The Kingdom Where Everybody Dies

“Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” examines a child’s perspective of how childhood and death, or the lack of, are connected. Edna St. Vincent Millay writes of a child who experiences death and reacts to it. It can either be read to mean that in childhood death is not fully understood so it does not really exist in the mind of a child, or it can be understood to mean that once someone close to us dies, we leave childhood. I hold more strongly to the second notion, particularly because of the final stanza of the poem.

Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house. (306)

The use of tea is significant. Earlier in the poem it speaks of “people who have died, who neither listen nor speak; Who do not drink their tea, though they have always said tea was such a comfort” (306). This poem was written at a time where the social setting placed high value on having tea together. It symbolized social inclusion among adults, and a dream symbolism dictionary states that “making or drinking tea, represents satisfaction and contentment in your life. You are taking your time with regards to some relationship or situation. Alternatively, the dream signifies tranquility, serenity, calmness, and respect” (DreamMoods.com). Because the dead can no longer drink their tea, the comfort that tea is supposed to bring is absent. Then the child’s tea is cold. The fact that the tea is cold also serves a significant purpose because the adjective cold “is said of the human body when deprived of its animal heat; esp. of a dead body, of death, the grave (mingling with b); hence sometimes = cold in death, dead” (Oxford English Dictionary). All of this comes together to symbolize the death of childhood in connection with the death of people close to us.

In the final line of this poem, the child “leaves the house” (306). The comfort of home and of childhood is gone. It is left behind as he steps out of the house into The Kingdom Where Everybody Dies.


“cold, adj.”. OED Online. November 2010. Oxford University Press. 23 February 2011. Web.

Millay, Edna St. Vincent. “Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies.” The Literary Experience. Ed. Beiderwell, Bruce and Jeffrey M. Wheeler. Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008. 305. Print.

Dream Moods. Dream Moods, Inc. 2000. Web. 23 February 2011.