Childhood's Glory (Ch.12)

The innocence and freshness of Clare’s early years are grounded in the specific places and occasions in which his early sense of ‘glory’ was first experienced.  The landscape of his childhood therefore is not only a particular physical landscape – where certain kinds of fields, trees, flowers, birds and animals may be found and where even the names of places become incantations – but it is also a cultural landscape of infant affections and pastimes. 

His childhood innocence may have been sometimes darkened by a sense of loss and of guilt, or of fear and foreboding, but it certainly was a time of his life when his perceptions were particularly vivid, more direct, more natural than the time of  “knowledge of good and evil” — of disillusionment, and the sickness that accompanied his later years.

I look behind & like to eden find

Too late the Eden I have left behind

To lose this extacy, this rapture, is to be excluded from a direct relationship with the unsullied glory of creation, and to have to live one’s life with a sense of loss.

Childhood's Glory (Arbour Chapbook No. 12) became available from me at £4.00 + £1.00 postage and packing (UK).  Email me on arborfield@pm.me 

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