Little Boy Blue

In just four devastating stanzas, Eugene Field achieves what many poets never do: absolute silence from the reader. 'Little Boy Blue' calls to a child who will never answer. The sheep are in the meadow, the cows are in the corn, but the boy who looks after the sheep is 'fast asleep' under the haystack, and nobody will wake him, because if they do, he'll cry. Except he won't. Because he's dead. The poem's pastoral innocence becomes unbearable. What appears to be a simple nursery rhyme is in fact a grief so precise it cuts on every read. Field wrote 'Wynken, Blynken, and Nod,' that dreamy celestial lullaby, but here he demonstrates another kind of mastery: the kind that breaks you in eight lines. This is the poem for anyone who has ever stood at a child's grave and found the world obscene in its beauty.