Life, 1921-07-14 · page 5 of 34
Life — July 14, 1921 — page 5: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
This page features a poem by Reginald Wright Kauffman titled "Children," accompanied by an illustration of adults and children at what appears to be a beach or seaside golf course. The poem reflects late 19th/early 20th-century sentimental attitudes about childhood—addressing how children inherit their parents' anxieties and sacrifices. The concluding dialogue between two figures debating whether children should walk on golf links while "new members are playing" satirizes upper-class recreational concerns and social hierarchies of the era. The satire suggests how privileged adults worried about maintaining exclusive leisure spaces (golf courses) while simultaneously expecting children to navigate these rigid social conventions. The illustration depicts this tension between childhood freedom and adult propriety.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
Children HEY come, and take, unrecking, all you give: You storm mute Heaven, demanding of it why, The mother’s pains, the father’s patient toil, Except for memories, your earth is lost: The love, the fears, dreams’ death that they may live, God’s good is never cheap, the price is high— The daylong care, the weary midnight’s spoil. And yet what child has undeserved its cost? Now helpless beauty in your anxious arms; For what you did is all this that they do, Then peril-potent grown a maid or lad; And what they rend is what yourself have riven: Next, while you still endure the first alarms, They came to be exactly what were you, They go unguessing, grown—with all you had. And, oh, they go to give what you have given! Reginald Wright Kauffman. Loe al Ze, a a aya “I think it’s dangerous for the children to walk on the links while those new members are playing.” “Not if they keep well in the fairway.” comicbooks.com