Ten short lines, and a whole life runs through them: a child, and then the adult who walks away from that child. The poem's central idea is that growing up involves a kind of desertion. Through the speaker's battles, and under the pressure of other people's opinions, the innocent self gets left behind. The poem is told entirely in the plural, "we" and "our", never "I", so the guilt is shared by everyone who has grown up. The regret comes late: "These things forgotten we will now regret." Nothing in the poem tells us where or when any of this happened, so the hospital setting reads best as a metaphor rather than a memory.
The opening line is about forgetting, and its grammar seems to forget too: "As time our goes by we may fast forget." The word "our" has slipped out of place. Whether that is deliberate or a slip, the line sounds like something half-remembered. The next line gives the first big image: "And turn our sun to a dark old moon." A sun makes its own light, while a moon only reflects someone else's. One reading is that children glow from within and adults shine on borrowed approval, which fits the later "gaze and prod of peers." "Dark old" makes the moon both dim and tired.
After that, the vocabulary becomes institutional, first medical and then legal. The child is left "in that white room", a blank, sterile space, then called "bedridden", and finally abandoned "in the E.R." Yet the child is also almost on "death row". These are two places that process people rather than comfort them. The effect is that neglect becomes both an illness and a sentence, and the "we" who did the neglecting are cast as doctors who failed to treat and judges who condemned.
The "Scarecrow" is the poem's strangest figure. It is capitalised, as "Innocent" is later, which marks it as a personified thing. A scarecrow is a stuffed dummy in human clothes, built to frighten. It might be the hollow, defensive persona we put on to face the world, or the fear we fight. The poem doesn't say, and the line is itself knotted: "It took our battles and fought our Scarecrow." Either way, the fighting costs the child, since the energy goes into the battle and none is left for protection. "Submitted to the gaze and prod of peers" adds to this. "Gaze" and "prod" make the speaker sound like a specimen being examined, and "submitted" means both handed in for inspection and given in.
The form is tidier than the grammar. Most lines run to about ten syllables, close to iambic pentameter, and the rhymes follow a sonnet pattern: forget/regret, moon/room, Scarecrow/row, peers/fears, then a closing pair. Several of these rhymes are imperfect. "Moon" and "room" share only a vowel sound, and "E.R" and "far" meet only on a final "r", which suits a line about things that no longer meet. The steady beat gives a tolling, inevitable pace, while the grammatical stumbles interrupt it. The poem also has ten lines rather than a sonnet's fourteen, and it ends without a full stop, so it simply trails off.
The most telling pattern is the word "left". It appears three times, "left in that white room", "left the child out", "was left in the E.R", and each time the place gets more serious. The pronouns do the same work. The child begins as "the child we were", someone we used to be, but by the end it is "it": "death that it fears." The speaker's language has already started treating the child as a thing, so the poem enacts the distancing it describes. The final line, "What we once were is now so very far", is plain and understated, and the small word "very" sounds almost like a shrug, as if that were the saddest part.
The poem's significance lies in how it handles a familiar subject, the loss of childhood. It does not call that loss gentle or inevitable. It says the child was neglected nearly to death, and it puts the blame on "we". Its roughness is part of its character, and it leaves an image that is easy to remember: a child waiting alone in a white room while the adults who could help have gone.