An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum

This poem was written by Stephen Spender, a guy with an extensive rap sheet in the genre of politically and socially inclined commentary. I'm not entirely sure when he visited the slum that this poem is based in, but he has such a melancholic way of describing things that, I am forced to conclude that this happened at a time when conditions were devolving faster than people could try to remedy them, and all that without any help form the authorities whose iron fists seem to rule these places, even through the dust choked air and the cheap squalor!
Now, the poem begins by painting the portraits of the children. They are located rather inland and, subsequently in a place that closes them off from the outside world in such a way, that even the gusty waves seem like fairytales, pointless and with fuzzy details. Most of these children look like the soil of a parched garden overrun with weeds of such a rootless nature, that even they cannot thrive there. The first child is a girl, tall with a weighed-down head such as is got from worries that are best left to those above the supposed ' best days of our lives' in age. The next child is a paper thin boy with skin that might as well be pulled over his bones for all that they jut out, with the eyes of a rat, cunning and analysing, looking for anything that could grant some extra chance for survival. The next boy who- reciting his lesson- seems to have inherited some muscular or skeletal disease leaving his body twisted and gnarled. The last boy, in the back of the room- the only one who hasn't been touched by those retched fingers of despair, that have stolen the light from within the eyes of all the others- dreaming of some distant place, not bound by the four dismal walls of the room, but free, free to follow the cheerful, bouncing game of the squirrels, the only one untainted!
All the objects that decorate the sour cream walls are donations, a sculpture of Shakespeare's head, pictures of flowered valleys, a map; all lies to these kids, whose eyes have never gazed on anything except dark, dingy, grey walls, roads and skies. Their world is a foggy vision of despair. They've never seen rivers, or capes, or the stars that they learn to describe with words, lies that they can never understand or believe.
Such liars as William Shakespeare and the maps, with their ships and sun, only drive them to thievery to replace what they've never had the good fortune to experience. And so their lives go on, within the cramped crevices they call home, from pale, washed out days to the endless night that waits at the horizon, for all of us. These children, upon their slag heaps, with such bodies as were the embodiment of the phrase 'skin and bones', with glasses  reminisce of Harry Potter, like broken bottles upon unyielding stone. All of time and space to them, consists solely of foggy, dirty slums. Which hits me particularly hard, because times and spaces beyond what we see, have always been refuges to me.... and to a time lord this would be pure torture.
Unless all the authorities turn their minds and hearts towards these children, and extend their hands to pull them up, they will rot there like corpses in the vast catacombs. Break that prison open, he says. Show them that the world can be green and lush, like the fields in the countryside. Make them see and feel a world that has golden sand and azure waves, let them run their tongues, and be free to believe the treasured images that the books present before them as tempting fruits, a history in a the language of the sun , free and oh, so tempting!