The birth in a narrow room

Without the context of Annie Allen, “the birth in a narrow room” celebrates the innocence of childhood regardless of race, gender, or economic class. The girl is not old enough to understand the complexities of those adult identities. She is a child, a newborn and toddler in the first stanza and a young child in the second, and in her explorations of her world and then her happy escape into her fantasy adventures she suggests the innocence of childhood.

Childhood is in its way a kind of benevolent, generous obliviousness. In the first stanza, the young baby awakens to the stunning revelations of the simplest objects in her world. Her grasping imagination takes a world teeming with objects unknown. Her vision is open and indiscriminatory, her perception captured by the merest objects. The ordinary things she takes in—an apron, a soup pot, a milk-glass bowl of cherries—speak to her, suggest mysteries, the shapes of their lines, the colors and textures beckon her to open up to a world that, we can guess, hardly ever stuns her parents anymore.

Awareness is only part of the poem’s definition of childhood. Childhood represents reckless courage, the willingness to engage a world without self-conscious limits, the bold entrance into a world full of things unknown.