If I could carve my poems in wood,

By children they would be understood,

So near to the sense things have in God

Are both my poems and children's thought.

For a child knows that logic and meaning

Are only nothing nothing screening,

And a child is one divinely aware

That all things are toys and all things are fair,

That a thimble, a stone and a cotton‑reel

Are things we can quite divinely feel,

And that, if we make men out of those things,

They are really men, not imaginings.

I would therefore l could take my verse

Out of mere ideas and better it worse

To visible carving or drawing or what

My verses could be resembling that.

Then would I be the children's poet,

And, though perhaps I might never know it

With the outer sense that makes life sadder,

In every innocent face made gladder

God would be giving my soul the sense,

Lost back of knowledge, of recompense ­-

The sense of children more children still

When, acting my poems at their glad will,

They, playing with toys, with legs incurled,

Lightly err the visible world.