"My Parents Kept Me From Children Who Were Rough" by Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender

"My Parents Kept Me From Children Who Were Rough" deals with class differences. The adult poet looks back at how it felt to be a child whose middle-class parents warned him to stay away from the "rough" working-class boys.

The poem's narrator is ambivalent. Like his parents, he is afraid of the rough boys, but he also feels a mixture of attraction, jealousy, and shame.

The poem begins, "My parents kept me from children who were rough." It would have been more accurate to say that his parents tried to keep him from children who were rough, because his parents weren't able to keep their son and the rough children apart.

The rough children follow the narrator on the road, imitating his lisp. They pin him down -- "their knees tight on [his] arms" -- or at least he feared that they would. There is a gap between his parents' intentions and the reality of his life.