The poem, ‘To the Foot from its Child’, presents a contrast between colourful dreams and humdrum reality of life. The poet conveys his view of life through his description of a foot. The foot is a metaphor for expressing the crushing of a child’s spirit through the challenges and restrictions that life places upon him. One can undoubtedly infer that the poem is basically a criticism of how people force children to grow in society and forget all their dreams and imaginations.

With a view to delineating the forces that capture the child’s freedom and aspirations, the poet begins the poem making a statement directly that the child’s foot, which is not aware that it is a foot, would like to be a butterfly or an apple. From this one can infer that man’s spirit dreams of enjoying unlimited freedom in this world but it comes to know that it cannot enjoy unlimited freedom and has to pass through several obstacles before it matures into an adult.

But, in time, stones and bits of glass, streets, ladders, paths in the rough earth go on teaching the foot that it cannot fly. As the infant is growing and developing into a mature adult, he is exposed to the harsh realities of life which are metaphorically expressed as stones, bits of glass, ladder, street, etc. These are the problems and obstacles an individual has to face. Thus, once the child becomes a boy, an adolescent, and an adult, the problems of life teach the individual that he is a ‘mortal’ and his powers are limited and can only serve the society as a member like other human beings. This sense is expressed in the line ‘that it cannot fly,

cannot become a fruit and is defeated, falls in the battle, is a prisoner condemned to live in a shoe’. Here, the ‘shoe’ can be taken to mean the human society that regulates his mind and activities.

Wearing the shoe refers to the infant becoming a mature adult. Soon after entering adulthood the individual explores ‘life’ within the shoe. He loses touch with the reality of the outside world but experiences the world through the eyes of society. This again means that a lot of restrictions are imposed on the individual. Now that he is an adult he keeps on walking without respite through the fields, mines, markets and ministries. The line ‘this foot toils in its shoe, scarcely taking time to bare itself in love or sleep’ expresses the fact that once he realizes that he is a man destined to live in a society, he learns to face the humdrum realities of life. He has no time to let his human spirit indulge in ‘love’ and ‘sleep’. He is a prisoner and keeps on working until he dies. Once he dies his spirit loses its human awareness and is once again as free as the children.