Poetry


The poet wants to fi nd some kind of ‘reason’ in the murder of the young child but this seems almost impossible. She is trying to make sense of what has happened, to fi nd the rhythm of her poem in ‘the discord of your murder’. Still, she is faced with the inescapable fact that she is writing a song for a child who ‘cannot listen’.


Adults should have taught this child nursery rhymes and songs and the child, like all children, should have been put to bed with its soft toys ‘the animals you took to bed’. Instead, the child was murdered by the adult world. The child’s imagination and sense of wonder should have been stimulated by ‘legends to protect’ and its sense of belonging to a community should have been fostered by being taught ‘an idiom for you to keep’. All children are entitled to such things but this child was killed before he could learn all he should have learned. Children are told fairy tales such as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ in order to teach them valuable lessons about the dangers of talking to strangers, for example. The irony is that it is the ‘We who should have known how to instruct’ who now ‘must learn from you, dead’.


The sounds in the second line of this stanza are reminiscent of the sounds a parent might make while soothing a child to sleep: ‘With rhymes for your waking, rhythms for your sleep’. The repetition brings to mind a child’s song or nursery rhyme and reminds us once again of the gulf between a song used to settle a child to sleep and an elegy written on the sudden, brutal death of a young child.


Boland says lessons must be learned from the death of this child. We must rebuild the world for the child’s sake. She claims that our ‘idle talk’ had led to this violence and that people must realise that words have consequences. We must fi nd a ‘new language’ and build a safer, better society for our children. She addresses the child once again and admits, in a heartbreaking line, that ‘our times have robbed your cradle.’ The poem ends with a wish that the child will fi nd peace in the next world. His ‘fi nal sleep’ means that when he next wakes, it will be in another place. Might there also be a suggestion that the child’s death may have awoken us to our senses?


Language


The poem uses contrasting images of childhood and death to drive home the message that this innocent’s life was ended brutally and cruelly by those in the adult world who should have felt a duty to protect all children.


The language is inclusive: everyone plays a role in the child’s death.


Note the use of the words ‘lullaby’, ‘cry’ and ‘tune’ in the fi rst four lines. Taken out of context, they are words normally associated with the everyday lives of small children, but in this poem, they have a very different meaning. The child’s cry is his ‘fi nal cry’. He will never cry again and he will never hear the song that is being written for him. By using these normal, homely words, Boland contrasts the dreadful reality with the way things should have been in this child’s life.


The adult world has not protected this child and Boland clearly feels that we are all responsible. She does not talk about the ‘they’ who let the child down but rather the ‘we.’


299


Poetry


oetry


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