Poem Analysis: "Childhood " by Frances Cornford

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Childhood

Frances Cornford

Analysis

The poem childhood shows the reality of how children look at adults. Children are portrayed with their lack of experience on the real world and how little they know about the world they have yet to experience but then they realize how little they know about the world and have an epiphany that becoming an adult is part of life as well as becoming old. The narrator of the poem is an adult which may be reminiscing when he was a child and how he then realized what has been mentioned above. The narrator has a tone of reflection as he is remembering when he was a child as well as having the viewpoint of a child due to this.

The first stanza shows the viewpoint of the child before he has the epiphany and how little experience he has on the world. The narrator uses this first stanza to paint how a child would see an adult. By using words such as “stiff backs” and “wrinkles around their nose” we can easily get the picture of what the narrator is trying to paint for us. His inexperience on the world is reassured when it says “on purpose to be grand”. We can see the variation of the lines which shows that the

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writer did this with the sole purpose to show that it was a child which was writing, this then changes after the narrator has its epiphany which reveals a more mature and complex nature of the narrator. This is also seen in the tone which is at first childish and then changes to a more mature and complex one.

The second stanza the narrator has its “epiphany”, realizing how little experience in life it has and how wrong he had been when he had said that adults choose to be with “stiff backs “ so that they could be ...

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