Playing with bright buttons from the tin

I lost myself in patterns colours shapes

Pleasure and  enjoyment is no sin.

Forced learning without joy may feel like rape.

I learnt without the knowledge that I learned.

I lost myself in thoughtless happens tance

And in this way abstraction’s rightly earned.

Does thinking need such joy for  eloquence?

Then children learn unknowing they have learned

I wish I were at home in that old room

The coal fire burning red, the cat asleep

My brother and my sisters went  too soon.

The joy and woe are mixed and so I weep.

How short each stage of life,oh, all too brief

The caterpillar gnaws upon the leaf