In his poignant poem "Norfolk", John Betjeman uses memories of childhood holidays with his father to reflect on the loss of innocence. He looks back on "the rapturous ignorance of long ago / The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts / Of unkept promises and broken hearts." T. S. Eliot also approached a similar theme, of regret and the struggle to come to terms with the past, in "Burnt Norton", from his Four Quartets.
"Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened". In "East Coker", the second of the quartets, he notes that "As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated".
