Themes and message

The main themes of the poem “Warning to Parents” by Elizabeth Jennings are children’s protection and the inherent evils of society and people. The poem shows that, although parents desire to preserve their children’s innocence, they cannot protect them from discovering the evils of society and from the inherently evil nature which inclines all people to violence.

Children’s protection

The theme of protecting children is explored actively in the first two stanzas of the poem, which illustrate the measures parents take to preserve their children’s innocence by not exposing them to violence which can create feelings of fear. In this section of the poem, the author shows the way parents tend to consider their children as fragile and vulnerable beings who need to be guarded from...

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Inherent evils

The theme of inherent evils is mostly explored in the second part of the poem (stanzas 3 and 4). First, the poem shows that children cannot be protected from evil indefinitely because evil (violence, torture, cruelty, crime) is part of human society and history (the reference to the Belsen concentration camp).

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