The Care and Feeding of Small Children

In true spinster fashion, I have now become a teacher of small children. I'm teaching a pre-school playgroup of three-year-olds two days a week. It is a hallmark of a certain type of spinsterhood to borrow other people's children to make up for not having your own, and these kids certainly are a joy to be around- they are bright, funny, curious, and loving, and they view the world in that astonished, joyful and yet completely serious way that young children have. Because I've been spending so much time with small children, I've been thinking about what a responsibility it is to have the care of young minds and souls. This poem by Richard Wilbur has been on my mind, so I thought I'd share it.

The Writer

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.