Hatching is a frightening business if you happen to be the one inside the egg. Elizabeth von Schonberg's "Life Begins" takes that moment of terror and turns it into a small parable: a baby skylark, mid-struggle, believes his world is collapsing, while a fairy watches and knows he is wrong. The poem's central idea is stated plainly in its last stanza. What feels like an ending, the point where "we have struggled thru the night / And reached the end of things," is often a beginning arriving "on silver wings."
The poem's drama rests on a gap in knowledge. The skylark sees only loss. "My house! It falls apart!" he cries, and the shell he is breaking free from is, in his eyes, the only safety he has ever known. The parenthetical "(Ah, soft and sheltered nest. . .)" slips in like a sigh, reminding us why he clings to it. The fairy, by contrast, sees the whole picture. She "rocked with grief for skylark / And all earth's needless dread." That word "needless" carries the poem's argument: the pain is real, but the fear that the pain means the end is unnecessary.
The structure supports this contrast. Most of the poem moves in neat quatrains with an alternating rhyme (morn/born, apart/heart), and the lines sit in a light, singsong rhythm that suits a fairy tale. Then, in the middle, the pattern breaks. The fairy's speech is set in clipped, short lines that rhyme in couplets, almost tripping over each other: "How sad 'twould be / If mortals knew / That all this dew / Is fairies' tears." The quickened rhythm feels like breathless fretting, and it works as a change of register, a glimpse of the fairy's own voice rather than the narrator's. It also delivers a charming piece of invention, the idea that morning dew is made of fairies' tears shed for humans who "do not know / Our secrets." The fairy's frustration, "We try to tell / Them all is well, / But they won't heed," is gently comic, but it also names something true about how hard it is to comfort someone in the middle of a crisis.
The sound effects are used with care. "Crack! Crack!" is blunt and onomatopoeic, placed at the head of a line so that the reader hears the shell split. Then comes "a crash!", and the poem's mood swings at once. The fairy "danced 'round in wildest glee" while the skylark, "spent, bewildered / Was dying, so tho't he!" The exclamation mark and the clause "so tho't he" tilt the moment toward humor. We are invited to smile at his mistake, not mourn him, and the playful tone is part of the poem's comfort.
The imagery of light and color is worth noticing as well. The poem begins with "a fairy polished buttercups / One early Summer morn," a picture of freshness and care. It ends with "silver wings" and earlier mentions "pale starlight." Night is the time of struggle and dread; the "golden" head of the fairy and the silver of the closing image suggest that morning, and a hopeful kind of brightness, wait on the far side.
The most effective moment may be the short exchange near the end. "Then why did you not tell me?" asks the skylark, and the fairy's answer, "You wouldn't have believed me!", is both funny and sad. It admits that some truths cannot be handed over in advance. You have to break through the shell to learn what the breaking meant. That makes the fairy's comfort honest rather than glib: she does not say the struggle is unreal, only that it is not the end.
What gives the poem its quiet significance is how much it asks of such simple materials. Its diction is homely, with "wee," "poor dears," and "my funny little friend," and its form is childlike, yet it offers a real consolation to anyone facing a frightening change, such as a new school, a loss, or a difficult year. By letting a nervous baby bird stand in for all of us, the poem makes a hard idea easy to carry: when everything seems to be cracking, something may simply be hatching.