ng the children come inside and not enjoy their playing. She seems almost jealous of them and their innocence. The first sentence describes the thoughts in her mind:When the voices are heard on the green,And whispering are in the dale,The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind,My face turns green and pale(lines 1-4). In thinking of her childhood she seems to be sickened by it. Two questions come to mind when reading this, is it because she feels she wasted it and it flew by too fast, or did she do something in her younger days to hurt someone. Both questions can be answered by the etching and the verse. Her thinking that she wasted her youth and be answered by the second sentence:Then come home, my children, the sun is gone down,And the dews of night arise;Your spring and your day are wasted in play,And your winter and night in disguise(Lines 5-8).Here she says that the children do not realize that with each passing day they grow older and closer to death. The words winter and night can explain this. In the winter, the snow comes, canvassing everything with a white shroud, killing vegetation. While the night has everything lay quietly down to sleep, much like in death and sleeping for eternity. The etching can explain her possibly hurting something/one. The young girl in the picture seems to have a sinister look on her face. Her eyes stare off into the distance while her hair is being brushed by the older woman. She seems not to have the look of innocence that the children had in the first song.In looking at both poems, they have two separate meanings from each other, but can be tied together by a the simple lesson of living. Song one is about being young and living freely as a child in the spring time. While the second song, by having the children come into the house and stop their foolish playing for they do not know what comes to them later in life, shows that the nurse is thinking of the aging process and wondering w...
