Tag Archives: Childhood

My Brilliant Friend, Cure for Loneliness?

By Robin Bates | Published: November 15, 2023

The child perspective in Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” creates a special bond with the reader.

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Thrown by Proust into the Past

By Robin Bates | Published: May 9, 2023

Reading about Gilberte in “Swann’s Way” has had me thinking a lot about a girl I knew in childhood.

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Larkin’s Attack on Nostalgia

By Robin Bates | Published: April 25, 2023

Larkin’s “I Remember” is an attack on Coventry for not having given him an idealized childhood.

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See, This Coal Has Touched Your Lips

By Robin Bates | Published: January 29, 2022

The image of God touching the lips of Isaiah and Jeremiah shows up in C.S. Lewis’s “Voyage of the Dawn Treader.”

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Bright Shoots of Everlastingness

By Robin Bates | Published: October 2, 2021

In “Retreat” Henry Vaughan’s childhood self is closer to God than his adult self, perhaps reflecting Christ’s admonition to receive the kingdom of God as a child would.

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Becoming Clever at Age Six

By Robin Bates | Published: June 15, 2018

A. A. Milne’s poem about turning six gets the age just right.

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What Tennis Meant to Tolstoy

By Robin Bates | Published: September 5, 2017

Leo Tolstoy picked up tennis late in life, even though at one point seeing it as symbolic of bourgeois decadence. A look at the novel “Resurrection” explains why he changed.

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Childhood, Space of Terror & Enchantment

By Robin Bates | Published: October 3, 2016

Norman Finkelstein’s wondrous poem “Children’s Realm” (in “The Ratio of Reason to Magic”) examines child’s play spaces and says that the poet also needs play spaces within.

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Fantasy as a Shield against Growing up

By Robin Bates | Published: March 13, 2016

Teaching “Peter and Wendy” has given me insights into my father and the uses of fantasy. It can be used to shield one against an intolerable reality.

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