dear daughter, "may you be dull"

are our daughters too coddled? you tell me. good readin' from some non-manhattan island's Times:

Father-daughter poetry is interesting in its own right, from Shakespeare to T. S. Eliot, and it is usually touching in its emphasis on safety (Prospero shushing his feisty daughter Miranda by bewitching her to sleep: "tis a good dullness"). Maybe there is a genetic factor that makes it harder for women to reach the pinnacles of human endeavour. But we will only really be able to tell once poets start writing odes to their sons, warning them that they are too frail to be tall poppies.