The Circle Game

The poem’s alternating sections of childhood versus adulthood activities show a complete generational and seasonal cycle with age-based behavioral changes. In the children’s sections, the young people engage in outdoor group activities, such as in section i: “joined hand to hand / go round and round” (Lines 2-3). In the adult sections, as in section ii, the adults are inside—even confined—in a room separated from “people in the next room” (Line 56). While the children are joined together and in sync with their singing and circling, the adult pair faces a disconnection through wordplay, as in section iv, that “attempts to keep / [them] at a certain distance” (Lines 121-122). The children’s games are traditional group ones akin to “Ring Around the Rosie.” The adult games, as in section vi, are solitary: “the orphan game” (Line 198), “the ragged winter game” (Line 199), and “the game of the waif” (Line 203), in which the waif is

glad

to be left

out by himself

in the cold” (Lines 221-224),

“watching the happy families” (Line 208). As the children age into adulthood, it appears that they become more independent and less reliant on groupthink, though perhaps to the point of self-isolation. The children’s games take place in summer and in natural surroundings but are likened to those without merriment: “[T]here is no joy in it” (Line 22) because they do not take time to enjoy the summer environment. On the other hand, the adult games have a wintry basis with the speaker trying to decipher the motives of their partner but only receiving the gaze of their partner’s eyes as “cold blue thumbtacks” (Line 159), evoking multiple meanings of “cold.”