A Sad Child
A Sad Child - meaning Summary
Childhood Sadness, Widened
The poem addresses persistent childhood sadness and adult attempts to dismiss or treat it—therapy, pills, distractions—while insisting the feeling stems from a formative moment of exclusion: the speaker’s realization that she is not the favorite child. That private wound haunts and informs identity until a catastrophic image—being trapped, burning—collapses distinctions between selves. The closing lines suggest that in extreme vulnerability individual hierarchies lose meaning; pain is universal or null.
Read Complete AnalysesYou're sad because you're sad. It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. Go see a shrink or take a pill, or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll you need to sleep. Well, all children are sad but some get over it. Count your blessings. Better than that, buy a hat. Buy a coat or pet. Take up dancing to forget. Forget what? Your sadness, your shadow, whatever it was that was done to you the day of the lawn party when you came inside flushed with the sun, your mouth sulky with sugar, in your new dress with the ribbon and the ice-cream smear, and said to yourself in the bathroom, I am not the favorite child. My darling, when it comes right down to it and the light fails and the fog rolls in and you're trapped in your overturned body under a blanket or burning car, and the red flame is seeping out of you and igniting the tarmac beside your head or else the floor, or else the pillow, none of us is; or else we all are.
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