A Child in the Garden

When to the garden of untroubled thought
I came of late, and saw the open door,
And wished again to enter, and explore
The sweet, wild ways with stainless bloom inwrought,
And bowers of innocence with beauty fraught,
It seemed some purer voice must speak before
I dared to tread that garden loved of yore,
That Eden lost unknown and found unsought.

Then just within the gate I saw a child, --
A stranger-child, yet to my heart most dear;
He held his hands to me, and softly smiled
With eyes that knew no shade of sin or fear:
"Come in," he said, "and play awhile with me;"
"I am the little child you used to be."

Henry Van Dyke

JANUARY -1903.

“In every real man, a child is hidden that wants to play” –  Friedrich Nietzsche.

‘’The sun illuminates only the eyes of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child”- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The two beautiful quotes remind me of the poem a child in the garden by Henry Van Dyke. The poem is a sonnet which relays how pure, untroubled, innocent and fearless children are. The poet probably wants to go back to his childhood where everything was magical and simple without the complications of adult life.

Henry Van Dyke describes the kingdom of childhood as “the garden of untroubled thought”. Through this beautiful poem he wishes to re-enter the Garden of Eden, which is the biblical garden of God. Van Dyke describes the Garden of Eden in words of poetry which makes the imagination of the reader make pictorial depictions of the Garden, his description of the garden is rhythmic, the way he melds nature and human like qualities of innocence and pure voice is exceptional. He uses words like sweet, wild, stainless, untroubled and innocence to depict how beautiful the garden is, Van Dyke’s poetry gives the reader’s imagination a boost to paint out their own version of Eden in their minds.

Through his poem, Henry Van Dyke probably wants to bring about the hard reality of life wherein when a child grows he quits childish things, adults become so busy to run the race of life that they forget to notice the marvelous little things that life has to offer. When the poet tries to go into the garden through the open door he finds the Garden of Eden and that is when realization hits him that was not lost to him; but it came to him without him having to search for it and at precisely the time when he needed it at most. The poem is a sonnet which means that it is divided into two parts. The first part consists of eight lines which is called octave and the last six lines are called sestet. In a sonnet the octave and the sestet contain two different ideas; likewise; in this poem the 1^st stanza describes the Garden of Eden and the innocence of childhood and in the 2^nd stanza it talks about an incident where the poet comes across a boy when he is in the Garden.

In the second stanza of the poem the poet sees a child just beyond the gate of the Garden of Eden, the child seems to be a stranger to the poet; yet there is something that seems to be familiar about him. The child then beckons the poet to come play with him and the poet complies. The child is the epitome of purity and innocence. The child is probably a figment of the poet’s imagination because the child is the past of the poet; the child reminds the poet of his older days when he was not caught up with the worldly affairs and was just a small boy who wasn't part of harsh and cruel reality of the world. The poem is a reminder to every adult who is so caught up in their life that they have lost the purity from the child residing in each one of them and as a very famous quote and one of my personal favorites by Edna St. Vincent Millay says; “childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age the child is grown, and puts away childish things. Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.”