Returning to Twilight

I met a couple today on Loch Lomond who spoke affectionately of tneir children and grandchildren and I dedicate this blog to them.

What is my most beloved poem? I sometimes ask myself. It feels rather like choosing a favourite Haribo. There are too many shapes, colours and moods. To place one above all the others seems almost unfair.

Yet there is one poem I return to often. It is not ornate or dazzling. On the surface, it is simply a captured moment: a father sitting in his study as his three daughters come to find him. But each time I read it, the moment seems to open into something larger.

For me, that poem is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Children's Hour.

It begins at twilight, that suspended hour between daylight and darkness. Longfellow sits in his study and hears his three daughters approaching. Their footsteps come down the corridor, and soon they burst into the room, laughing, surrounding him and binding him in what he calls their "living chain."

He does not resist. There is instead a "gesture of peace and silence" and a "murmur of soft persuasion."

The tenderness of the poem lies partly in that response. Authority gives way to affection. The study, a place of work and thought, is interrupted by children, and the interruption is welcomed.

But twilight matters. Evening is a time of transition, and so is childhood. The girls are still young, yet the reader knows they will not remain so. Longfellow's playful description of them as little bandits and spirits carries a hint of something more wistful, as though he senses how briefly such enchantment lasts.

That is where the poem deepens for me.

Did he wonder what sort of women his daughters would become? What would the world make of them, and what would they make of the world? Longfellow knew personal sorrow and lived through a deeply unsettled age. Innocence, then, could hardly have seemed permanent.

When the children bind him in their "living chain," the image is playful, but his wish to keep that chain fastened in the "round-tower" of his heart suggests something more. He cannot keep the children as they are. He can only keep the memory of this hour.

Every parent eventually faces that truth. We can love, teach, encourage and guide our children, but we cannot determine the people they will become. They have wills of their own. Scripture gives us little reason to imagine that goodness comes automatically with upbringing.

Longfellow does not attempt to solve that problem. Instead, he shows us something about formation.

The children are experiencing what love feels like: security, affection and joy. Their father allows himself to be captured. He does not surrender his authority; he simply values the relationship more than the interruption to his work.

There is an education here that requires no lesson.

Children learn not only from what we tell them but from the atmosphere in which they grow. They learn whether home is a place of safety, whether authority can be trusted, and whether love is freely given. Such ordinary moments may become part of the moral foundation on which a life is built.

That is why I don't think The Children's Hour is merely nostalgic. Beneath its sweetness is an awareness that the hour will pass.

The children will grow. The arms that now encircle their father will one day reach for lives beyond his. He cannot control what awaits them, but he can give them something to carry with them.

Perhaps that is why I return to the poem. It reminds me that some of the most important moments in life arrive disguised as interruptions: a child's footsteps in the corridor, laughter in a room where work was being done, an embrace that lasts only a few moments.

Poetry has a way of making us notice such things.

And when I imagine Longfellow sitting there in the fading light, surrounded by his daughters, I see a father storing something against the future. He cannot stop the darkness from coming, but he can preserve the light of this hour in his heart.

The living chain may eventually fall away from the body.

But it need not fall away from the heart.

Poetry: "The Children's Hour" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (read by John Lithgow)