Childhood

Walker’s “Childhood” is a poem written in two stanzas and is 14 lines total in length. Loosely following the sonnet form, the poem follows a slightly different rhyme scheme from traditional English or Petrarchan sonnets. With each line being roughly 10 syllables long, the poem follows an iambic pentameter rhythm. Told through the voice of a speaker looking back on a memory from their childhood, “Childhood” occupies the scene of an old mining town in the South.

The poem opens with a lengthy description of the miners that the speaker remembers seeing walking through town as a child. They are described as “red miners” (Line 1) because of the color of the dust from the mine, a characteristic that permeates the rest of the stanza—and the town. The hills around the mine take on the color (“I saw them come down red hills,” [Line 3]) as do the camps where the miners slept (“their camps / dyed with red dust,” [Lines 3-4]). With this detailed imagery, the speaker sets the scene. Then in Line 4 they provide the name of the mine, “Ishkooda mines,” specifically locating the poem in place: Birmingham, Alabama.