I could have scrolled past this and left it alone.

Ok, in terms of potential social media reactions, that’s what I did. I didn’t leave a comment.

It was a simple post about the name given to a children’s daycare center: “The Children’s Hour.” 

My reaction was physical, maybe even audible: “Huh?”

Not, I am assuming, “Huh?” in the context of what the person posting the comment intended. A couple of responses that were left bore testament to that fact. There was a context to this tweet that I clearly didn’t grasp. Mine was the reaction of someone asking “what do you see that I don’t see?” 

Somewhere in my memory something stirred. “The Children’s Hour.” The title made me smile and remember my mother and her frequent recitations of memorized poetry. I grew up hearing stanzas from “Hiawatha” interspersed with Biblical passages and snatches of verse from “Psalm of Life.” My parents were educated when teachers frequently assigned poetry for students to memorize and perform in front of the classroom. Longfellow was obviously a “go to” for memorization and recitation. Still, I couldn’t quite place the reference to “The Children’s Hour.” So I did what most 21st century seekers do: I googled it.

And there it was. A 10-stanza poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “The Children’s Hour.” Reading it, I could almost hear my mom’s voice. I didn’t spend too much time basking in the glow of that memory. That came later. I was too immediately focused on the question of “what is objectionable about this poem?”

Longfellow wrote the poem in 1860. It was included in the collection of his poems, Tales of a Wayside Inn. A bit of digging (thanks Wikipedia!) reveals that the poem was often taught in the early 20th century to elementary school children. The Wikipedia entry also references an educator, R.L. Lyman, who thought the poem’s language and literary devices weren’t suitable for children, arguing that it was “about children” and not “for children.”

This still didn’t answer my question.

Ok. It’s from an earlier time when the task of raising children was peripheral to the busy, productive lives of their fathers. The poem’s content indicates that a father “pauses in the day’s occupations” to greet and roughhouse with his kids. Longfellow included the names and descriptions of his own 3 daughters in the poem, which personalizes it as his own experience.

And obviously, the “day’s occupations” are the purview of said patriarch while the task of raising the children falls to their mother or, potentially, a nanny. So it represents a patriarchal view of parenthood as well as a view of life from a privileged standpoint. 

That’s a possible answer. 

Back to Google. I did some more digging, and I discovered that there are several daycare centers named “The Children’s Hour,” including an academy with that name in Lake Oswego, Oregon. (Fairly impressive looking library in the photos from that one.) But the number of daycare centers and academies with this name made me ask: is this poem more relevant to 21st century life than we realize?

I walk through my neighborhood frequently. It’s one that lends itself to walking; in fact, we have people who drive to our neighborhood to enjoy walking their dogs. The residential streets here are quiet and people recognize and greet one another regularly. There are at least four daycare centers (none of them named The Children’s Hour) within a 6-8 block radius. So, as I’m out walking, I often see parents picking up their children at the end of their work day. Daytime or afterschool care of these kids is the purview of someone besides mom or dad.  It’s obviously a  more harried experience than the poem’s speaker has, but these are people “pausing the the day’s occupations” to greet their children and take them home. Harried as this pick up time is, I often hear laughter and “what did you do, today?” and see kids sharing artwork with their parents. 

So, I ask again: what is objectionable? Doesn’t this poem resonate in some significant ways with the experience of raising kids in 21st century American culture? And would naming a daycare center after the poem be similarly appropriate?

And then my eyes fell on this:

The play written by Lillian Hellman–The Children’s Hour.

Pause here while I admit to my ignorance (until now) of this play. It’s a literary work that has been the subject of controversy and literary and cultural criticism. A bit more digging, and I acquired two critical literary essays written forty years apart. It has obviously been the subject of an ongoing discussion–and one I will pledge myself to enter via reading the play, viewing the film (Audrey Hepburn!) and reading the critical essays.

So, my thanks to a colleague who posted the tweet about the daycare center, for giving me yet another literary journey for Winter Break this year.

And, yet–

While I understand what the tweet was implying because Hellman’s vision of a girls’ school as a battle between mercy and cruelty hardly recommends it as the name given to a daycare, I wonder if the owners of the multiple daycare centers so named are aware of that possible connotation? Hellman gave the play its title as a purposeful ironic twist on the title of Longfellow’s poem. Is it possible that the daycare proprietors are unaware of the play’s existence, or, if they are, its content and theme? Is it possible that, like me, they have associated that title with a vaguely remembered short poem about children roughhousing with their father at the end of the day? 

I have a degree in literary studies (albeit, not as advanced as my colleague’s), and I have never read the play. I believe it’s quite possible that there are others, some even daring to wander the halls of academia, who have not.

My colleague has obviously read and studied the play; thus, her response to the name given to the daycare center. I believe her response and mine are akin to what Gerald Murnane refers to in “A Loose Fish”–the brief adaptation of his essay that is included in the January, 2022 edition of Harper’s. In his essay, Murnane refers to James Joyce’s irritation with anyone reviewing a book by summarizing or commenting in any generalized way on the content. He apparently expected any such reviewer to be able to quote passages from the book, a feat Murnane argues few people can accomplish. Murnane suggests that we remember our own “impressions” or “memories” of a text. In doing so, he argues, we have “adapted a fictional text for the best of all purposes: to enrich an actual life.”

We each, my colleague and I, have our own “impressions” of the text we associate with the title, “The Children’s Hour.” And those impressions enrich our lives.