Poetic analysis of Edwin Muir's "Childhood"

Poetic analysis: "Childhood" by Edwin Muir

The poem "Childhood" by Edwin Muir begins with the poet observing himself as a young boy, still innocent, contemplating the world and the existence that lies ahead of him. "Long time he lay upon the sunny hill, / To his father's house below securely bound. / Far off the silent, changing sound was still, / With the black islands lying thick around." The hill of childhood is still symbolically sunny and like the boy is 'bound' to his father's house, a word that conveys both security and a sense of slightly unwelcome confinement. Like all children, change will come to 'the boy' but it is still far away. By calling himself a boy, Muir establishes a certain sense of distance between his present and past self, his adult and childhood reality. There is ominous blackness to this future, symbolized by the black islands around the hill but the boy is protected from them.

The mood of the poem is thus both nostalgic yet also somber, given that the childhood of the narrator's present is clearly not eternal. In terms of form, the a/b/a/b and c/d/c/d regular rhythm of both stanzas gives a comforting, familiar, regular quality to his observations, like a nursery rhyme, as predictable as his current life. Although "often he wondered what new shores were there" he still walks in a state of joy and the waters he observes, like his existence, are tranquil. The poem functions as a kind of eulogy to the poet's past self, particularly since his childhood incarnation is observed from a distance, as if the child is a third person.

The 'story' or narrative of the poem revolves around the poet's observation of this younger self. He relates what he 'sees' (the child) and also what the child sees matter-of-factly. The adult poet documents what the child observes through the child's own eyes, even though the poet's is emphasis on darker details that are symbolic of the future. This is obviously part of the poet's craft and not the ingenious perspective of the little boy. The surface texture of the poem is relatively simple -- it depicts what seems like a very ordinary, everyday occurrence for the child in which he spies the world from a pastoral location near his home and at the poem's end he is called away by his mother. But the poem about this innocent rural child is invested with greater significance given the imagery of darkness on the horizon vs. The comforting, binding closeness of the area on which he stands. This causes the reader to immediately feel a more intense emotion of sadness as well as an appreciation of the child's simplicity, than the reader might otherwise.

Muir's poetry has a heavily Romantic overtone: childhood is idyllic but leaving childhood is a 'fall from grace' which is always visible in the future. The child can perceive this dimly, the adult more acutely. The poem evolves in a series of contrasting images of past and present, adult and child perspectives, as the poet looks back at the child he was with both a nostalgic eye upon 'his' innocence and an awareness of what has been lost. "The story of the fall is often retold in his poetry, along with the dream of ritual purification and the restoration of a whole order. His [Muir's] adult intellectual life, in fact, can be mapped as a series of attempted restorations or, as I think of them, conversions, where the soul seeks to heal lesions, to mend its divisiveness….The becalmed, processional summation of his experience has the measured quality of much of his poetry -- it's the plainness and orderly simplicity of fable" (Di Piero, web). Unlike a purely nostalgic view of childhood, however, the darkness is still visible in the landscape, even then, within the child's realm of perceived vision. Despite such foreboding, Muir's Romanticism has caused some of his poetry to fall out of favor: "Muir's poems are not without faults. Their habitual plainness of style can at times be so unvaried as to be simply flat. They can be stylistically derivative… of Wordsworth… [and] Yeats," stated one critic (Shaw 39)

The fact that the black islands of "Childhood" represent the future becomes clearer in the second stanza: The child "saw each separate height, each vaguer hue, " indicating the future is indeterminate and represents separate yet unclear possibilities, although all blend together in his eyes. "Where the massed islands rolled in mist away, / And though all ran together in his view/He knew that unseen straits between them lay." Childhood is characterized by visions of the future yet uncertainty of what that future may be.

In the bucolic contrast between the darkness of the mist with the comforts of the present, Muir's vision of childhood is highly idealized, which has been called both his strength and weakness as a poet. Muir wrote about childhood "as the only period in life when we live in immortality because we are without a sense of the policing exactions of time. He describes childhood as a perfect unself-conscious repetition" (Di Piero, web). Muir described his own childhood as rustic, yet also filled with imaginative significance: "His early life gave him not only subject matter but also legendary patterns on which he modeled narrative forms. In one of his late essays he remarked that we become human by repetition" (Di Piero, web).

In "Childhood," repetition has a clear function for Muir, as the images of water that contrast with the boy's stationary location are repeated over and over again. "Over the sound a ship so slow would pass / That in the black hill's gloom it seemed to lie. / The evening sound was smooth like sunken glass, / And time seemed finished ere the ship passed by." For Muir, "in the imagination that repetition becomes an object of delighted contemplation with all that is good and evil in it" (Di Piero, web). The repetition of images of the sea and the cloudy and indistinct images that the child's imagination allows him to see function as future portents which are both black yet also beautiful. Muir the poet shows that that childhood is simultaneously comforting (the boy can see what lies ahead but does not need to suffer the gloom himself) yet also uncertain. Of course, the fact that he is narrating the child's journey with an adult's eye makes these visions of the future seem particularly sad, given that he knows that the child's happiness is not eternal.

Muir creates a contrast between Edenic perfection and prosaic reality that is physically embodied in the poem in the child's immediate presence and what the child sees as a vision. The vision is grounded in reality (there are 'real' ships, water, and movement ahead of him) but these visions are invested with a symbolic significance of the future by the adult poet's art. "This poem is one of his finest because it tells with massiveness and credibility and completeness the simple story of a dream persuasion overturned by waking doubt, waking knowledge. But that suspicion comes to us at such a vulnerable moment, when we have already been converted by the authority of the imagination of the dream, that we are then drawn even closer to some final derangement" (Di Piero, web). This displacement occurs when the child is finally called away: "Grey tiny rocks slept round him where he lay, / Moveless as they, more still as evening came, / The grasses threw straight shadows far away, / And from the house his mother called his name." The child returns to the present, away from the observing view of the adult speaker and also away from the poem's text contrasting present and future.