In the poem, the speaker communicates how his beloved child's joy in the simple sensory pleasures of the world heightens and renews these pleasures for him, the adult interacting with the child.
In the first stanza, the narrator states that when he brings "colored toys" to his child, he understands why there is such "a play of colors on clouds, on water." In the second stanza, the speaker becomes more acutely aware of why there is the music on the earth as he sings to make his child dance. In the third stanza, he has a renewed sense of why there are "sweet things" like honey or nectar in the world when he hands sweet things to his child. Finally, in the fourth stanza, he says that when he kisses his child to make him smile he understands better why light streams and breezes blow on the earth. All of...
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these things exist for us to enjoy in an unadulterated way, as a child does. All of these things express a child's love.
Tagore uses simple words and childlike images—"colored toy," "flowers . . . painted in tints," "music in leaves," "the sky in morning light"—to convey how the sensory world is experienced by a child. He creates a sense of rhythm in the poem not by end rhymes but by the repetition of words, such as "my child," "dance," or "smile" within each stanza. He also develops a sense of cadence by using an "em" dash as a pause at the start of the last line of each stanza.
Despite the simple language, Tagore is writing to adults. His verses remind adults that the child's love of the world brings renewal and the ability to experience the world with a sense of heightened sensitivity. By interacting with a beloved child, the poet is learning the intense joy of perceiving the world again through a child's wondering eyes, ears, movement, and hands.
The poem is a lucid expression of love from one to another. Many read this and feel it is a parent to a child. The idea of a parent's love and child's reception of such love is an authentic and pure experience that is captured at each point in the poem. The first stanza links the love and joy experienced by the child with the many pallets of color in nature, and how the divergent natural experience is linked to the multi- dimensional experience of love felt by a child. This idea is conntected in the second stanza, as the physical experience of dance is connected to the natural element of wind in the trees as well as breezes felt. It helps to convey the idea how natural and elemental a love from parent to child is within the world. The last two stanzas do the same element, linking subjective experience to objective reality. For the speaker, the sensation of love shared between child and parent is one that radiates and reverberates within and throughout the natural world.