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Note on A Child Waking 

A considerable amount of the happiness in most marriages comes from the children in it.  Like the last poem but in a totally different manner, this one improvises with a style which seemed to come attached to it ready-made.  The emphasis is on the disconnected objects that seem to float, as in a Chagall painting, in the midnight stillness of the nursery.  The piece has affinities with Dead Serpentine, in the commentary to which I spoke of ‘corpo-reality in stasis’.  Both parents stand quietly above the baby that has half-woken.  This was at Deerswood Court in Ifield, Sussex, and Undine must have been no more than a few months old.  The year 1964.

Alan Marshfield

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