Hide and Seek

The poem at a glance

On the surface this is one game of hide and seek, told moment by moment: the gleeful shout, the sacks in the toolshed, the seekers’ whispers and prowling footsteps, the long cold wait, the triumphant emergence into silence. Underneath, it is a parable of growing up. The hiding place stands for the small strategies of childhood, the ‘win’ for every victory we plan for an audience that has already gone home. Scannell turns one abandoned child into an image of disappointment that echoes far into adult life.

Methods that matter

Voice: the second person makes you the hider

The poem is written almost entirely in imperatives addressed to ‘you’: ‘Call out. Call loud’, ‘Don’t breathe. Don’t move. Stay dumb.’ The commands sound like the rules of the game, or an older voice coaching a younger self, and they conscript the reader: you crouch in the dark, you feel the cold, and the final desertion happens to you. The clipped monosyllables also perform the held breath of hiding.

Sensory imagery: pleasure curdling into cold

At first the hiding place is an adventure: the sacks ‘smell like the seaside’, a simile that imports holidays and happiness into a dark shed. But the salty dark slowly turns literal and hostile: feet go numb, ‘the cold bites through your coat’, the darkness that was cover becomes blindness. The sensory shift is the poem’s emotional structure: excitement, patience, discomfort, and only then the discovery that patience has been pointless.

Form and the ending: no stanza break, no answer

The poem runs as one continuous block with no stanza breaks, so there is no pause, no relief, and the reader waits inside the poem exactly as the boy waits inside the shed. The dramatic irony tightens: we sense the seekers giving up before he does. Then the garden itself comes alive against him, ‘The darkening garden watches’, the bushes hold their breath, and the last line is a question nobody answers: ‘But where are they who sought you?’

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘Call out. Call loud’ (l. 1)	Imperatives, second person	The reader is ordered into the game from the first words: confidence and excitement that the ending will quietly dismantle.
‘The sacks in the toolshed smell like the seaside’	Sensory simile	Holiday happiness smuggled into a dark shed: the child’s imagination makes hiding an adventure, for now.
‘The darkening garden watches.’	Personification	The familiar garden turns witness, almost accomplice: the child’s world itself seems in on the desertion.
‘But where are they who sought you?’ (final line)	Rhetorical question, ending	Triumph collapses into abandonment: an unanswered question that reaches past the game to every outgrown friendship and hollow victory.