He doesn’t like children, so they have said. He has lost his own, and his heart is dead. They know not of his walks ’neath the pale moon’s laughter, Of his trysts with memory and that tears flow after. They do not know that a small boy's grin Stabs like a knife, hurting deep within. But as from children he withdraws and shrinks, My heart is too much alive, he thinks.
Everyone says the man in "Bereft" dislikes children, and the poem sets out to show how wrong that is. The first two lines give the gossip and the hidden cause side by side: he has lost his own child, and people have read his silence as a dead heart. The rest of the poem answers them. They don't know about his solitary walks under the moon, or the "trysts with memory" that end in tears. They don't know that a boy's grin, the very sight that delights most people, cuts him like a knife.
The twist comes in the last line. His avoidance isn't hardness; it's the opposite. He pulls away because his heart is "too much alive," still raw and still loving. The mood is quiet and aching, with a note of reproach toward neighbors who judge without knowing. The tidy rhymes make the sadness feel contained, like pain carried carefully and kept private.