Comments on: These Summer Sundays

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 22:46:35 +0000

I second these comments. Some of the power of these lines comes from the double sense of offices. An “office” in the old days was not so much a place as a duty, an assigmnent. (“She undertook the office of chief mourner.”) An official or an officer was someone who fulfilled a necessary task. The “austere and lonely offices” that we all recognize as physical places in modern architecture & bureaucracy, are overlaid, in this poem, with the office of a person carrying out some kind of devotion or formal commitment. Here, I guess : fatherhood, in the midst of hardship.

Thanks for this beautiful poem. One of my earliest & most persistent memories is of watching, through the window, my father going off to work, & waiting by the same window for him to come home.
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By: Michael Hartford

Michael Hartford — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:05:30 +0000

It wasn’t until I had two charming, lovable, and impossibly ungrateful children of my own that those last two lines really hit me; there are things we do for the people we love that we sometimes hate and dread, and that the beneficiaries will never appreciate, and those are the truest expressions of love.

I like the way this poem starts off in media res–”Sundays too my father got up early,” as though we’re dropped into the middle of list of the father’s tasks. And I also like that the father isn’t romanticized: there are “chronic angers” to fear, and we get the feeling he’s not the sort of cuddly Pop you want to hug. Even if the narrator could have done more than speak indifferently to him, it’s not clear he would have responded with emotional warmth, even though he provided the physical warmth of the fire. A lot is packed into three stanzas, and a lot is unsaid; I think that’s where the strength of this poem lies.
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By: thomas brady

thomas brady — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 21:47:45 +0000

“I share the same birthday—August 4th—along with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Louis Armstrong, Barack Obama, and Helen Thomas.”

err…sorry, but Percy Bysshe Shelley’s kinda persona non grata around here…
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By: J Diego Frey

J Diego Frey — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:31:05 +0000

Katie,

Thanks for reminding me of that poem. I probably haven’t read it since I was in school, but so much of it resonates. And I do remember the way those last two lines struck me. I remember thinking of the tiny underlit teacher’s office behind my HS English class, the stack of books and coffee mug.
Also though, it’s the sound/alliteration that he pulls off, and the beauty of an unbeautiful word like “austere.”
As a father now myself, I think of the nights sitting in a chair by my son’s bed, waiting for him to drift off in the semi-silence and I think that what’s being said here is that some kinds of love are not comfortable, some are hard–but that they still count just the same.
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