There is remarkably little good poetry about very small children. Maybe it’s the lack of sleep that does it; for the first few months it’s hard to remember to put out the bins, let alone write poems. Perhaps the first writer to make a serious attempt to evoke the world of earliest childhood was the Latin poet Statius, a contemporary of the Roman emperor Domitian (ad 81–96). In one of his most remarkable poems, Statius describes taking a newborn baby boy in his arms, “as he demanded the novel air with trembling wails”. Bit by bit, he learned to interpret the child’s inarticulate complaints and