Most poems about childhood reach for golden light and lost innocence. Jessea L. Vaughan's "When We Were Young" does something less flattering and more honest. It looks back at a younger self and calls that self, twice and in plain words, "foolish / And confused." The central idea is that youth is a time of enormous certainty built on almost nothing, and that the certainty was part of the confusion.
The poem moves in four sweeps of memory, each opened by the refrain "When we were young" and each closed by a semicolon instead of a full stop. The first real full stop arrives only on the last line. That gives the poem the feel of one long breathless confession, which suits a subject who never pauses to doubt herself or himself. The lines are short, often just two to five words, and they break in unexpected places. "We thought challenges / Were easy so / We laughed at pain" leaves the little word "so" dangling at a line-end, the way a child's story trails along on "and so, and so." There is no regular rhyme, only a faint echo between "so" and "arose" in that opening passage. Without rhyme, the voice sounds like someone talking rather than performing, which keeps the poem close to a spoken admission.
The poem's imagery is less visual than conceptual, but a few phrases stand out. "We knew volumes / About nothing" is the sharpest. "Volumes" suggests shelves of books, weight and authority, and the line then empties them out. The word "knew" keeps returning: "we knew it all," "the world we knew," "life as we knew it." Each time it sounds more ironic. Alongside it sit "thought" and "believed," verbs of conviction rather than evidence. The speakers never say they wondered or guessed.
"Fantasyland" is another telling choice. It sounds like the name of an amusement park, a world arranged for delight, and it is set against "Reality," which gets a line to itself and is described as "weird and strange." Those two adjectives are near-synonyms, and their flatness may be deliberate: it sounds like a child reaching for words and repeating one to be sure. The idiom "worried ourselves to pieces" turns anxiety into a body coming apart, and it is paired with "frivolous things / Of no consequence" that were nonetheless treated as if "They'd affect the world." The comedy comes from the mismatch of scale, and it never turns cruel.
The final section speeds up into a catalogue of inversions: "We took nonsense as fact / And lies as truth / We thought up was down / And this was that / And wrong was right." The list climbs from the factual to the moral. "This was that" is the vaguest item, and the vagueness seems to be the point, since the syntax itself blurs. The same reversal appears earlier, in the first section, where the young laughed "at pain" and cried "for joy." Their feelings were as scrambled as their facts.
The ending is the cleverest move. After "When we were children," the poem adds "Because when we were young," and the refrain stops being a time-marker and becomes an explanation. They were foolish because they were young. Then the opening two lines return word for word, so the poem closes in a loop. Judging by the text, the speaker uses "we" throughout and never "you," so nobody is being lectured. The tone feels rueful and affectionate rather than scornful. Whether the grown-up speaker has actually escaped the confusion is left open, and the circular shape hints that confident foolishness may not belong to childhood alone.
That is where the poem earns its significance. Its language is simple and its form unshowy, and it avoids the sentimental habit of treating childhood as secret wisdom. Instead it makes a modest, recognisable claim: we were once certain of everything and right about very little. For readers still close to that age, the poem works almost like a mirror held up a few years early.