The Last Hurrah!

My favorite thing about poetry is that I don't have to feel incompetent when I have read something, perhaps for the tenth time, and notice something that I didn't realize in the first nine readings. Poetry has a way of growing and blossoming while you aren't actually reading it, because when you return to it there is often some new element that wasn't in the poem before, or in the reader. =)
I am always drawn to the closing lines of any poem. They seem to be the 'last hurrah' of the author and are often the words that stay with me the longest. In "Those Winter Sundays," what struck me is the similarity between Hayden's closing line and Creech's closing line in "Engine Work."

"of love's austere and lonely offices?"(Hayden).

"to fire the lonely engine of the heart"(Creech).

It is amazing to me that the literal words are incredibly dissimilar, but the poetic meaning behind each line really speaks to me of the same idea. I get the impression in "Those Winter Sundays" that the child is reminiscing about days/times that have come and gone, scenes in which he/she was an active participant. Creech displays a similar scene, but one from which the child is absent. In both there is an element of heartbreak and a kind of sorrow. Hayden conveys this through phrases such as, "no one ever thanked him," and that word "indifferent" strikes me as a weight on the child's conscience.

The sounds are very impressive. "Blueblack cold" just makes me shiver thinking about it and hearing the low and abrupt sounds of the consonants. The ck-c arrangement just cracks when you read it aloud. I know that words only have meaning because we give them meaning, but "splintering" and "breaking" sound in word form just as I know them to sound in life.

The closing line still has me thinking about the child and what he means by this phrase. Is the father lonely because he's raising a child alone? Is it lonely because as children grow there is this elemental distance that comes between the changed role of adult to adult rather than child to adult? Is it even the father that is lonely? I do appreciate that he asks "what did I know?" The past tense of the word did makes me believe that he didn't know, but has since come to an understanding. Oh, so many questions. It's great because it means possibilities.