The Children’s Hour
I met a couple today on Loch Lomond who spoke so affectionately of their children and grandchildren that, when I later sat down to write, my thoughts returned to them. So I dedicate this little piece to that couple, and to all parents who have watched their children grow from small hands into lives of their own.
What is my most beloved poem? I sometimes ask myself. It feels rather like choosing a favourite wine gum. There are so many that have accompanied me through different seasons of life that choosing one seems almost unfair. Yet today, perhaps because of that conversation beside the loch, I found myself returning to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Children’s Hour.
On the surface, it is a delightful little poem about a father interrupted at his work by his three daughters, who have decided to lay siege to him. He hears them coming and knows perfectly well what is about to happen. His work, however important it may have seemed a moment before, can wait. The children cannot.
There is something wonderfully familiar in that scene. Longfellow captures the way children can enter the adult world without the slightest regard for its schedules and obligations. To them, a father sitting at his desk is not a man with correspondence to answer or work to finish; he is simply Dad, and Dad is available to be climbed upon. The world of childhood has its own logic, and in that world affection is often expressed by proximity, noise, interruption and an almost complete disregard for personal space.
But the poem runs deeper than this charming domestic scene. Beneath the playfulness lies something more poignant: the father knows, as every parent eventually comes to know, that his children will grow up. The little girls who can so easily storm their father’s room will one day have lives beyond his reach. They will become women with friendships, loves, convictions, disappointments and decisions of their own. They will travel roads he cannot travel for them, and make choices he cannot make on their behalf.
And perhaps the most humbling part of parenthood is that we do not know what those roads will look like.
We bring children into the world without being given a map of the lives they will lead. We can teach them, protect them, encourage them, warn them, pray for them and, if we are fortunate, give them a sense of belonging strong enough to carry with them when they eventually leave home. But we cannot write their stories for them. We can only accompany them for a while.
That is one of the strange sorrows of loving a child. We love someone whose future is largely hidden from us. We see the beginning, but not the ending. We know the child who is standing in front of us, but we cannot know with certainty the adult who is slowly emerging.
Perhaps that is why The Children’s Hour has stayed with me. It is not really a poem about a father being interrupted. It is a poem about a father being given a moment in which his children are still small, still close, and still entirely convinced that he is the centre of their little universe. He is their fortress, their mountain, their place of safety, and they are perfectly content to storm him whenever they please.
There is something almost unbearably precious about such moments precisely because they are temporary. Childhood does not announce its departure. It simply changes, almost imperceptibly, until one day we realise that the small shoes have become large ones, that the voice has changed, that the hand which once reached instinctively for ours now belongs to someone who can find their own way.
Perhaps this is why the couple I met on Loch Lomond stayed in my thoughts. There was something beautiful in the affection with which they spoke of their children and grandchildren. It reminded me that parenthood is not simply the experience of raising a child; it is also the privilege of witnessing a life unfold, knowing that much of its unfolding remains beyond our control.
There is a certain courage in that. We love our children, knowing that we cannot protect them from every sorrow, cannot make every decision for them and cannot see the future that awaits them. We can only give them what love, wisdom and time allow us to give, and then trust that what has been planted in them will continue to grow.
And so, perhaps, when the children come to lay siege to us, the wisest thing is not to think about the work they are interrupting. Perhaps it is to recognise that they are giving us something far more valuable: a moment of their childhood that will never come again.
The work can wait. The children cannot.
Longfellow understood that. And perhaps that is why, after all these years, The Children’s Hour still feels less like a poem about three little girls climbing into their father’s arms and more like a quiet reminder to treasure the people we have been given, while we still have them close.
Poetry: "The Children's Hour" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (read by John Lithgow)
