A boy and girl walk side by side to school, share holidays in buttercup fields, and play a game of death and resurrection in the woods. The memory is so complete that it unspools in one long, breathless sentence: “We went together side by side to school, / Together had our holidays in fields...” The repeated word “together” sets up the intimacy that the rest of the poem will lose. Under “ferns fresh pulled” the boy buries the girl, then calls her back “like Lazarus from the grave.” She rises laughing and shakes her curls until he thinks he hears “full half a hundred bells.” The Lazarus allusion gives childhood play a miraculous authority; for a moment the boy can summon life back with a word, and the girl’s hair turns into ringing bells, a sound of pure unguarded joy.
That unguardedness cannot survive adult attention. “A grown-up world took playful notice soon,” and the effect is not simply embarrassment but a deeper change: “Made me feel shame that grew a greater love.” The syntax is striking because shame, not affection, is the subject of “grew.” Love increases, but it is entangled with self-consciousness. The girl’s response is equally telling. She becomes “more chary of her laughter” and her voice is “subdued,” “as soft and sweet / As Autumn’s, blowing through his golden reeds.” The simile quietly shifts the poem’s season from the June buttercups of childhood to autumn. The colour gold remains, but the buttercups have become dry reeds, and the bells have faded into a softer, sadder wind. The poem does not say the adult world is wholly wrong; it simply shows what is lost when playfulness is watched and judged.
The portrait of the girl also deepens the sense of loss. “In her sweet sympathies she was a woman / When scarcely she was more than child in years.” The word “sweet” ties her back to the golden world, but “sympathies” suggests an emotional maturity that has arrived too early. She is a child and a woman at once, and the pressure of that double role seems to silence the laughing child. Her subdued voice is not only a result of the adult gaze but perhaps also of an empathy that makes her feel its weight more than the boy does. This asymmetry makes the final rupture more painful: the bond is already uneven before the “one angry moment” ends it.
The form supports the emotional curve. The poem moves in loose unrhymed iambic pentameter, close to the rhythms of speech, and its lack of rhyme keeps it from feeling playful or neat. The long first sentence stretches across seven lines, imitating the slow, spacious time of childhood. Then the sentences shorten. “A grown-up world took playful notice soon” is a complete, flat statement. Later, “And yet one angry moment parted us” arrives with almost brutal plainness. The anger is never explained, and that is part of the poem’s honesty. It is not a grand tragedy but a small, irreversible human moment. The final line, “And days of longing never joined us more,” sets “longing” against “joined,” and “joined” quietly recalls the opening “together.” What began as side-by-side presence ends as separation that even years of longing cannot bridge.
Beneath the surface, the poem is about more than a lost companion. The boy could once call the girl from a pretend grave; after shame and anger, no word can bring her back. The deeper loss is the loss of an unguarded childhood self. That is why the little resurrection game carries such weight: the real miracle in the memory is not Lazarus rising, but that two people were ever so completely, thoughtlessly together.