Nobody chooses their inheritance, and the speakers in Anne Scott Musil's "Youth" know it. The poem begins with an uneasy admission: "what we make you inherit". The verb is "make", not "give", so the older generation is imposing a legacy rather than bestowing a gift. The legacy is deliberately mixed: "debris insights skyscrapers / word or insect bites". Rubble, wisdom, architecture and stings share a line with no commas to sort them into good and bad. The central idea is that every generation hands down everything at once, its beauty and its mess together, and then has to watch the next one decide what to do with it.
The "we" of the poem is neither villain nor hero. The phrase "cocky unsure" welds two contradictory moods into one, which sums up the adult position well. These elders claim to be heirs themselves ("we say ourselves inheritors"), and they admit that what they are is "mostly unseen". The line can also be read as "all we are", mostly hidden, which makes the inheritance partly invisible even to those passing it on. Their hopes are modest and a little self-mocking. They want to pass down "sun-blessed greeneries or symphonies / or vulgar croons", and that last "or" quietly concedes that what survives may be a cheap tune rather than a masterpiece.
The second stanza is the shortest, and its list of efforts shrinks as it goes: "work read news sometimes / protest make gardens birdbaths poems". Birdbaths are a small, domestic kind of resistance, and the poem puts itself on the same list. Then the dash and the blunt "try." feel like a shrug and a vow at once. Meditation follows, aimed at "subtler realms our / inner light", and the line breaks leave "real" and "our" dangling, as if the language hesitates on the way inward.
At the third stanza the pronouns shift. "You" appears only in the first line, and from here the young are "they", discussed rather than addressed, as though they have already stepped out of earshot. They "learn all that / within", yet they meet "savage / cults and bombs" while "untaught raw unshielded". Three adjectives pile up with no noun to rest on, which makes the young seem exposed in a grammatical sense too. The stanza's setting is litter and noise: "thrown out wrappings ads the / lifeless asphalt speed". The line ends on a stranded "the", so the reader is pushed forward before the noun arrives, the way speed pushes a pedestrian. After the "green" of the opening, "asphalt" is its hard opposite.
The last stanza is one long sentence, and its rhythm changes. Clusters of stressed words, "roses wine our dregs guilt / questions sneers", slow the reading to a stumble, then three verbs, "gulp evade or grasp", list the ways the young might respond. After that the sentence widens across the final lines. The elders' "summer / darkens cools" while the young "grow / high suddenly in command / in a new loud reaching / noon". The sun image returns from the "sun-blessed" greenery of the first stanza, now as a handover of power. Noon is the moment of greatest height and the least shade, and "loud" can mean vitality or mere noise. The poem does not say which.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme and stanzas of 11, 5, 7 and 10 lines. Sound still ties it together. "Unseen" and "green" echo across the first stanza, "insights" chimes with "bites", and "croons" at the end of the opening stanza is answered by the final word, "noon". The only full stops fall in the second stanza, and the last line ends without one.
The poem is significant because it refuses to lecture. It offers no solution and no confident advice, only an honest inventory of what is being passed on and an admission that the giving cannot be controlled. Its closing image gives the future to the young, loud and bright and unfinished.