Hoagwood, Terence. “Kingsley's ‘Young and Old',” Explicator
Vol.
46, No. 4 (Summer 1988): 18-21.
Hoagwood analyzes Kingsley’s "Young and Old,” the short poem sung by
the kind schoolmistress at Vendale in The Water-Babies. He
shows that it is impossible for the song to be fully understood when first
encountered in the book. It is only later in the story that we recognize
that the song is the old dame’s lament for her son Grimes who left her.
The realization at the end of the novel that Grimes is her son “enables
us to revisit the lyric and to revise our understanding of its latent,
private, and even secret significance for the grieving old dame” (19).
‘Young
and Old’;
Poetry;
The
Water-Babies. |
