Rather than showing the ways in which change arouses fear by making us overcome comfort zones and representing us with new challenges, the poem "The Glass Jar" written by Gwen Harwood brightly traces the fear and anxiety of growing up usually felt by young children. The nightmares of a child, his abortive hopes to exorcize the beasts from his dreams are typical of the process of growing up. The religious implications in "exorcize", "disciples" symbolizes Christ and chastity and help in transferring the boy's faith in the power of the sun, showing his change through emotional willfulness. Harwood confronts these with monster imagery of evil and death comparing "monstrance" with "monster", which again transfers the child's perception that change is ineluctable, and its results on him and his world. His try to capture the "light" represents his try to keep the darkness of the world in a cleft stick and to restore innocence. When he miscarries, the jar seems to mock him and the scarf had no biblical power. This change in the child's persona, as he loses his chastity is continued following the child's painful decision to run away to his comforter's bedroom where he is compared with the sexual implications associated with this room as a physical delimitation between childhood and adulthood.

"The Glass Jar" also reveals some aspects of "The Door" written by Miroslav Holub, including that of the fear coupled with change and the ways it forms our understanding of the world surrounding us. This is shown by the way Harwood graphically pictures the monsters in the darkness. They are depicted in bright imagery. They are spiteful and their weapons are claw and trident, representing images of a crab-like creature that act as a intermediary to express the child's worse fears which the child has to face after he realizes that he is alone in the darkness of his bedroom.