Children

Literary Commentary

Innokenty Annensky's 'Children' opens with a man being led away by guards: 'Has time come? I'm fully ready.' From that first line the poem is also an argument. The speaker accepts his sentence, 'We to prisons, they to gladness,' and turns immediately to the only thing he asks of the people who remain free: that they protect the children. Five quatrains later the poem ends in a question, addressed not to a single listener but to 'People! Brothers!' This is Annensky's most public-facing piece of writing.

The argument moves in stages. The opening stanza takes prison as a given and pleads for the children to be given sun and grass instead. The middle three stanzas turn inward, instructing the reader on how to treat a child: do not scold, do not coerce, do not ever cause a child to tremble. At the center is a theological claim. A child's tears cannot be washed away by the parent's confession, the poem says, 'because in them is Christ, all of him, with all his radiance.' The closing stanza widens again, naming the children whose arms are 'as thin as threads' and asking whether the adult world's peace is in fact only suffering wearing peace's clothes.

Among the lyrics in *The Cypress Chest* (published posthumously in 1910), 'Children' sits in the most outward-facing section, 'Scattered Leaves.' Annensky's better-known poems work in modes of solitary metaphysical reflection: the cosmic loneliness of 'Among the Worlds,' the silent instrument of 'The Bow and the Strings,' the autumnal interior weather of 'September.' This poem speaks differently, in a register of civic appeal. The schoolmaster who ran the Nikolaev Gymnasium at Tsarskoye Selo for ten years is audible in it: an adult who watched children up close and refused to write the genre of children's poem in which adults are wise.

Key themes

• Childhood innocence as moral ground
• Adult shame and parental responsibility
• Class injustice (prison versus gladness)
• Religious faith — Christ borne in the child
• Public address and civic conscience

Notable craft elements

• Trochaic tetrameter throughout, with cross-rhyme (ABAB) holding all five stanzas
• Direct second-person address ('do not scold,' 'you are unhappy,' 'People! Brothers!') that turns the poem into a speech
• Concrete nouns over abstractions (prison, flowers, sun, thread, whisper, trembling, threads-for-arms) carry the moral argument
• Rhetorical caesurae at the start ('Has time come? I'm fully ready') and at the end ('People! Brothers!') frame the poem as both arrest and altar call

Reread prompt

On a second reading, follow the word 'thread' (нить) from stanza two, where it describes the fragility of childhood, to stanza five, where it returns as the visible thinness of starving arms. What does this single word's transformation do to the poem's argument?

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