A grown man looks at a painting of himself at two years old and cannot find himself in it. That is where Robert Southey's poem begins, and it opens on an exclamation that sounds like a double-take: "And I was once like this!" The title gives the child's age, and the speaker says "twenty years / Have wrought strange alteration," so we can infer a young man of about twenty-two looking back. The poem starts as a meditation on lost innocence, but it turns into something bolder: a defence of the choice to be a poet.
The first section is built on contrast between a picture that stays still and a life that does not. The child's brow is "Smooth as the level lake, when not a breeze / Dies o'er the sleeping surface", an image of perfect calm, and the verb "dies" quietly hints at what time will do to such calm. The painted "hues / Remain unalter'd," while the people who once admired the likeness have changed or vanished. Some are dead, "gone / To their last home," and others, "estranged in heart," pass him "on the other side," a phrase that may recall the biblical story of those who walk past a person in need. The speaker's own face has hardened: the "lightly-arching lines" of the child's brows are now "Dark and o'erhanging," the "mild face / Settled in these strong lineaments." Even the word "Settled" suggests something that has set, like a liquid turning solid.
Then the poem does something unexpected. The speaker stops saying "I" and addresses the child as "thee / Young Robert," as though he were another person. This split lets him judge his own past from outside. The adults who looked at that bright, quick-feeling face "form'd high hopes and flattering ones." The poet answers them with a weather image. A rainbow on a morning cloud looks glorious, but the farmer ("husbandman") knows it means storms ahead. The child's expressive eye is that rainbow, a beautiful sign of sensitivity that should have warned the grown-ups what kind of life was coming. They misread it because they were looking for success.
The sarcasm sharpens as the poem goes on. The adults saw a boy who loved "faery fiction" and the "godlike deeds of Greece / And rising Rome" and concluded he would "tread PREFERMENT'S pleasant path." Southey capitalises "PREFERMENT" and "POESY" so they stand like rival destinations on a map, and the mocking "forsooth" shows what he thinks of the adults' logic. Ambition is a crowded road, a place to "prest amid the crowd." Poetry is where the boy lingered, "Loitering beneath the laurels barren shade." The laurel is the traditional poet's crown, and "barren" is a frank admission that it brings no income or advancement. He does not pretend the choice is easy. He just refuses to apologise for it.
Formally, the poem is blank verse, unrhymed lines of roughly ten syllables, and the choice suits its purpose. Without rhyme, the voice sounds like thinking aloud, and the sentences spill across line endings ("Of the friends / Who once so dearly prized this miniature"). The exclamations and the sudden appeal to the "SPIRIT of SPENSER" make the meditation feel spontaneous. Spenser, famous for fairy-tale poetry, is a fitting patron for a child who loved "faery fiction."
The ending reverses the poem's opening. The little picture was made "for ornament," to "shine amid the motley mob / Of Fashion and of Folly." Against that noisy crowd Southey sets a single word: "solitary." The final question, "is it not / More honour'd by this solitary song?", claims that the poem honours the portrait more than any drawing room could. The poem itself becomes a second, truer portrait, one that shows what the boy grew into rather than how he looked. Because it ends on a question and not a statement, the confidence has a faint tremor in it, and that makes the defence more human and more convincing.