Was There a Time
Was There a Time - meaning Summary
Innocence, Loss, and Ironic Protection
The poem meditates on lost innocence and the corrosive advance of time. Early playful images — dancers, children's circuses, crying over books — give way to a bleak paradox: knowledge, feeling, and exposure invite harm, while ignorance, absence, or incapacity provide a strange safety. Thomas suggests that what is never known or what lacks heart or limbs escapes injury; vulnerability and perception are reconfigured into ironic protections.
Read Complete AnalysesWas there a time when dancers with their fiddles In children's circuses could stay their troubles? There was a time they could cry over books, But time has sent its maggot on their track. Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe. What's never known is safest in this life. Under the skysigns they who have no arms have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.
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