Child of Innocence

Excerpt from "Dancing the Dream - An Interpretation"
© Sabine Fritah-Lenze, Silke Milpauer

The poem „Child of Innocence“; published in the book „Dancing the
Dream“ in 1991, is about the loss of one’s Inner Child and the
resulting feelings of loneliness, despair and isolation. The topic of
the Inner Child – a term frequently used in the realm of psychology -
is like a thread pervading most other poems published within Dancing
the Dream.

According to the latest notions, the “Inner Child”, exists in every
human being and represents our deepest inner feelings. Perhaps it’s
best to picture the Inner Child as oneself aged between 5-6. At this
age, we are mainly made up of curiosity, spiritedness and unadulterated
feelings. But the older and the more conditioned, worldly-wise we
become, the more difficulties we have to stay connected to the child
within us.

Often, we cannot even feel our Inner Child any longer. Consequently, a
deep-felt emptiness develops within us – and it is this what Michael
Jackson describes so well here. Moreover, he expresses a longing for
everything to become as it once was, a longing to be able to see the
world once again through the eyes of the Inner Child.

Analysis by Silke Milpauer

In the poem “Child Of Innocence” the Lyrical I appeals to a person whom
he refers to as “child of innocence”. Even though this person obviously
is not with him any longer, he directly reveals his feelings to him.

  The content can be summed up in three sentences: The Lyrical I misses
this “child of innocence” deeply and expresses his feelings of
loneliness and despair in the first stanza. In the following two
stanzas the Lyrical I begs the child to return to him and reveals his
wishes, and in the final stanza the Lyrical I depicts the positive
effect that this “child of innocence” had on him and what impact this
has had on his life.

  In the poem there are two main characters: One is the Lyrical I, the
other one is somebody referred to as being a “child of innocence”. When
you read between the lines, you learn that both persons have had a very
special relationship and have obviously been very close to each other.
The child brought happiness and life into the Lyrical I’s world, e.g.
“[...] I miss your sunny days / We joyously frolicked in extended
plays” (1-2); “[...] messenger of joy” (13), and as time passed by, the
Lyrical I has grown to depend on this child. This becomes obvious when
regarding the whole second stanza and the following lines: “Ever since
you’ve left the scene / The streets are lonely, dark, and mean” (3-4);
“[...] your elegance, your beauty / Beckons me now beyond the call of
duty / Come fly with me [...]” (9-11). As a conclusion, you can say
that since the child has departed, life isn’t the same for him anymore,
and thus he cannot appreciate life anymore the way that he had done
before. That is the information gathered from the text, but the
question of the child’s identity and the child’s reason for leaving
remains unanswered. The first part of the question, the child’s
identity, shall be discussed in the following part. One can imagine two
possibilities:

  Eye-catching is the fact that the first two lines of this poem also
appear in another poem, entitled “Ryan White”. In this text, the author
writes: “Ryan White, I miss your sunny days / We carelessly frolicked
in extended plays” (4-5), and at the beginning of “Child Of Innocence”
we find the lines “Child of innocence, I miss your sunny days / We
carelessly frolicked in extended plays”. In addition, in the second
line of “Ryan White”, the boy, namely Ryan, is referred to as being a
“child of innocence”. In the context of the poem at hand, this could
mean that the author has written it for Ryan White as well, implying
that Ryan is the person so desperately missed on the part of the
Lyrical I.

  But there are some things which do not really fit into such an
interpretation, for example, the plea to return to the Lyrical I (5)
would not make any sense if Ryan was meant here. More likely is the
second theory about the identity of this “child of innocence”: It is
possible that the author refers to the child within himself, his inner
child, with this appeal. The idea that everyone has a hidden child
within themselves can be found in numerous other poems of this book;
the best example probably is “Magical Child”. The author is strongly
convinced that if everybody found their inner child again, almost every
problem we have to deal with nowadays would be solved and would
disappear immediately. Life without the inner child is painful and a
burden, for then you only experience despair, loneliness and
hopelessness, as the Lyrical I underlines in the first verse.
Furthermore, the “magical child” also possesses the quality of
innocence, as the author mentions in both parts of “Magical Child” In
the first part, the term “innocence” can be found for the first time:
“This power of innocence, of compassion, of light / Threatened the
priests and created a fright [...]”. A second time, the word
“innocence” appears in the second part of the same poem: “With cruel
darts they tried to plunder / To suffocate and strangle his innocent
wonder”. So the fact that innocence is also a quality of the “magical
child” would underpin my belief that the “child of innocence” and the
“magical child” are one and the same, namely the inner child within
ourselves.

  The wholehearted plea to the child to come back reveals that the
Lyrical I obviously knows what he has lost, and as a result feels torn
and incomplete inside. Moreover, he has also lost his self-confidence
and belief in himself. Consequently, he does not think that he still
has the same abilities that he has had before when the child was still
with him, as the lines 6-8 reveal: “[...] With your simple smile show
them how / This world once again can respond to your glance / And
heartbeats flutter to the rhythm of your dance”.

  If my theory proves to be right, and the inner child inside himself is
meant, this would imply that the Lyrical I had lost his inner child at
some point in his life, maybe in a time of crisis, when problems seemed
to be so overwhelming and unsolvable that he simply forgot or neglected
his inner child. But whatever the case may be, he soon realized that
with the loss of his inner child, he had also lost his joy of
existence, with everything becoming even more complicated and dull.
Thus his longing for the inner child, the time of bliss, those “sunny”
and carefree days, can be explained.

  In the final stanza of “Child Of Innocence” we find a glimpse of hope,
as the Lyrical I remembers how his inner child has influenced his life
in a positive way: “You’ve touched my heart without a ploy / My soul is
ablaze with a fragrant fire / To change this world is my deepest
desire” (14-16). While in the first two stanzas the Lyrical I seemed to
bathe in self-pity, he now slowly realizes that this will get him
nowhere, nor will it help him to re-discover his inner child again. But
thinking unselfishly and remembering the love is a first step into the
right direction, because no matter how deep one falls, his / her inner
child will never be completely lost; instead of this, it will just be
hiding within oneself again. (The idea of an inner child who is just
hiding inside a person and waits to be recovered was firstly introduced
in the poem “Magical Child” and could be called a leitmotif in many
other poems, e.g. “The Elusive Shadow”.) The last line, saying: “To
change this world is my deepest desire”, implies that the Lyrical I has
already gotten his self-confidence back and is willing to work on his
aim.

  But how will he make his “desire” come true? Well, as already
mentioned in “Magical Child”, he can only succeed when people find
their inner child again, because then the world will be changed for the
better, or as he puts it: “[...] we could see / All the children of the
earth / Weave their magic and give new birth / To a world of freedom,
with no pain / A world of joy, much more sane” (taken from the first
part, last stanza). According to this, his priority will be on helping
people to discover the child hiding within themselves.

  When I read this poem for the first time, I already knew the poem
“Ryan White” and the choice of words here automatically reminded me of
it; that is why I was so very insecure in which direction my attempt of
interpretation should go. Because of this doubts, I decided to put both
theories in this interpretation. But after analyzing the poem, I think
that my first assumption is completely wrong, and that the author was
exclusively speaking about the child within oneself.