Children of Darkness

“In their generation wiser than the children of Light.”

We spurred our parents to the kiss,
Though doubtfully they shrank from this—
Day had no courage to review
What lusty dark alone might do—
Then were we joined from their caress
In heat of midnight, one from two.

This night-seed knew no discontent,
In certitude his changings went;
Though there were veils about his face,
With forethought, even in that pent place,
Down towards the light his way he bent
To kingdoms of more ample space.

Was Day prime error, that regret
For darkness roars unstifled yet?
That in this freedom, by faith won,
Only acts of doubt are done?
That unveiled eyes with tears are wet,
They loathe to gaze upon the sun?

Background and Analysis of This Poem

Robert Graves's Children of Darkness was published in his 1923 collection Whipperginny, a volume that belongs to the years after his service in the First World War. The Academy of American Poets identifies the poem as coming from Whipperginny and places it in the public domain, while also noting Graves's reputation as a war poet, novelist, translator and author of I, Claudius. That background matters, but the poem is not straightforwardly a war poem. Its darkness feels older and more intimate, as if Graves is looking not at one historical catastrophe, but at a human inheritance of fear, hunger and bewildered desire.

The title immediately places the poem's figures in a condition rather than a location. They are not merely children in the dark, waiting for a lamp. They are "children of darkness", born from it, shaped by it, and perhaps unable to imagine any other parentage. Graves writes in a way that makes darkness feel psychological, sexual, moral and existential all at once. It is not just night outside the window. It is the atmosphere in which human beings find themselves before they understand what they are, what they want, or why they suffer.

The poem's voice has a strange mixture of tenderness and severity. There is pity for these children, but not sentimentality. Graves does not present innocence as a shining refuge untouched by corruption. Instead, childhood becomes a place where fear and longing already stir. This is one of the poem's unsettling insights: darkness is not something that politely waits until adulthood before entering the room. It is present early, mixed with dreams, bodily impulses, loneliness and half-understood terrors. The children are vulnerable, but they are not blank.

Graves's treatment of desire is particularly uneasy. The poem suggests that human longing can feel both natural and frightening, as though the self is driven by forces it cannot fully command. This gives the piece a mythic quality, even without an obvious mythological framework. Graves would later become famous for his intense interest in myth, ritual and poetic authority, but even here there is a sense that private feeling belongs to something ancient. The darkness around the children seems less like a modern mood than a deep ancestral condition.

The poem's compression is part of its force. Graves does not explain too much, and the gaps matter. He leaves readers with images and implications rather than a moral neatly pinned to the page. That restraint allows the poem to remain troubling. Are the "children of darkness" victims, inheritors, sinners, dreamers, or simply human beings before the consolations of daylight have been invented? The answer shifts as one reads. Graves seems interested in the way innocence and shadow can occupy the same small body, which is not the sort of thought most nursery decorators would welcome.

For modern readers, Children of Darkness may feel stark, but it rewards careful attention. It belongs to a world in which childhood is not idealised, desire is not tidied up, and fear is not treated as an interruption to life, but as one of its first languages. Graves gives the poem a haunted inwardness without explaining away its mystery. The result is a short, unsettling meditation on what it means to be born into darkness, and to begin, somehow, searching from there.