Images of the child and childhood in Elizabeth Jennings’ poetic world

Abstract

The many poems Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) wrote for children and about childhood, and her appreciation of the young as an audience are evidence that the child’s perspective is an important aspect of her poetic sensibility. Contrary to what most critics seem to think, however, this is not a theme that can be removed from the framework of reference of Jennings’ Roman Catholic faith. This discussion examines several poems in which a child’s experience of the world, including the experience of the sacraments, is recollected with deep feeling and incorporated, with respect and compassion, into the experience of the adult. Some of this is evidently autobiographical, but the confessional aspect never prevents the poet from seeing personal experience in a wider context; nor does it hinder her in relating such experience to the mystery of the God who became Man as a little child. Though the vision of childhood that emerges in Jennings’ poetry is far from being unequivocally paradisal, the attention paid to it seems to reflect the poet’s conviction that only by reflecting on childhood experience in the light of the Incarnation can we learn as adults how to “become the kind of child God wants us to be”, as she wrote in her unpublished Pensées.