Poem Of The Week - Christopher Morley

I don't know if it is obvious from the commentaries on the poems I run here but for me one of the things makes a poem for me is the context; it's relationship to my life. Sometimes I read a poem that doesn't move me right then but I know that what's missing is not with the poem, it's the context. I have the right poem but not at the right time. I first encountered this poem many years ago whilst doing John Bradshaw family of origin work. I was moved by it at the time but more so now that I am a parent myself, the changed context has emphasised every line of this poem. Our little Miss is coming up to three years old in April and I can tell you that every line of this poem is truth.


To A Child

The greatest poem ever known
Is one all poets have outgrown:
The poetry, innate, untold,
Of being only four years old.

Still young enough to be a part
Of Nature's great impulsive heart,
Born comrade of bird, beast, and tree
And unselfconscious as the bee--

And yet with lovely reason skilled
Each day new paradise to build;
Elate explorer of each sense,
Without dismay, without pretense!

In your unstained transparent eyes
There is no conscience, no surprise:
Life's queer conundrums you accept,
Your strange divinity still kept.

Being, that now absorbs you, all
Harmonious, unit, integral,
Will shred into perplexing bits,--
Oh, contradictions of the wits!

And Life, that sets all things in rhyme,
may make you poet, too, in time--
But there were days, O tender elf,
When you were Poetry itself!

Christopher Morley