Song To Be Sung By The Father Of Infant Female Children - Analysis

A love poem that flips into a threat

Ogden Nash builds this poem on a deliberately absurd, but emotionally recognizable, contradiction: a father adores his infant daughters so fiercely that other people’s baby boys begin to look like future invaders. The title promises a song, yet the speaker’s heart leaps up at a rainbow only to go Contrariwise cold at the sight of little boys. That word Contrariwise is the poem’s motor: each tender, ordinary image of infancy triggers a counter-image of adulthood, and with it the father’s panic about losing his daughter to marriage.

The joke isn’t merely that the speaker is overprotective. It’s that he treats time itself as an enemy, because time turns little boys into men who eventually marry. In his mind, the baby carriage already contains the wedding suit.

From harmless boys to swine among the pearls

The speaker insists he has No special hate for boys as little boys, but the qualification gives him away: his resentment is aimed at what boys become. The line swine among the pearls is comically rude, yet it reveals the father’s private value system. His daughter is the pearl, and any man who marries her is automatically swine—not because of his character, but because the father experiences marriage as contamination and theft.

That’s the poem’s central tension: the father talks as if he’s protecting purity, but what he’s protecting is possession. The future husband is condemned before he’s even met, simply for wanting what the father already has.

The nameless infant becomes a rival

Nash sharpens the comedy by making the rival absurdly small and anonymous: somewhere an infant plays, cared for by proud parents whose lips are sticky with praise. The speaker’s reaction—I have begun to loathe him—is intentionally disproportionate, and the repetition (loathe with loathing shameless) turns jealousy into a kind of theatrical confession.

Even the phrase bachelor child is a comic distortion that exposes the father’s obsession: he can’t see infancy without projecting adulthood onto it. The line about hardly being able to say knife before the boy will hunt him a wife is funny because it’s so premature, but it also hints at something darker—the father imagines courtship as predation.

Milk bubbles, then stubble: time as the real villain

The poem’s most vivid turn comes when Nash lingers over the baby’s softness—bubbles of milk, thumbsucking, cheeks like roses painted on silk, teeth tucked in his gums—and then snaps the image forward. The teeth will begin to grow, the bubbles will stop, the roses will become stubble. This isn’t only a joke about boys becoming men; it’s a miniature horror story about inevitable change.

Notice how adulthood is defined not by love but by appetite and acquisition: he’ll sell a bond or write a book, and get that acquisitive look. The future husband’s desire for Jill is pictured as a hunt, raging and ravenous for the kill, climaxing in the polite legalism of ask for the hand. That contrast—predator language wrapped in manners—captures the father’s fear that social rituals can disguise violence.

Comic cruelty and the confession of infanticiddle

The last stanza pushes the speaker’s logic to a grotesque extreme. He blesses the baby—sweet be his slumber, moist his middle—and immediately admits the real content of his fantasies: My dreams, I fear, are infanticiddle. The invented word is a safety valve; it’s cute enough to keep the poem in comedy, while still naming a frightening impulse.

His sabotages—open all his safety pins, pepper his powder, salt his bottle, even forcing readings from Aristotle—are cartoonish, but they reveal a deeper wish: to rig the world so that the boy will survive only by turning his desire elsewhere, so that he’ll marry somebody else’s daughter. The father’s love becomes a kind of curse-making.

A sharp question the poem won’t let go of

If every male infant is already guilty—if the child in the sun might be the one—then what is the father really defending: his daughter’s happiness, or his own role as the person she belongs to first? Nash’s joke lands because it’s not only about marriage; it’s about the way love, when mixed with fear, can start to resemble ownership.