Dave Bonta's "Grownup" looks back at the distance between a child's imagination and an adult's working life. The speaker remembers playing at sea as a boy, and calls it "that first music," as if the game was the earliest thing that ever moved him. Then comes a flat, slightly rueful line: business has carried him away from "all my former delights."
The second stanza is stranger. The speaker says he is "quit of any obligation / to my missing key," which suggests a lost way back, though the poem doesn't spell out what the key opens. Judging by the tone, he seems to shrug off the loss rather than mourn it loudly. The closing image, a hand that "writes me from / the country of temper," makes the body feel almost separate from him, as though his own writing arrives from somewhere moody and foreign.
The mood is wistful and a little numb. Loss is stated plainly, with little drama, and that restraint makes it sting.