Poetry for Students

30 Poetry for Students

Poem Summary

Stanza 1

“Childhood” begins with the speaker address-

ing a child who is in school, describing the child’s

feelings of boredom, loneliness, and alienation

from other children. Adopting the language of a

typical school boy’s view of the world, the speaker

says, “Time in school drags along with so much

worry / and waiting, things so dumb and stupid.”

The speaker contrasts this negative representation

of school with the joy the child feels after school.

When school lets out, the boy is free, the world

now expansive and inviting. These feelings are il-

lustrated in the images of leaping fountains and

mysterious “woody places.” However, even in his

newfound freedom, the boy still feels odd, differ-

ent from others. This difference is illustrated in the

image of him walking oddly.

Stanza 2

In this stanza, the speaker foregrounds his

point of view as someone looking back on child-

hood. He compares the “terror” of childhood with

the “trust” of adulthood, as evoked in the images

of men and women, a house and a dog, and both

marvels at and grieves the change. Even though the

poem is written from a third-person point of view

and attempts to characterize the child’s changing

view of the world, the narrator is clearly present

and makes his feelings known.

Stanza 3

The poem returns to images of childhood, this

time to the boy playing at dusk, “as the light fades

away.” The “green place” is a descriptive metaphor

for a park or a lawn. As dusk settles, an adult—

most likely a parent—grabs the hand of the boy and

leads him away. The “oceanic vision that is fad-

ing” can refer to both the boy’s disappointment at

having to stop playing, and the speaker’s sense of

loss and pain in remembering his boyhood. The

progression of the events in this stanza are typical

of the events of a child’s day.

Stanza 4

In this last stanza, the speaker compares fading

childhood to the sailboat the child is playing with

that sinks. The imagery here is dreamlike, under-

scoring the confusion of a child’s mind and the place

of memory itself. The “sails more beautiful / than

yours” suggests people more beautiful and lives more

beautiful than the child’s and the narrator’s. The

“pale / narrow face” is the face of the child himself,

and his puzzling about the future is also the speaker’s

mourning about the past. The poem ends with the

child wondering where childhood will lead him.

Themes

Art

Rilke studied art history and was a lifelong

lover of the visual arts, writing essays on sculptors

and impressionist painters, living at a colony for

painters, and even marrying a sculptor. In The Book

of Images, he tried to create the verbal equivalent

to a gallery full of paintings. In “Childhood,” he

uses imagery in much the same way as painters do.

For example, he uses successive images of the child

Childhood

Media

Adaptations

• Rilke: Selected Poems(1998) is an audiocassette
  published by Audio Literature. It features
  Stephen Mitchell reading Rilke’s poems.


• ParaTheatrical ReSearch produced Requiem for
  a Friend(1991), a VideoPoem/Docudrama by
  Antero Alli, based on the Stephen Mitchell
  translation of a Rilke poem.

67082 _PFS_V19child 028 - 053 .qxd 9/16/2003 9:27 M Page 30