Before any philosophizing begins, there are three children and a broken spade. Elizabeth Madox Roberts sets “The Worm” in a Kentucky childhood much like her own in the late nineteenth century; she published it in her 1922 collection *Under the Tree*. Roberts is remembered for her novels of rural life, but this short poem shows how sharply she could listen to a child’s voice. The scene is ordinary: Dickie plans a well, Charles finds a piece of tin, the speaker digs with a shell, and Will joins in. The play seems headed nowhere special until a clod of dirt breaks open and reveals a worm.
What follows is less about digging than a sudden shift in attention. The children watch the worm “pucker up himself / And stretch himself to walk away.” Those verbs, *pucker* and *stretch*, turn the worm into a small, elastic body negotiating an enormous world. The physical details are close and tactile: its “shining skin was soft and wet,” and when the speaker pokes it, the worm squirms. Then Will asks the question that halts the whole game: “I wonder if / He knows that he’s a worm.” That line break after “if” holds the thought suspended, just as the children pause with it.
The poem’s construction has the easy swing of a children’s chant. Its four-line stanzas lilt along, pairing the second and fourth lines in rhyme—well and shell, wide and inside, squirm and worm. That nursery-rhyme quality makes the sudden depth of the question feel unforced. Roberts does not announce a lesson. She lets the rhyme carry the children toward a moment of real wondering, then leaves them sitting “back on our feet” in the dirt. The phrase is wonderfully awkward and true to childhood: they do not sit cross-legged or kneel; they settle back and think.
The central idea grows from that pause. The children “forgot to dig our wells / Awhile, and tried to answer it.” Their own project disappears; the worm becomes more important than the wells. This is the poem’s quiet claim: an encounter with another living thing can interrupt our plans and open questions about consciousness, identity, and the limits of knowing. The word *knows* becomes the hinge. A worm probably cannot know it is a worm, but the children can imagine the question, and in doing so they glimpse that their own knowing has limits. The poem does not moralize about kindness. The poke is still there, curious and slightly rough, but it leads to something gentler.
The ending resists a tidy lesson. While the children puzzle over whether the worm has self-awareness, the creature “puckered in a little wad, / And then he stretched himself again / And went back home inside the clod.” The word *home* matters. The children were digging their own imagined wells, shaping homes in the dirt, but the worm already has one. Its home is the clod, and it returns without offering an answer. The repeated pucker and stretch now become a quiet rhythm of departure, and the children are left with their unanswered question. The poem suggests that this is enough; the wonder itself is the discovery.
What makes “The Worm” significant is how seriously it takes a small moment. Roberts uses the simplest tools—a broken spade, a piece of tin, a shell—to dig into something large. She honors the philosophical curiosity of children without inflating it into precociousness. The question “Does he know?” is one that children might actually ask, and the poem treats it with respect. In doing so, Roberts shows that a backyard, a clod of dirt, and a worm can hold as much mystery as any grand subject. The poem ends where it began, in the dirt, but the children are not quite the same. They have wondered.