We attempt a comprehensive analysis of the low lying charm meson states which
present several puzzles, including the poor determination of masses of several
non-strange excited mesons. We use the well-determined masses of the ground
states and the strange first excited states to `predict' the mass of the
non-strange first excited state in the framework of heavy hadron chiral
perturbation theory, an approach that is complementary to the well-known
analysis of Mehen and Springer. This approach points to values for the masses
of these states that are smaller than the experimental determinations. We
provide a critical assessment of these mass measurements and point out the need
for new experimental information.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in Physics Letters