Stanley Kunitz – The Portrait

This poem is such a blunt feeling of love lost and anger. It is about a man who killed himself in a public park while his wife was pregnant, and she never forgave him for that. I could never imagine having to deal with that sort of pain, losing someone that way when your lives are about to be joined by a child. The poignancy in this poem however is not about the suicide, it’s about the hurt that never dies. She was never able to let the hurt go, even after the son was older and her reaction to the father’s picture was to rip it up and smack the child. That pain that she felt was then held by the son who at the age of 64 still carries that pain that she dealt with. The time factor in this poem turned a pain from a mother, to child, to poem forever caught in time.