Elizabeth Madox Roberts, born in 1881 in rural Kentucky, is best known for novels of the Southern Renaissance, but her 1922 collection *Under the Tree* gathers poems that speak in a child’s voice. “The Circus” belongs to that world of small-town mornings, dirt streets, and sudden arrivals. When a traveling circus came through, the whole shape of a day changed; Roberts recreates that change as a parade of glimpses, not a grand explained show.
The poem begins with a simple announcement: “Friday came and the circus was there.” A mother gives permission for “the twins and I / And Charles and Clarence and all of us” to see the parade go by. That roll call of names grounds the poem in a specific, neighborly world. From there the child lists what passes: wagons painted with pictures but shut tight, a dog a monkey can ride, a man clapping and talking from a cart, an elephant whose long stride makes the children laugh, three women in golden dresses with golden whips, and a caged “big wild man” with snakes over his feet. The central idea is not merely that the circus is exciting; it is that excitement grows from partial knowledge. The shut doors of the wagons are the poem’s engine. “Nobody could guess” what they held, and so the child’s mind does what any watcher’s mind does—it fills the blank. The women become “queens of Sheba, I guess,” and the rumor that the wild man eats snakes alive is met with the honest check, “But I didn’t see him eat.” Wonder, Roberts suggests, is a mix of invention and plain truthfulness.
The form supports that childlike way of thinking. The poem moves in four-line stanzas with a loose ABCB rhyme scheme, the second and fourth lines chiming like a folk ballad. When “I” settles against “by,” or “dress” against “guess,” the rhymes feel less like ornament than like a child making sense of the world by pairing one thing with another. The line lengths shift and the dashes interrupt, so the song never becomes mechanical. A line such as “The elephant came--he can step pretty far--” sounds like speech caught on the move. The repetition of “guess” in the second and fourth stanzas frames the parade as a series of open questions.
Roberts’s images are bright and deliberately concrete. The golden dresses and golden whips flash against the ordinary day; the snakes “going over his feet” are strange and close. Words like “beautiful,” “wild,” and “alive” suggest something arriving from beyond the town’s everyday edge. Yet the poem keeps returning to what is hidden. The wagons’ pictured sides promise something, but the closed doors withhold it. That withheld center is what makes the circus larger than any single display. The child’s final line—so flat and careful—matters because it separates what was seen from what was said. It gives the poem a quiet integrity: imagination may run ahead, but the speaker will not pretend to have witnessed more than the parade allowed.
The significance of “The Circus” lies in that balance. Roberts does not condescend to childhood or turn the circus into a moral lesson. She preserves the texture of an ordinary American moment—a small town stopping to watch a parade—and shows how a child’s attention turns fragments into a whole world. The poem remains memorable because it understands that wonder is not the same as ignorance. It is an active state, built from guesses, glimpses, and the resolve to say what one actually saw.