Warning to Parents

Credit: Christopher Combe photography

Save them from terror; do not let them see

The ghost behind the stairs, the hidden crime.

In the first lines, the speaker uses a list of imperatives to encourage parents to protect their children from childhood fears. The horrors from which they need to preserve their children belong both to the imaginary and to the real realms, as the second line illustrates.  

They will, no doubt, grow out of this in time

And be impervious as you and me.

Parents have to spare their children  while they are small because the persona predicts with absolute certainty that children will outgrow their own fears with time,  to the point of becoming insensitive to everything that causes them, like adults. She uses the first and the second person pronoun to prove her point. The second person pronoun here can include the parents she is addressing in this warning but also other adult readers.  She seems to be suggesting that we- adults-  know this is true because we have become impervious to these fears.

Be sure there is a night-light close at hand;

The plot of that old film may well come back,

The ceiling, with its long, uneven crack,

May hint as things no  child can understand.

The second stanza presents another example of the actions parents take to save their children from fear.  The internal rhyme of “night- light” helps us perceive the connection between the two words: children need to have a light at night. A light is also linked to a rationality that darkness does not provide. Darkness unleashes the imagination, which can create the unreal terrors described in the second and third lines of this stanza. The last line, however, links these imaginary horrors to “things no child can understand”.  The expression is vague, but can it suggest that what children intuitively  fear is  violence and brutality, which are strong forces beyond rational understanding.  

You do all this and are surprised one day

When you discover how the child can gloat

On Belsen and on tortures- things remote

To him. (...)

The speaker addresses the parents once more using the second person plural and making reference to all the actions they take to protect their children (like the ones described in the previous stanzas).  In spite of them, parents end up discovering with surprise that their children evoke cruel historical events with malicious satisfaction. They were kept far away from the fears aroused by the menace of violence, but they end up enjoying the thought of cruelty exerted on other human beings in the concentration Camp in Belsen or on tortures.

(...) You find it hard to watch him play

With thoughts like these, (...)

It is difficult for parents to accept this evil aspect of children. The word “play” which suggests the innocent games of childhood is combined with the thoughts about tortures, which creates a shocking effect.

(…) and find it harder still

to think back to the times when you also

Caught from the cruel past a childish glow

And felt along their veins the wish to kill.

However, what is even harder for parents to accept is the fact that they also used to experience the same perverse pleasure when they were children.  While recreating “the cruel past” in their minds, they felt a “glow” and “the wish to kill” in their veins. The hyperbaton of the last line gives the phrase “the wish to kill” a lot of force as it occupies the end of the stanza, which makes it remain in the reader´s memory. The reference to the veins suggests how engrained in us this feeling is. Besides, the similar sounds in the words “gloat” and “glow” emphasise the similarities between the parents´and the children´s feelings, suggesting that violence is innate in all human beings, and constant along generations.

Fears are more personal than we have guessed-

We only need ourselves; time does the rest.

The last stanza stands out from the rest of the poem in different ways. First of all, it is a rhyming couplet instead of a quatrain with enclosed rhyme as the rest of the stanzas. Secondly, it states a generalisation which serves as a conclusion. Finally, the use of the first person plural pronoun suggests that the speaker is including all human beings in her revelations.

The use of the word “personal” to describe fears suggests that they are a private aspect of people rather than something which is shared openly and publicly. However, the use of the inclusive “we” suggests it is a common feature of our species. The fact that parents pretend to ignore this innate violence in children and try to protect them from the fears it produces in them proves it is not socially accepted. That is why they feel surprised to discover it  and to remember it also existed in themselves as children.

Children´s fears are personal because they speak about who they really are: children can guess the existence and the menace of violence because there is violence ingrained in them. Their fear of cruelty is just an expression of the cruelty that is lodged in their genes. On the other hand, parents discover this reality and admit they also felt the same in their childhood. The fear and attraction they felt for violence as children has been overcome as adults and has only been evoked when they discover their children´s malign pleasure in learning about the cruelty that humans can exert on their fellow beings.

The last line seems to give an optimistic twist to the poem, as it suggests that time adjusts our innate cruelty and violence so that we are able to live acceptable social lives. For the speaker, it would be a fact that we are born evil, but time tempers our monstrous tendencies. It makes us forget how much we fear but were also attracted by cruelty, to the point that we only remember it and acknowledge it when we discover our children gloating on torture.

In conclusion, in our reading, the warning to parents in the poem can be paraphrased and summarised in this way:  Whatever you do to protect your children from their fears is useless as these fears are only an expression of the violence that is lodged inside them, and that will only subside with time. Trying to protect your children from their fears will only help you discover the cruelty that is ingrained in them, as it was ingrained in yourself and in all human beings.