About the Poet and the Poem

Markus Natten is remembered for this short, deeply reflective poem in which a young speaker looks back and tries to pin down the exact moment his childhood slipped away. Written in a simple, questioning voice, the poem reads almost like a child thinking aloud, and that plainness is what makes it so moving.

The poem is built as a series of questions. Three times the speaker asks, "When did my childhood go?", and each time he offers a possible answer — the moment he stopped being eleven, the moment he saw through grown-up pretence, and the moment he discovered a mind of his own. In the final stanza the question shifts to "Where did my childhood go?", and the speaker admits he cannot really say, except that it survives somewhere in "an infant's face."

Rather than telling a story, the poem explores an idea: that growing up is not a single event but the slow arrival of reason, disillusionment and independent thought — and that innocence, once lost, cannot be traced back to any one day.