Theme · 114 poems

Poems About Childhood

The house remembered, the swing, the long summers: poems looking back at the country we all emigrated from — plus verse written for children rather than about them.

There are two kinds of childhood poem and they want different readers. The first looks back, and its model is Thomas Hood's 'I Remember, I Remember' — a poem that starts as fond recollection and turns, stanza by stanza, into an account of loss: the fir trees are taller, the speaker is further from heaven than he was. That is the adult mode, and it belongs at milestone birthdays and in eulogies rather than in a child's book.

The second kind was written for children to actually read, and Robert Louis Stevenson is its master — the swing, the lamplighter, the counterpane hills of a sick bed, all in metre simple enough to memorise at six. Anne Bradstreet's poems to her own children add a third, rarer note: a parent writing about children while still in the middle of raising them. Pick by audience, not by subject; a poem about childhood and a poem for a child are almost never the same poem.