I am glad I met you on the edge <br />Of your barbarous childhood <br /> <br />In what purity of pleasure <br />You danced alone like a peasant <br />For the stamping joy's own sake! <br /> <br />How, set in their sandy sockets, <br />Your clear, truthful, transparent eyes <br />Shone out of the black frozen landscape <br />Of those gray-clothed schoolboys! <br /> <br />How your shy hand offered <br />The total generosity <br />Of original unforewarned fearful trust, <br />In a world grown old in iron hatred! <br /> <br />I am glad to set down <br />The first and ultimate you, <br />Your inescapable soul. Although <br />It fade like a fading smile <br />Or light falling from faces <br />Which some grimmer preoccupation replaces. <br /> <br />This happens everywhere at every time: <br />Joy lacks the cause for joy, <br />Love the answering love, <br />And truth the objectless persistent loneliness, <br />As they grow older, <br />To become later what they were <br />In childhood earlier, <br />In a world of cheating compromise. <br /> <br />Childhood, its own flower, <br />Flushes from the grasses with no reason <br />Except the sky of that season. <br />But the grown desires need objects <br />And taste of these corrupts the tongue <br />And the natural need is scattered <br />In satisfactions which satisfy <br />A debased need. <br /> <br />Yet all prayers are on die side of <br />Giving strength to naturalness, <br />So I pray for nothing new, <br />I pray only, after such knowledge, <br />That you may have the strength to be you. <br /> <br />And I shall remember <br />You who, being younger, <br />Will probably forget.<br /><br />Stephen Spender<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-childhood/
