Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Lawrence Raab’s "Other Children" is a haunting meditation on loss, cruelty, survival, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of suffering. The poem weaves together personal memory, historical tragedy, news reports, and folklore, primarily drawing from Grimm’s The Juniper Tree, to explore the fragility of childhood and the way violence—both deliberate and incidental—shapes the world. Through shifting perspectives and narrative fragments, Raab examines how stories of harm and resilience are passed down, repeated, and ultimately absorbed into the fabric of history.

The opening section situates the reader in the perspective of the speaker’s young daughter, who watches the eruption of Mount St. Helens on the news. "She could not have known this wasn’t likely to happen here, and she was worried, for the first time perhaps, over such concerns." The child’s first awareness of disaster is deeply personal—she fears not for abstract strangers but for the security of her own world. Yet the adults watching the same footage experience it differently: "Nor could she have understood how often we’d seen that shot, that man / among the wreckage, a broken toy in his hand." The repetition of disaster in the media has dulled its impact for the adults, who recognize the familiar image of grief. But for the child, this is new, a first encounter with devastation.

The second section shifts the focus to the speaker’s own intrusive fears: "Accustomed to the daily / summaries of loss, it’s easy to believe the news, by definition, happens elsewhere." This line speaks to the way tragedy feels distant—until it doesn’t. The speaker, despite this detachment, cannot help but imagine personal catastrophe: "But when I watch my wife and daughter drive off to school, sometimes I can’t help but see myself standing beside the warped and twisted metals of the car." The act of watching his loved ones leave is infused with dread, a helpless anticipation of disaster that hasn’t happened but could. This fear—rooted in possibility rather than reality—mirrors the child’s fear of the volcano, showing how both innocence and experience can be consumed by uncertainty.

Raab then introduces The Juniper Tree, a fairy tale of violence and resurrection. The gruesome story—of a stepmother who murders her stepson, cooks him into a stew, and feeds him to his unsuspecting father—is presented without embellishment. "Now what will I do? she thought, then picked him up, set his head back on." The casual tone of the retelling makes the horror even more unsettling. The contrast between the fairy tale’s grotesque violence and its ultimate resolution—the boy’s bones, carefully gathered, leading to his magical rebirth—suggests the power of stories to contain suffering within structured, even comforting, narratives.

But in the next section, the poem pivots sharply from folklore to real-world horror: "In the newspapers I read about a father who put his son in a bathtub filled with scalding water because / the child needed to be taught a lesson." Unlike the fairy tale, this story has no supernatural resolution. The suffering is real, senseless, and irredeemable. This is followed by an even more horrifying account: "A young woman named Betty Lansdown Fouquet left her five-year-old daughter out to die on the center divider of the interstate." The detail of the girl’s "fingers pried from the Cyclone fence," and her desperate attempt to chase after the departing car, is unbearably stark. There is no magical bird to restore her, no enchanted justice.

Raab does not present these stories as disconnected tragedies but as part of an ongoing cycle. The man who sees the abandoned child but keeps driving—convincing himself "there’s got to be an explanation even if he’s now too far away to find out what"—represents the passive bystander, the one who tells himself that intervention is impractical, that tragedy belongs to someone else. His failure to act mirrors the way society compartmentalizes suffering, reducing it to something observed, regretted, but ultimately dismissed.

As the poem nears its conclusion, Raab brings us back to his daughter, now asking an innocent but unsettling question: "When I die," my daughter asked me, / "will I still have my fingers?" The father, like the bystander, is uncertain how to respond: "I can’t remember what I told her." He recognizes the inadequacy of any answer—how can one explain death to a child in a way that doesn’t introduce terror? The question is not just about death but about wholeness, about whether the self can remain intact even after loss.

The poem’s closing sections return to the fairy tale structure, yet this time, it is stripped of its redemptive arc. There is no magical bird to sing the suffering away. Instead, "Other children will be born, some loved, some feared. And the parents who loved them will find their places in the ground beside the ones who did not." This blunt juxtaposition erases any easy moral resolution. The good and the bad, the loving and the cruel, all end up buried side by side. The image of "bones growing whiter, waiting for the body to come back to them" suggests that, unlike in the fairy tale, the dead do not return.

But Raab leaves us with an echo of the folktale’s power: "And some who listen imagine they can sense a shape beneath this song, which for a time contains the grief each believed was his, or hers, alone." This final line acknowledges the role of stories in processing trauma. Even without magic, even without a just resolution, stories offer a shape—a way of holding grief, even if only briefly. The fairy tale structure, despite its impossibilities, provides a framework for understanding what otherwise seems beyond comprehension.

"Other Children" is a poem about cycles of harm, the limits of intervention, and the uneasy space between horror and redemption. Raab does not offer answers, nor does he attempt to resolve the tension between fairy tales and reality. Instead, he allows these stories to exist alongside each other, forcing the reader to confront the unsettling continuity of violence, the randomness of survival, and the weight of bearing witness. Through its layered narratives and quiet, devastating shifts in tone, the poem leaves us not with comfort, but with the recognition that suffering, once seen, cannot be unseen—and that perhaps the best we can do is try to find some shape to contain it.

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