"Five Days Old" (1958) is a poem by Australian poet Francis Webb.
[1] It was originally published in The Bulletin on 30 April 1958,[2] and was subsequently reprinted in the author's single-author collections and a number of Australian poetry anthologies.
[1] According to The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature "The background to the poem, according to Webb's friend, Sister M. Francisa Fitz-Walter, was that a kindly doctor, hoping to renew Webb's interest in life and to restore his desire to write, placed a five-day old baby named Christopher John in Webb's arms.
"[3] The Oxford Literary History of Australia wrote that Webb's "rich tapestry of metaphors and similes has contributed greatly to his popularity among his successors, some of whom might even have taken his mental condition as part of a true poet's inevitable alienation from modern society, or even from all society.
'Five Days Old' represents Webb in an unusually lyrical and publicly open mode.