Children of wealth in your warm nursery,

Set in the cushioned window seat to watch

The volleying snow, guarded invisibly
By the clear double pane through which no touch
Ultimately penetrates, you cannot tell
What winter means; its cruel truths to you
Are only sound and sight; your citadel
Is safe from feeling, and from knowledge too.

Go down, go out to elemental wrong,

Waste your too round limbs, tan your skin too white;
The glass of comfort, ignorance, seems strong
To-day, and yet perhaps this very night

You’ll wake to horror’s wrecking fire – your home

Is wired for this, in every room.

Given the target of today’s poem is the privileged British upper class, you might
be forgiven for thinking Elizabeth Daryush was a working-class warrior. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Daughter of a Poet Laureate, as a young girl she
enjoyed all the trappings of privilege. Nevertheless, she was often critical of the
upper classes and, through her poetry, advocated for social justice and equality
of opportunity. However, knowing something of the downs (as well as ups) of being
cosseted in wealth and comfort, Daryush’s criticisms are never mean or
unjustified. As you’ll see in Children of Wealth, while calling for the abolishment of
barriers that separate people of different classes, she still treats her subjects with
sympathy, recognising how coddled children, swaddled in layers by overprotective
parents, often lose as much as they gain. Deprived of chances to join in with fun
that others might take for granted, they grow up ignorant of life’s rich and
visceral experiences; tumbling in the snow, getting pelted with snowballs, and
enjoying that invigorating feeling of just playing outside – whatever the weather:

We first meet the children of wealth on a cold winter’s evening; heavy snow is
falling outside – and they watch, enthralled, through a thick glass window behind
which they are kept safe and warm. The coddled warmth of the nursery is
immediately evoked in the first line of the poem: Children of wealth in your warm
nursery. Patterns of consonance and alliteration made with the letters W, M and N
warm the poem as underfloor heating warms a house: wealth, warmth, window
seat to watch… and more besides. The combination of these letters, all soft
consonants, sounds woolly and unformed, smouldering warmly. Occasionally,
Daryush turns the thermostat up even higher through fricatives (made with the
letters F, V and Th, as in the line safe from feeling) and sets the temperature to
maximum by combining soft consonants with assonance in the form of long O
and OU sounds: listen to the way your combines with warm to lull us into a
heat-induced stupor. A corollary effect of so much warmth is to induce a
dreamlike lethargy, making the images of the poem fuzzy and unclear. This effect
is particularly apparent in the phrase it’s cruel truths to you are only sound…
where long vowels create a muffled auditory image of the winter wind howling
outside the thick double panes of glass – the sound is eerie and deadened,
depriving us of the full force of the snowstorm’s power. While we can all see and
hear the force of the gale, we don’t feel any visceral impact, and even the sound is
dulled as if our ears are wrapped in warm cotton mufflers.

The glass windows act like stand in guardians, calling attention to the lack of
flesh and blood parents in the poem. ‘Set’ in the windows as if discarded, the
children lead cold, detached lives – despite the warmth of the nursery.
That clear double pane of glass which separates the child from the snowstorm
outside therefore becomes the poem’s most important symbol. The children are
described as invisibly guarded, and the panes of glass fulfil the role of guardian
figures. But what cold, uncaring guardians they must be. Is the glass doubled to
call attention to the conspicuous absence of Mum and Dad in the poem? When
Daryush writes through which no touch ultimately penetrates, she’s not only
referring to the storm, but about the way the children are missing even the
slightest intimate human contact – a cuddle before bed, rough and tumble with
an older brother, riding on the shoulders of a favourite cousin. There’s nary a
nanny hovering in the background, the children were just somehow set in the
window by unseen hands. Even this little word is revealing; set is something you do
to objects, not people, and the word has an indifferent, uncaring quality to it. As
we notice the lack of other adults in the children’s lives, the title of the poem
comes into play. These poor kids are labelled Children of Wealth, as if they are
born from ‘money’ itself. But cold coins are as unfeeling as that smooth, hard
glass; neither are any substitute for a living, breathing family member who might
show some love and affection from time to time. All things considered, that warm
nursery doesn’t seem quite so comforting any more.

Outside is a world of wonder – and risk. But in trying to keep them safe, the
children are denied visceral and physical experiences essential for well-being and
personal growth.
Acting as a stand-in guardian, the window works like a television, letting the
children see and hear but not participate in any meaningful way with whatever
action runs across the screen. In the second line, Daryush made a point of saying
how the children were set to watch the snow – but not to interact with it. Sight and
sound are only two of our five senses, so the children are deprived of any chance
to develop other ways of perceiving the world, particularly through physical
contact which is negated in line four: no touch. The primacy of vision as the
children’s only means of learning is suggested through words from the lexical field
of ‘sight’: watch, invisibly, clear, sight, and glass; yet the poem’s visual imagery is
defined by a lack of colour. Daryush sketches the outside world in a bare, clinical
whiteness: snow, winter, that stark, clear glass again and, in line ten, the white skin
of the children. The poem’s colourless palette effectively conveys the lack of
vividness in a world only seen and not truly felt. We’ve discussed before about how
sound, ostensibly permitted by the window, is dulled. The storm, as heard through
the thick glass windows, is weak and insubstantial: lines like set in the cushioned
window seat and …sight and sound; your citadel is safe… contain sibilance that
conveys only a faint trace of the storm’s power rather than the full force of driving
wind and snow.

By contrast, outside, barely a few inches away from the child’s nose pressed
wonderingly against the glass, the snowstorm rages. Its power is implied through
metaphor when Daryush describes the snow as volleying, suggesting the force of
the wind is such that the snow is falling sideways! We can investigate this word a
little further. While we might connect volleying to sports (such as volleyball,
football or tennis), the word’s etymology derives from French ‘volere’, where it was
used to describe artillery in battle: a ‘volley of gunfire’ describes a group of
soldiers discharging their rifles at the same time. Attaching this word to the
snowfall suggests how harmful it might seem to an overprotected child. Deprived
of play, and of any opportunity to ‘toughen up’, the idea of going out in the snow
appals the children’s invisible guardians who fear their wards getting hurt.
Another word from warfare, citadel can also be read metaphorically. Meaning ‘a
fortress’ that defends the children from harm, their grand house is also a kind of
prison, locking them up behind high walls and invisible, impenetrable, barriers.
This prison might be warm and comfy, adorned with the trappings of wealth, such
as that cushioned window seat. Nevertheless, it’s hard to avoid the idea that the
children are being profoundly deprived by their well-meant but misjudged
upbringing. Cosseted behind glass the children are safe from feeling – a phrase
loaded with irony because ‘feelings’ (physical sensations and emotional
experiences) are something children should never lack – and safe from knowledge
too. The word knowledge links with various others in the poem – tell, truths,
ignorance – to suggest a serious stunting of educational opportunities. Some
types of knowledge can only be gained experientially by going out there,
interacting with one’s environment, and getting one’s hands dirty. Of course,
there will be an element of risk in the world outside the mansion gates. But people
learn and grow through making mistakes and overcoming danger.

If you’d like a little more help understanding the poem’s technical and linguistic
devices, visit the store and download the Study Bundle for Children of Wealth.
Inside, you’ll find a fully editable PPT with all the notes you’ll need to break down
this poem in detail – and you can add your own annotations as you go along too.
Alongside are plenty of worksheets and activities for teachers and students to
make learning about the poem interesting and help your ideas stick. If you need
help with your own analytical writing there’s a continuation exercise as well as
sample essay planning materials – and one complete top-standard essay for you
to learn from.
Daryush’s poem follows a very traditional sonnet form – although she adds her
own personal touches and ends with a flourish, which we’ll get to later. A poem of
fourteen lines, a sonnet follows its own distinct internal structure: an octave (the
first eight lines) followed by the sestet (the last six lines). In traditional Petrarchan
sonnets (the form Daryush most closely adheres to) the sonnet turns between
lines eight and nine. Also called volta, the turn is where something in the poem
changes; the change could be as subtle as a shift in tone or perspective, or it
could be more obvious. Daryush structures her poem so that the octave defines
the problem or argument – and the sestet offers a solution. She employs
structural features to make her turn unmistakeable: the octave is written in one
long sentence, and the poem’s first full stop occurs at the end of the eighth line.
Unusually, she also presents this sonnet in three verses, using a line break
between the octave and sestet, and another before the final rhyming couplet. You
won’t see this in too many other sonnets which are normally presented in one
unbroken verse. Like her father before her, though, Daryush wasn’t averse to
playing with form where it suited the story she was trying to tell, and the urgency
behind her requests for the children to break through that glass barrier before
disaster strikes is conveyed by the ever-shortening verse lengths of the poem. In
another example of how form marries perfectly with the themes of her story,
where a traditional Petrarchan sonnet rhymes ABBAABBA, Daryush rhymes her
poem ABABABAB… Also called alternating rhyme, what better way to suggest
ideas like ‘separation’ and ‘isolation’ than never allowing her rhyming words to
touch each other.

Accordingly, in the second verse, having laid out what she perceives to be the
problem, Daryush turns and proposes a radical solution: Go down, go out to
elemental wrong. In other words – put on your wellies and mittens and go out to
play in the snow! Elemental wrong is a wonderful metaphor that suggests how
alien the snow would feel to a person almost totally deprived of visceral, physical
experiences. There’s heavy irony in the word wrong, and in cruel as well; we could
more easily accuse those absent parents of neglectful cruelty than a few inches
of snow. Daryush’s voice takes on the edge of command through repetition
(repeating words at the beginning of lines and phrases is technically called
anaphora) of the verb go in the imperative tense. She urgently exhorts the
children to leave their warm nursery and bravely venture out to experience winter
first-hand – through touch rather than sight alone. In a slightly unkind (but no
doubt accurate) description she calls their little arms and legs too round limbs,
as if a life of indulged comfort has fattened them up and made them a bit pudgy;
and the oxymoronic tan your skin too white suggests the way children can be
strengthened and toughened, like metal tempered in a white-hot forge, through
physical challenge. As if trying to force her sharp words through the glass,
Daryush employs consonance in a series of hard sounds that oppose all those
warm sounds we previously discussed: Go out, go down… tan your skin too white…
glass of comfort, ignorance… all phrases from the second verse, contain a
smattering of gutturals and dentals that tinkle like shards of broken glass or the
crunching of snow underfoot.

The end of the poem offers a frightening alternative to simply letting children be
children. The fire that wrecks their home seems self-inflicted – and the
unintentional cruelty of their upbringing has devastating consequences.
The final lines of the poem offer a frightening alternative, a warning to the
children of wealth and their parents, should they care to listen. Through the
pointed use of the word seems, she reminds them all that, while their protective
barriers may look and feel strong, they are much more vulnerable than they might
appear. In fact, when disaster strikes, the very forces keeping the winter winds
from getting in will prevent them from getting out as well. In an image that’s
shocking and vivid, Daryush imagines fire suddenly coursing through the nursery,
wrecking the carefully controlled, hermetically sealed rooms that the children are
in and casting everything in a devilish orange light that contrasts so wonderfully
with the pale white imagery of the previous lines. There’s a threatening undertone
to the way Daryush promises the fire will come to-day, and perhaps this very
night… as if she can foresee a deliberate arson attack on the rich estate by a mob
bearing pitchforks and flaming torches. The way the second verse enjambs into
the third evokes the way an angry flame can quickly spread – or even the
smashing of the social barriers that separate the one-percent from the rest of us.
After all, history teaches us that unequal societies never last, and the vivid
imagery at the end of the poem alludes to the way Nero’s Rome, Louis’ France and
other massively unequal societies have ended in violence and fiery destruction.

Of course, the fire is more symbolic than real, metaphysical rather than literal.
The harmful flames relate to the warmth of the children’s nursery to imply the two
are causally linked. The way the home is wired for this suggests the destructive
horror is actually self-inflicted, that the very idea of being totally impervious to
risk is doomed to failure. It’s not that you can’t keep children safe from harm all
the time – it’s that you shouldn’t. An epiphany is a sudden revelation, a flash of
recognition when the full essence of a time, event, person, or memory is realised.
Is it possible that the fire occurs in the very minds of the children who are
supposed to be kept safe, a moment of epiphany after they are all grown up and
look back on their deprived childhoods with anger rather than gratitude? The
end of the poem leaves this possibility open to interpretation.