Two stanzas, eight lines, and a title that should make us suspicious: "The Braggarts." Boasting is rarely a sign of real confidence, and Nathalia Crane's speaker, who seems to stand in for a whole modern generation, announces fearlessness a little too loudly. The poem is a swaggering declaration that nothing in the new scientific age can frighten us, followed by a quiet undercutting of that swagger in the closing lines.
Consider what the first stanza claims. "We hold no awe for the new unknown," the speaker begins, and the phrase is a small puzzle: the unknown is supposed to be what we cannot yet know, yet here it has already been tasted, since it "tasted each ancient plan." Knowledge is imagined as an appetite. The new age has sampled every old idea and swallowed it, the way a child tries every dish on the table. Then come the two boldest images: "the fuse in the atom's jaw" and "the ray in the palm of man." The atom has a jaw, a mouth that could bite; the human hand holds a ray, as if power were something we carry around like a coin. Both are threats presented as things we no longer fear. Judging by the imagery, the poem points toward the dangers of modern physics, though it never names a single scientist or event, and it does not need to. The vagueness is part of the point: the speaker waves at the whole frightening machinery of progress with one dismissive gesture.
The second stanza turns, and the turn is gentle rather than dramatic. "For the dew still dazzles the garden old." The word "still" carries the weight here. After all the talk of atoms and rays, the speaker's real security comes from something far older and smaller: dew, grass, a garden. The grasses "their goblets fill," a lovely image that turns each blade into a drinking cup, as though the morning were a quiet feast set out without any help from us. Notice how the vocabulary shifts. The first stanza is full of hard, sharp words (jaw, fuse, ray, palm); the second is soft and domestic (dew, garden, goblets, window-sill). The poem physically moves from the laboratory to the garden.
The last two lines hold the best joke and the best idea. "And the dawn we thought in the doctor's care / Comes in by the window-sill." The dawn is pictured as a patient, something fragile that we feared might need medical attention, perhaps because a scientific age seems able to meddle with anything. Instead it simply arrives, uninvited and unmanaged, slipping in at an ordinary window. The tone is affectionate and a little mischievous. Human cleverness is not mocked cruelly, but it is gently put in its place: the sunrise never asked permission.
This is also where the title earns its irony. If the braggarts' fearlessness rests on the fact that nature keeps going regardless, then their boast is really an admission. They are not brave because they have mastered the atom; they are calm because they trust the dew. The pride of the first stanza quietly drains away in the second.
The form supports this. Each stanza uses a simple alternating rhyme scheme, with the second and fourth lines rhyming (plan/man, fill/window-sill), and the lines move in short, bouncy beats of roughly three stresses against four, giving the poem the feel of a nursery rhyme or a ballad verse. That lightness is deliberate, I think: a poem about enormous forces keeps its tone nimble and almost playful, which makes the underlying seriousness easier to slip past and harder to forget.
What makes the poem worth reading is its compression. In eight lines it holds an entire argument about science, confidence, and the stubborn ordinariness of the natural world, and it does so without lecturing. It trusts a few vivid pictures, an atom with a jaw and a dawn at the window, to do the thinking for us.