Return to Nature

From the details provided, it is clear that this speaker lives in a rural setting: she sleeps on a straw bed and she knows enough about birds to imagine which type of bird her daughter would become if she were to become one. She knows that swallows travel with large flocks of other swallows and that they cover vast distances in their migrations, which means that they leave for long periods of time. Ironically, the transformation to a swallow in the first stanza is not presented as a return to nature but as a corruption of nature, forcing a little girl to separate from her mother. One of the primary fears worrying the speaker of this poem is that her little girl might no longer be able to play in the meadow if she becomes too deeply a part of society, which is symbolized here by...