Summary

“A Little Boy Lost” begins with a young boy telling a priest he does not see how he can love another to the same extent that he loves himself. Hearing this, the priest drags the boy up to the church altar and denounces him, calling him a fiend and chastising him for setting “reason up for judge/of our most holy mystery” (55). The child and his parents begin to weep, but their cries go unheard as the boy is stripped down, bound in an iron chain, and burned in a holy place “where many had been burned before” (55). The poem then ends with the question “Are such things done on Albion’s shore?” (55).

“A Little Girl Lost” begins with the speaker addressing the “children of the future age” in order to inform them that there once was a time when “love, sweet love...