Brendon Gallacher is about a little girl who imagines that she has a friend who is Brendon Gallacher but this friend does not exist. The poem is like a childhood fantasy where she has created a friend she considers interesting and fun. However when her deceit was discovered, Brendon Gallacher metaphorically dies.
The main theme portrayer between the two poems is loneliness. In Hide and Seek the aspect of loneliness is when the child emerges from his hiding place, thinking that he has won but he is mistaken as he soon comes to realise that he is alone. This is because the other children had given up looking for him:
“Yes, here you are but where are they who sought you?”
He thinks he is the winner but really the others had just left him all alone.
In Brendon Gallacher the little girl is so lonely that she dreams up her own friend. Someone who liked all the things she did. It was a fragment of her imagination:
“He was Irish and I was Scottish, my Brendon Gallacher.”
She created someone surreal but however the dream is then killed of by her mother.
Another common theme mentioned in each poem is death. In Hide and Seek some parts of the poem are reminiscent of death:
“Your legs are stiff, the cold bits through your coat; the dark damp smell of sand moves in your throat.” And “The darkening garden watches.”
These phrases are reminiscent of death as if you are died you can not feel anything so your body is stiff and you are very cold.
In the final stanza of Brendon Gallacher the mother tells the girl that the Gallacher’s never existed and that was when the fantasy or dream:
“There never have been any Gallacher next door and he died then, my Brendon Gallacher.”
To conclude both the poets’ recollections of childhood were about loneliness and in some cases death but they were both completely different. In Hide and Seek, the boy is lonely as he has been forgotten by his friends who had given up looking for him, whereas in Brendon Gallacher the girl is also lonely but this is because she has no friends. Thus indicating the two poems are contrasting but revolve around the same theme.