It is terrible how easily we bear the suffering of others. If only for one hour a day every man in the world could feel the hunger in the gut of a starving child in Bangladesh or Ghana or the Sudan, or the daily agony of what is happening to thousands of Syrian refugees perhaps the world would become a better place.
The fate of children should afflict us most. It is natural that the fate of a child should tear the heart more than that of an adult. When an old man dies he dies in the fullness of his days, but if a child dies with him perhaps dies some promise of the stars cut short.
And it is not only the physical lives of children that deserve our special consideration. Their imaginations also should be handled with the greatest care. After all, their days are filled with magic, with terror, and with inspiration that we adults have forgotten long ago.
It is true what Wordsworth said in his great Ode, ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.’ He lamented how the things we saw in childhood, full of the glory and the freshness of a dream, we see no more as we grow old. Visions we had when we were young fade into the light of common day as the years bring their inevitable yoke and custom comes to lie upon us with its weight, cold and heavy as frost in the soul.
Once, a long time ago, I wrote a poem for my young son which ended like this:
Let him, I pray, sleep soft and well.
Give him some sweet preliminary of life.
Do not warn him too soon of cruelties and sleepless lusts,
The bribery of habits, red wounds, the iron nations’ wars.
In this raw age of jealous, total moods
When men soon march to order behind dogmatic whims,
Watch well and deeply love and determine this:
\Take childhood’s time and make a dream of it.
I think that still. Be patient with their anxieties which sometimes may seem nonsensical. Match their anxious nonsense with a reassuring nonsense – if they have nightmares and hate the night-time do as the old peasant grandmother pretended to do in the story for her grandsons to set them laughing:
“She swept the night up and put it in a sack and boiled it and then she took it and baked it and sprinkled it with sugar and sat down and ate it by the light of the silvery moon.”
And do not punish children too harshly or too long. I think of John Berryman’s lovely poem to his child:
Cross am I sometimes with my little daughter:
fill her eyes with tears Forgive me, Lord,
Unite my various soul
Sole watchman of the wide and single stars.
Punish mildly. And do not punish at all a child’s imagination, even if it seems to get a little out of hand. We cannot tell the destination of the voyage into truth that a child’s mind makes. But what we do know is that in the imagination of children, in the dreams they dream, lie all out tomorrows, how sweet or bitter they will be.
