The Circuses Poem Analysis

Jennings selects from panorama of childhood experience another moment portrayed by her concern with words and language. The speaker in “The Circuses” remembers the child’s failure to differentiate between the circus she imagines with “energetic clowns, “sprightly horses,” and “elephants,” and the circus she sees when taken to Oxford Circus. The confusion over the word and what it describes provides a plot for the inevitable disparity between expectation and realization; it analyses the nature of memory, and its role in concealing or distorting reality: “So memory/Shields the future, dulls imagination/And no one came to tell me what I said or whether I cried/When the circle dwindled to traffic, the hope held nothing inside” (504)
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She joins other writers who have traditionally found in the creative power of the priest an apt metaphor for the creative power of the artist. The young child holds in her: “hands the story of man’s transforming/ With no cold Creeds or Bible or bidding prayers”(504) Her attention remains fixed on the “host in the shining box” which lays always before her as she “mumbled the old words,” the “good magic,” Thus the remembered game takes on prophetic meaning, intimating the poet’s subsequent concern with language, liturgy and transforming power of words. “A Serious Game” remakes the poet’s sense of wonder in the ritual of the Mass whereas “A Sky in childhood” recreates the poet’s sense of wonder in nature. Both poems rejoice the innocence of the child’s view of the world from the viewpoint of the same individual grown older. The opening lines of “A Sky in Childhood” reveal, however , the primacy of the child’s enthusiastic response to nature as she says: “No sacrament thereafter/No blaze of blue in a Southern sky,/No Italy of the heart/ Would ever gainsay would sunder that good evening” (