Are The Children at Home?

Description

Are the Children at Home? is one of the most beautiful and most moving poems by Margaret Elizabeth Sangster. Like most other poems by Sangster, Are the Children at Home? is inspired from family life, this time through the eyes of an aging mother whose children have already left home.

Are the Children at Home? impresses the reader with the serene, melancholy atmosphere as well as with the depth of the feelings expressed. An aging woman remembers the times when the house was filled with laughter, when children were around or were expected to come home after a day spend playing outside. Now the only people in the house are the speaker and her husband who is sleeping in his chair on the veranda, waking up hoping the children are coming home.

Family and children are among the central themes of the entire oeuvre of Margaret Elizabeth Sangster. She grew up in a deeply religious environment where family values were very important and it was these values that informed Sangster’s literary activity. She worked as an editor and a columnist for a number of important publications in her time, including Hearth and Home and The Christian at Work.

Between 1889 and 1899, she worked as editor for the Harper’s Bazaar and she also had her own column in Woman’s Home Companion. She wrote not only newspaper articles and poetry, but prose as well, mostly children’s stories. Her work drew attention from the beginning – her first story, entitled Little Jamie, was appreciated by the public and by the critics as well. Other work that brought her success included two stories, Hours with Girls and Winsome Womanhood, and she also wrote hymns for her church such as Thine is the Power. She was also known for contributing a preface to a publication entitled Happenings in Our Home – a book intended for families in which they could record notable events such as birthdays and other celebrations.
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