Four lines are enough for Sara Teasdale to change how we look at a crowded pavement. "Chance" imagines two people, the "we" of the poem, looking back and realizing they must have crossed paths long before they truly met. Nothing dramatic happened on those earlier occasions. They passed "as strangers do." Yet the poem insists that something enormous was within reach: "the door of heaven." Its central idea is the vertigo of hindsight. The most important thing in a life can brush past us unrecognized, looking exactly like everything else.
The opening rests on a guess. "How many times we must have met" is deduction, not memory. The speaker can't recall a single one of these encounters, and that is the point. The line is an exclamation dressed as a question, and "how many" suggests a long, quiet accumulation of near-misses. The poem never says outright that the two have since found each other, but the phrase "never knew" implies a present from which the past can be judged. Judging by the tone, this is someone looking at a loved one and doing a painful bit of arithmetic about lost time.
The imagery sets two worlds side by side in a single sentence. "Here on the street" is deliberately flat. The word "Here" plants us on a real pavement among real passers-by. Against it stands "the door of heaven," which is not heaven itself but its threshold. A door can be opened or walked past, and the verb "passed" carries the whole tragedy gently. Nobody knocks, hesitates or turns around. There is no villain here, only inattention, and the poem treats it with something closer to wonder than blame.
The phrase "Children of chance" carries two meanings, and the title carries both. Chance is randomness: these two were tossed about by accident, like leaves in a gutter. Chance is also opportunity, as in "a chance," and that is exactly what they failed to recognize. "Children" adds innocence and helplessness, so they are ignorant rather than guilty. The past tense of "we were" also hints, as an inference from the grammar, that they are no longer in that state. The sound of the phrase helps too. The repeated *ch* sounds bind the two words together like a label pinned to the pair.
The poem is built as one sentence running across all four lines, with no pause until the end. This gives it the feel of a thought arriving all at once. The rhythm starts out smooth, almost song-like: "How MANy TIMES we MUST have MET" is a regular beat of eight syllables. The later lines loosen. "Children of chance" opens with two heavy stresses where we might expect a gentle rise, so the phrase lands like a verdict. The rhyme scheme is sparse. Only the second and fourth lines rhyme, "do" with "knew," while "met" and "passed" share a hard consonant ending without truly matching. That half-rhyme feels fitting, since the first and third lines almost meet and then don't. The long, open *oo* sound of the real rhyme lingers like a sigh. The poem ends on "knew," the very verb it has just negated, so the last word names exactly what was missing.
The line break also does quiet work. At the end of line three, "who passed" hangs for a moment before the next line supplies "The door of heaven." The reader's eye drops past the end of the line, just as the pair walked past the door. It is a small piece of structure acting out the meaning.
The poem's significance lies in this economy and restraint. It has no names, no setting beyond "the street," and no description of the lovers. Only the most common words remain: *street*, *strangers*, *door*. That lets any reader slot their own life into the gap. It also avoids sentimentality. There is no weeping over fate, only a calm, almost conversational tone that makes the discovery more unsettling. If the past was full of unnoticed thresholds, the present probably is too. The poem leaves the reader glancing at the faces on the next street, wondering which of them they are passing right now.