Few poems turn the word “ambition” away from worldly striving and toward the quiet, ungovernable longing for more children. Aline Kilmer’s short lyric “Ambition” does exactly that, and in doing so it reveals a mother’s heart as a place of both fierce gratitude and restless imagination. Kilmer (1888–1941), an American poet who published several collections including *Candles That Burn* (1919) and *Vigils* (1921), knew this tension firsthand. She and her husband, the poet Joyce Kilmer, had five children, but their daughter Rose died in infancy. That biographical shadow slips through the cheerful rhymes, transforming what could be a simple list of names into a meditation on presence, absence, and the unappeasable appetite of love.
The poem is built from four neat, song-like stanzas, each composed of two rhyming couplets. The meter dances between iambs and anapests, creating a skipping, nursery-rhyme lilt — an apt choice, since the speaker is a mother crooning over both her living and her dream children. The AABB rhyme scheme rarely falters, even when the sounds are slightly stretched, as with “compare” and “hair.” This steadiness wraps the poem in a surface innocence that makes the deeper ache all the more disarming.
In the opening stanza, the speaker names her real children — Kenton, Deborah, Michael, and Rose — and assures us they are “fine children as all the world knows.” Yet the very next line swings into a private, nocturnal world: “But into my arms in my dreams every night / Come Peter and Christopher, Faith and Delight.” The conjunction “but” opens a door between daylight certainties and nighttime fantasies. The four imagined children bear abstract, almost allegorical given names (Faith, Delight) or familiar but unclaimed ones (Peter, Christopher), and they visit regularly, a persistent vision of what might be. Already the poem has established its central tension: the tangible, public children versus the shadowy, yearned-for ones who exist only in sleep.
Kilmer then lavishes sensory detail on the living children. Kenton is “tropical,” a word suggesting warmth, lushness, and intensity; Rose is “pure white,” an image of innocence but also, poignantly, of ghostliness when one recalls the poet’s own lost infant. Deborah “shines like a star in the night,” a simile that casts the girl as a guiding but distant light, and Michael’s round eyes are “as blue as the sea” — elemental and fathomless. These children are fiercely loved, “nothing on earth could be dearer to me.” Yet the concreteness of these descriptions throws the vagueness of the dream children into sharp, painful relief.
The third stanza erupts into questions. Where is the baby whose goodness matches the name “Faith”? What is the colour of Peterkin’s hair? The affectionate diminutive “Peterkin” underscores the imagined intimacy, but the hair carries no answer — its colour is unknowable. The speaker cannot “make Christopher clear to my sight” nor see the eyes of her daughter Delight. These children remain stubbornly in the dark, all longing and no flesh. The contrast between the vivid, tumbling images of the real children and the blurred, question-marked dream group becomes the poem’s emotional core. A mother holds four miracles, and still she aches for the ones she cannot sketch or hold.
When the speaker finally exposes this private obsession to public scrutiny, she does so with a disarmingly breezy tone: “When people inquire I always just state: / ‘I have four nice children and hope to have eight.’” The offhand rhyme of “state” and “eight” plays down the depth of feeling; she offers a socially acceptable, even humorous version of her ambition. The final couplet — “Though the first four are pretty and certain to please, / Who knows but the rest may be nicer than these?” — is both a playful wink and a startling admission. The word “nicer” is childlike, yet it carries the weight of impossible comparison. This is the restlessness of a mother’s love: not dissatisfaction with what she has, but an expansive, almost greedy capacity to cherish what does not yet, and may never, exist.
What makes “Ambition” significant is how gently it undoes the silence around maternal loss and longing. Written at a time when a woman’s public identity was often defined by motherhood, the poem gives voice to the hidden arithmetic of children born and children dreamed. It allows a mother to admit that her heart has extra rooms, furnished with names and unanswered questions. The nursery-rhyme form sweetens this confession but does not disguise it; instead, the lulling repetition of dreams and names becomes an incantation, a way of keeping the shadow children alive. In the end, the poem’s real subject is the borderland between what we hold and what we imagine — the colour of Peterkin’s hair, forever unknown and forever loved.