- ‘She slotted him back into school time’. Here the child becomes and object to the teacher, which shows she acts unemotionally.
- We can hear two voices (this is called heteroglossia): a child’s voice and an adult’s voice, who are in fact the same person (the author): the child’s voice brings a feeling of innocence and naivety whereas the adult brings a feeling of reason and reality.
+ In Piano
- There is a constant opposition in the poem between the softness of the emotion the author feels, which remind him of his childhood, and the fact that he does not accept these emotions, because the ‘man’ he is know does not want to feel such touching, ‘childish’ emotion: ‘In spite of myself’ ‘Betrays me back’.
This dilemma the author is confronted to is symbolized by the contrast between the softness of the singing and the piano: ‘Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me’ and the strength and intensity of the emotions ‘Till the heart of me weeps to belong’.
+ In My Parents kept Me from Children who were Rough:
- We can see that even though he is being bullied by the other kids, the author at the end of the poem says that he wanted to forgive them for what they did, which shows how innocent and not spiteful he is: ‘I longed to forgive them’.
In opposition, the parents are a lot more rational and prevent their child from getting close to the other children who bullied him: ‘My parents kept me from children who were rough’.
Likewise, we can also observe that the children (or the child’s voice) in these poems seem to see the world differently, in a more naïve and less complicated way, but that the adults bring them back to reality at one point.
For example, in Half-past Two:
- The child falls into a deep reverie where he completely loses the notion of time and location: ‘Out of reach of all timefors’; ‘Into the air outside, into ever’. The anaphora and sensory details in stanza n°8 make the daydream seem very real and intense, but it is suddenly interrupted by the voice of the teacher who brings back the child to reality: ‘And then, My goodness, she said, (…) Run along or you’ll be late’.
+ In Piano:
- The ‘child’ part of the author nostalgically remembers his childhood with the soft melody of the piano (which is conveyed by the sibilance in the sentences ‘ Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me’ and ‘In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song’) but rapidly, his ‘adult’ part feels ashamed of feeling such emotions: ‘In spite of myself’ ‘Betrays me back’ and unsuccessfully tries to fight them back.
+ In My Parents kept Me from Children who were Rough:
- As he is still inexperienced in life, the child doesn’t realize how horrible the other children are towards him, and dreams of liberty, is envious towards the other children for their liberty. We can even find positive connotations in the other children’s description, which betrays the child’s will to be part of them: ‘They ran in the street And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.’
However the parents, who are logically more experienced and have a more rational may of seeing things, try to protect their child by keeping him away from the bullies: ‘My parents kept me from children who were rough’.
In the same way, we also remark that in the three poems, there is a sort of rejection of the childhood/children by the adults.
As an illustration, in Half-past Two:
- The child uses many nonce words in these poems, and two of these are ‘Nexttime’ and ‘Notimeforthatnowtime’. This shows that he is maybe rejected by his parents, or neglected, because he hears these words as much times as words like ‘Gettinguptime’ or ‘TVtime’.
- We also get the impression that the child is bored by real life, most probably because he is being ignored. ‘But he never forget how once (…) he escaped into the clockless land of ever’
+ In Piano:
- In this poem, the rejection by the author of his childhood and the feelings that remind it to him is very clear. He cannot accept his mood, because in this mind, an ‘adult’ should not feel emotions such as the ones he is feeling during the poem: ‘In spite of myself’.
But at the end of the poem the author finally gives up and nostalgically remembers his childhood: ‘My manhood is cast, Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.’
+ In My Parents kept Me from Children who were Rough:
- Here the rejection is subtler, but the protectiveness that the parents of the author show at first sight can be seen as over protectiveness at second sigh: the parents take control of their child’s youth. ‘My parents kept me from children who were rough’; in this sentence we can see that the child has no control whatsoever.
By showing us how innocent children and more experienced adults have different ways of seeing the world that surrounds them, the poems Half-past Two; Piano and My Parents kept Me from Children who were Rough, all show an opposition between childhood and adult perspectives.
However, they present slightly different visions of childhood, which shows us that everybody doesn’t live his childhood in the same way.
