Lullabies are meant to put a child to sleep, but Squire's poem also tries to talk a fear down. Four times the speaker says "peace" to a sleeping child and names something that might frighten her: a cat, men, the night sky, the world itself. Each time the threat is answered, and each time the same line closes the stanza: "and you are safe with me." The central idea is that safety comes less from the absence of danger than from the presence of someone who stands between a child and it. The speaker doesn't promise a harmless world. She makes herself the fixed point inside it.
The structure is tidy. Every stanza has five lines, opens with "peace, my…" and ends on the refrain. Within that frame, two things grow. The pet names move from "sparrow" to "rose" to "light" and finally to plain "daughter," which is the one name that isn't a metaphor. The sparrow is small and easily eaten, the rose is beautiful and fragile, the light is almost cosmic, and the last word drops the imagery and simply states the relationship. The threats widen in the same way, from a household cat to a social danger, then to the whole sky, then to the entire world. The child's circle of fear expands as she grows, and the speaker's reassurance keeps pace.
The cat stanza is the most inventive. A cat is the natural enemy of a sparrow, yet this one is defanged before the poem begins: "her claws have dulled, anger faded, / yellow eyes clouded with age." The danger is old and tired. The second stanza is the only one that admits a real threat. "Emboldened men" is a pointed phrase, since it suggests courage lent to them by something other than their own merit. Here the poem uses "though": "though they may be strong / you are stronger." The speaker doesn't explain why the child is stronger. She simply says so, the way a parent does at bedtime, and the bare assertion is moving because it asks to be believed rather than proved.
In the last two stanzas the poem's protectors turn out to be female. The cat is "her," the moon is "our mistress" who "will protect us," and the world is "the mother" who "storms and rages." The pronoun shift from "you" to "us" in the moon stanza folds the speaker into the child's safety, so mother and daughter shelter together. The final stanza is the boldest. It doesn't claim the storm is gentle. It says the same force that rages "gives us life and love." The poem lets anger and care sit in one figure, which is perhaps the truest thing it says about mothers as well as nature. The mother-world storming above and the speaker murmuring below begin to mirror one another.
There is no rhyme, and the poem is in free verse, but it still rocks. The repeated "will do no harm" lands at line-ends like a hand patting a back, and the soft sounds around "peace," "safe," and "me" keep the voice low. Everything is lowercase, which adds to the hush. The slight change in the last stanza, "will do you no harm" instead of "will do no harm," is easy to miss. It is the only time the promise is aimed directly at the child, who has just been named "daughter." The label under the title calls the piece a "freewrite," which suggests quick, unpolished writing, and that fits the plain, spoken feel of the lines.
The poem matters because it is honest about what a lullaby is. Nobody can truly guarantee that the world "will do you no harm," and the speaker seems to know it. The repetition sounds less like a prediction than like an incantation, a promise made so that the child, and perhaps the speaker too, can rest. By shrinking the cat, matching the men with the child's own strength, and giving the night and the storm a mother's face, the poem shows love as a way of making fear small enough to sleep beside.