here, own/alone, gone/on), and the second line is left without a partner (bird, sleep, day). That unmatched line gives each stanza a small loose thread before the rhymes tie it off. The line lengths also shrink. Each stanza runs from long lines to a final line of only four syllables: "And I stay here." "All, all alone." "And still dreams on." In the first two stanzas the short line feels like a drop to the ground, and the verb "stay" is exactly what a bird-wishing speaker cannot do without. The rhythm is light and bouncy, close to a nursery rhyme, and nearly every word is one syllable. That plainness lets the sadness arrive quietly.
Small word choices carry a lot. "Little" appears twice in the first two lines ("little wings," "a little feathery bird"), a child's pet word that makes the fantasy tender and slightly comic. The word "all" does the opposite work. It begins as a boast, "I'm *always* with you," and grows into "The world is *all* one's own," a line that sounds like a sleeper's private kingdom. Then the same word comes back doubled and bleak: "All, all alone." The world that belonged to the dreamer is now just emptiness with the dreamer in it. Notice, too, the pronouns. In the dream stanza the speaker slides from "I" to the more general "one": "one's own," "one wakes." It is as if the speaker holds the pain at arm's length by turning it into a general truth, until "where am I?" pulls the focus back, sharply, to a single person.
The last stanza is the most inventive. "Sleep stays not, though a monarch bids" says that even a king cannot command sleep, so a powerless lover must be sly instead. The speaker loves to wake "ere break of day," because while it is still dark one can simply shut one's eyes and slip back into the dream. The verb "stays" echoes "I stay here" from the first stanza. The body is stuck in place, and sleep will not stay either, which is why the speaker has to work for it. The final word "on" also deserves attention. "Still dreams on" means the dreaming continues, and "still" quietly suggests stillness as well. The poem ends in a half-waking twilight, not in grief.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about comfort. It never pretends the dream is real. Wishes are "idle," waking is a lonely question, and yet the speaker still finds a small trick for reaching the beloved. It would be easy to dismiss the poem as slight, but the title has already answered that charge. The words are childish and the feeling is not, and the gap between the two is where the poem's power sits.