Here’s a short poem on the perennial English theme of class. Stephen Spender (1909–1995) was part of that loose grouping of left-leaning poets in the 1930s, the others being W H Auden, Louis Macneice and C Day Lewis.
There’s a feeling here that the speaker is both afraid of the “rough boys” but also rather envious of their freedom, energy and rude health.
If we assume that the poem is autobiographical, and refers to Spender’s own childhood years, we would be in the early 1920s. The very fact that the poem is entitled My Parents indicates an era in which class and status were still very much a matter of birth.
We might smugly think that everything has changed for the better and that things are different today, but perhaps it’s worth reflecting that the modern equivalents of the speaking voice in this poem are ferried everywhere by car. They never have to run the gauntlet of the rough boys in the street.
My Parents by Stephen Spender
My parents kept me from children who were rough
Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes
Their thighs showed through rags. They ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.
I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron
Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.
They were lithe, they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud
While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.
I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.
The Good Reader 