Parenting & Family Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden’s line is chilly on purpose: it refuses the sentimental shortcut we’re trained to take when we look at children. Instead of “innocence,” he offers a provocation about identity. Calling their countenances “masks” suggests not deception but unfinishedness. A face, in Auden’s moral vocabulary, is earned: it’s the visible record of choices, habits, compromises, and loyalties. A mask is provisional, a surface without biography.

The comparison to animals is the barb. It isn’t an insult so much as a reminder that without self-narration and social responsibility, a being reads to us as pure presence. Animals don’t “perform” a self in the way adults do; they don’t accrue a public profile. Auden implies children are closer to that state: expressive, legible, but not yet authored. The subtext is that adulthood is less about “finding yourself” than about becoming accountable enough to have a self others can recognize.

Context matters: Auden wrote in a century that watched personhood get bureaucratized and brutalized, when “profile” could mean both psychological depth and the sort of dossier that states and institutions keep. That double meaning sharpens the phrase “significant profile”: the self is at once an inner shape and a social artifact. He’s also pushing back against the modern cult of childhood authenticity. The line lands because it denies comfort while sneaking in a harder tenderness: children aren’t little saints or little monsters. They’re unfinalized. The face arrives later, when time and choice carve it.