The Old Familiar Faces

It has long been Lamb's most popular poem, and was included in both The Oxford Book of English Verse[1] and Palgrave's Golden Treasury.

The phrase some are taken from me he interpreted as a reference to Lamb's sister Mary, who had recently been confined in a lunatic asylum during one of her periodic fits of madness, in the first of which she had killed her mother.

The "fairest among women" of the fourth stanza was, he thought, a Hertfordshire girl called Ann Simmons whom Lamb loved in his earliest youth and whom he elsewhere wrote about under the names "Anna" and "Alice W—".

[10] He reprinted it in The Works of Charles Lamb (1818),[11] but without the opening four lines referring to Mary's killing of their mother, doubtless having come to the conclusion that those events were no business of the reading public.

[15] Robert Graves complained of the "rambling incompetence of the argument"; he suggested improvements, but claimed that even they could make the poem no more than "a macabre account of what would now be called 'a regressive infantile fixation'.

"[16] Others have called it Lamb's most successful poem,[17] a work which shows him "at his bleakest and most powerful",[18] "transcend[ing] the particulars of his situation to express his feelings about it in universal terms".

[19] The poet Edmund Blunden was struck by the poem's dreamlike, almost Alice in Wonderland treatment of the universal, everyday experience of loss.