Dickinson’s “A Light Exists in Spring”
Emily Dickinson’s speaker remains somewhat hazy about what that special light looks like, but she has made it abundantly clear how it makes her feel, and that aspect of the poem endears it to children. The experience of this light affects her so deeply that she cannot describe its physical appearance but only the strange influence it exerts upon her mind and heart.
The speaker asserts that this special light is “[n]ot present” at any other time of the year; even before March has advanced very far, the light begins to appear. They mystery of the light becomes a delight almost immediately. Her description of color appeals to the childhood fancy with precision: “A Color stands abroad / On Solitary Fields,” and this color baffles science, endearing it to heart more than the mind.
Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour”
In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s delightful and playful “The Children’s Hour,” the speaker claims there is a magic time of day, “When the night is beginning to lower, / Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,” as the hour “known as the Children’s Hour.” He hears the “patter of little feet” upstairs. He hears soft, little voices, and doors being opened and shut.
The speaker is cloistered in his study, but suddenly he can see that three little figures are making their way to him; they are “Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, / And Edith with golden hair.” He hears the little voices whispering, plotting their ambush of their father.
And suddenly they are pouncing upon him, “a sudden rush from the stairway / A sudden raid from the hall!” The speaker metaphorically likens their little ritual of coming to say goodnight to their father to a storybook attack, involving a “castle wall,” which the little ones are proficient at scaling.
They enter his study in flurry of wild motion, and they “almost devour me with kisses, / Their arms about me entwine.” The speaker is reminded of stories that imply that he has, no doubt, read to his little brood. He thinks of “the Bishop of Bingen / In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!” And he protests that they may think, “Because [they] have scaled the wall, / Such an old mustache as [he is] / Is not a match for [them] all!”
But he assures them that he “has [them] fast in [his] fortress, / And will not let [them] depart.” He then makes the remarkable loving statement that he will “put [them] down into the dungeon / In the round-tower of my heart.” And he promises to keep them in his heart forever, “Yes, forever and a day, / Till the walls shall crumble to ruin, / And moulder in dust away.”
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