Grade 9 Notes: Hide and Seek
Hide and Seek is the anthology's trap poem: it recruits you with the imperative second person — 'you' are the hider — walks you through a child's game in real time, and then ends the game without you. Revise it as an experience Scannell engineers: the commands, the sensory prison of the toolshed, the time-skips you almost miss, and the final question that turns a game into a parable. Because the poem is in copyright, work from single load-bearing words — the anthology text is printed in your exam paper, so precision costs nothing on the day.
Character studies
'You' — the hiding child (and the reader)
The poem's masterstroke: the protagonist is whoever is reading it
Hide and Seek has no named characters at all. Its protagonist is 'you' — a child hiding in a garden toolshed during a game, addressed throughout in the second person by a voice that is part self-coaching child, part narrating adult, part the game itself giving instructions. The device is the poem: by conscripting the reader as the hider, Scannell ensures that the ending — emerging victorious into a garden where everyone has gone — happens TO whoever reads it. The child's age, name and face are left blank because the blank is a door: every reader walks through it into their own childhood, and every reader is abandoned at the end. The poem is twenty-six lines of second-person present-tense immersion with one of the coldest final lines in the anthology.
Thesis statements
- Hide and Seek administers its meaning rather than stating it: imperatives conscript the reader as 'you', present tense detains them in the shed, and the terminal question hands them the abandonment as their own — a poem experienced from inside, whose desolation has no outside to watch from.
- Scannell plots the poem through the senses alone — seaside sacks souring to salty dark and biting cold — so that loss is registered in the body before either the child or the reader can name it, and never is.
- The poem's form plays the game against its reader: an unbroken verse block refuses rest, enjambed time-skips steal the hours mid-line, and a ritual ring of shouted formulas closes on silence — structure as the quiet defection of the rules.
- The ending's cruelty is that nothing went wrong: 'you' played perfectly and won absolutely, and the empty garden is victory's own payout — Scannell's parable of triumph without witnesses, sized to a toolshed and applicable to a life.
- Set against its anthology neighbours, Hide and Seek is the dark twin of Half-past Two and the rebuttal of If—: the same childhood solitude Fanthorpe renders as transcendence, and the same self-command Kipling rewards with the Earth, here paid out in cold, cramp and an unanswerable question.
Essay plans
- Compare how the poets present a child's experience in Hide and Seek and Half-past Two. — Both poems trap a boy inside a structure adults built — a game's rules, a school's clocktime — and let the structure's keepers forget him; but Fanthorpe's boy escapes through the gap into a timeless elsewhere he will mourn losing, while Scannell's boy obeys the structure perfectly and is abandoned by it: the same childhood solitude, rendered once as transcendence and once as sentence.
- Compare how the poets create powerful endings in Hide and Seek and one other poem from the anthology. (Partner: Prayer Before Birth) — Both poems end on their darkest possible note — an empty garden, a plea to be spilled rather than corrupted — and both earn the ending through accumulating pattern; but MacNeice's climax is chosen by his speaker as a last defiance, while Scannell's is inflicted on a child who chose nothing but obedience: endings as verdict, one delivered BY the voice and one delivered ON it.