A young mother calls her husband to the doorway of their cabin, baby in her arms, to enjoy the evening by the water. William Cullen Bryant, the nineteenth-century American poet, gives this scene to a speaker who is not himself. The title names Pitcairn's Island, and the text supplies the rest: "Tahete's beach," a "dusky brow," "Europe's maids," a husband with "soft blue eyes and sunny hair" and a "country's tongue" that she is only beginning to speak. Judging by these clues, the marriage joins two cultures, and the poem listens in as the wife works out what it will ask of her.
The form feels like a cradle song. Each of the five stanzas has nine lines, rhymed ABABCCBDD, and the pattern never changes. The B lines are shorter than the rest, three beats against four: "Before our cabin door," "The murmurs of the shore," "Songs that were made of yore." That small shortening gives the verse a rocking, rolling motion, and the repeated B rhyme returns like a wave. In the fourth stanza the sound comes back as "tell," "shell," "well." A closing couplet in every stanza then tucks the thought in, like a blanket pulled up under a chin. Even the vocabulary is lulling. "Soft" turns up again and again, along with "sweet" and "pleasant," and three stanzas open with the same gentle command: "Come."
Language is the poem's quiet subject. The couple met "scarcely twenty moons ago," counting time the island way, and they courted without a shared word, only "many a speaking look and sign." "I knew thy meaning," she says. Now the positions have reversed, and she is "stammering" through his language. She does not complain about it. She declares his speech "not so soft, but far more sweet" than her own, and the phrase shows how willingly she ranks her own world second. The same habit appears when she admits her eyes won his gaze, "But thine were fairer yet!" When she sees her son wearing his father's eyes and hair, her delight is complete, though it is hard not to notice that she finds joy in the child resembling him rather than her. The line "I feel a joy I cannot speak" works two ways. It describes happiness too big for words, and it also describes a woman who has few words yet in the language of her new home.
The fourth stanza is where the poem turns most revealing. She invites her husband to "talk of Europe's maids," whose beauty, "they tell," outshines "white foam and crimson shell." The phrase "they tell" shows that she knows these women only by report. Her own shoreline must supply the images for the standard she is about to be measured against. She will cut her dress to their pattern, bind her "jetty tress," and braid "a bonnet like an English maid," all for "a sight to please thee well." The husband never speaks anywhere in the poem. We hear only her promises, and every one of them is a change she will make.
The last stanza folds all this into gratitude. The sunlight "calls," and the outdoors is "lovelier than these cottage walls." She offers to learn a prayer to the God "who gave a home so fair," and the closing couplet, "for thee and me, / This sweet lone isle amid the sea," draws a circle round the family. One word there is worth pausing on. "Lone" makes the paradise a small, cut-off world, with the sea on every side.
What keeps the poem interesting is the gap between its tone and its content. On the surface it is a pure idyll of love, home and faith, and the smooth music nearly persuades us that nothing is being lost. Read closely, though, it shows a meeting of cultures in which all the adjusting goes one way, and the speaker presents that as simple happiness. The text does not say whether the speaker, or Bryant, sees the imbalance. It leaves the reader to notice it beneath the lullaby.