Every child hears the rule: never look directly at the Sun. The speaker of this poem takes that piece of ordinary parental advice and turns it into a small story about growing up. Its central idea is that some knowledge can't be unlearned. Once we have looked at the thing we were told to avoid, we can't go back to the instinctive trust that kept us safe. The poem sets the warm, protected childhood Sun against an adult one that is "ancient energy, a violence our gaze can never meet."
The second stanza makes the most interesting claim. The children obeyed, the speaker says, "not from deference / to the authority of parents, / but out of reverence / for the warmth." Obedience is replaced by something closer to worship. Then comes the line that carries the poem's philosophy: "It was the animal – the It / & not the I – that compelled us." In childhood the body's instinct decides, and the self-conscious "I" hasn't yet taken over. The eyelids become a "warm veil," a lovely image that makes closing the eyes a gesture of tenderness toward the light rather than fear of it. Judging by this language, the poem pictures innocence as a kind of unselfconscious harmony with the world.
The turn comes through punctuation. The first part ends on an ellipsis ("benevolent warmth…") and the next begins with one ("…but we're not young anymore"). The dots form a bridge across the white space, and then the speaker drops the news flatly: "so / we looked & what we saw / changed us forever." That "so" is casual and almost shrugging, which makes the change feel more serious. The poem never says what was seen, and it doesn't need to. The Sun's meaning has flipped from "benevolent" to violent, and the speaker has gone from child to "small animals / lost." The animal returns, but now it is helpless, not wise. The word "lost" is indented and stranded on its own line, so it looks lost on the page.
The poem is in free verse with no rhyme, and its rhythm works by fragmenting. Lines are short and sometimes broken by large gaps of space, as in "Now" or "for the warmth," which make the reader pause where the speaker hesitates. The ampersands bind pairs together: "light & benevolent warmth," "fatal & final," "It & not the I." They give the voice a hurried, informal, almost typed-out quality, and they also suggest that ideas which seem opposite cannot be separated. The sound patterns are quiet. "Warm," "warmth" and "veil" recur, and "fatal & final" has a hard, tolling alliteration that fits the word "final."
The ending is the cleverest part. The poem reaches "a fatal & final ecstasy / of rebellion," and then defines that rebellion in an odd way: "to close our eyes, / stunned & waiting / for the after-image to fade." Closing the eyes was once reverence, and now it is the aftermath of defiance. The glowing patch that stays on your vision after you look at something bright becomes a symbol of memory, something that lingers and slowly disappears. The next line, "Afraid of what will come after," plays on that word. It could mean only the fading of the image, but "fatal" and "final" suggest something larger, and I'd read it as a fear of mortality, though the poem doesn't spell this out.
The last line is a quotation: "But I remember / when we were young." It echoes the title and the opening, so the poem closes like a circle. But the pronouns have changed. The childhood scenes belonged to "we," and now the memory belongs to a lone "I," the very self the animal had once kept quiet. The word "But" is the poem's whole sadness in one syllable. Remembering is not the same as returning.
The poem is worth reading because it makes a familiar loss feel strange and physical. It doesn't blame the parents or the child. It simply shows the warm Sun and the violent Sun as the same Sun, seen at different ages, and leaves us standing in the dark, waiting for the afterglow to go.