The title is a question without a question mark, and it sounds like something said in the middle of a moral argument, the kind of phrase people use when they want to win. The poem doesn't argue back. It answers with three short portraits of children the respectable world tends to overlook, and it claims that Easter, the festival of rebirth, is meant for them first.
The opening line sounds almost like a hymn: "Easter is for the glorious". The line break leaves "glorious" hanging, a word usually kept for God or the resurrection, until the next line hands it to "children of amours". That French plural does a lot of work. It suggests love affairs rather than marriages, and it is elegant and faintly romantic. The next stanza then says the same thing without any polish: "bastard children". The poem places the gilded word and the insulting one side by side as two names for the same people, and it does not apologise for the harsher one. The tone is closer to reclaiming than to softening.
The phrase "that know / the best world going" is where the poem turns. The line break stops on "know," so knowledge is stated first and without qualification, and only then do we learn what is known. Note too the "that" instead of "who." It is a small thing, but it may echo how the world talks about such children, as if they were less than fully people. The phrase "best world going" is colloquial, like "best deal going," and it shrinks a grand idea. Judging by the wording, it faintly recalls the philosophical "best of all possible worlds," but it keeps only the shabby, practical sense of what is actually on offer. It is hard to tell whether it is bitter or sincere. These children may know that nothing better is available, and they may also know how to make that world good. The poem lets both readings stand.
The last stanza trades claims for an image. "Grown odd in the fields" suggests slow, plant-like growth, and "odd" works in several ways: strange, eccentric, the odd one out. The cost of being set apart and the freedom of it arrive together. The setting is open country, away from the church and the village, though the poem never says so, and we can only infer that Easter has moved outdoors with them. The poem ends on "watching the horses," a participle with no real action behind it. The children do nothing except look, attentive and unhurried, and the absence of a final full stop leaves them in the middle of that looking.
The form supports this quietness. There are three couplets of free verse, with no rhyme and no regular meter, just short lines that fall into loose, speech-like stresses. Capital letters appear only on "Easter," and no punctuation appears at all, so each statement floats like a murmured aside. The repetition of "children" binds the poem together: it appears in the title, then in the second, third and fifth lines, and each time it picks up a new modifier: *of amours*, *bastard*, *grown odd*. The word is the same, but the children are described in more and more concrete terms. There is a soft pattern of long o sounds as well, in "glorious," "know," "going," "grown" and "horses," which gives the poem a low, rounded hum that suits its calm confidence.
The poem matters because of how much it reverses in so little space. The phrase in the title usually asks us to protect children according to someone else's rules. Here the children are not pitied, rescued or lectured. They are glorious, knowing and free to look. A religious festival that might have excluded them is turned around so that it belongs to them. The question in the title is never answered directly, but the final image does answer it: the children are fine, and perhaps they see more than the people who worry about them.