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In the poem, as Howe goes about her day, this thought seems to be echoing in her head: “This is what the living do.” After losing her brother, it seems that Howe had become painfully aware of the things around her, of the everyday, of life.

Everything in her life suddenly seems so bleak and miserable, which is reinforced by her use of negative connotation: “the Drano… smells dangerous,” “crusty dishes,” “the bag breaking,” “wobbly bricks,” “slamming the car door,” “cold,” “yearning.” Not only is a painfully depressing tone lurking throughout the poem, but the reader can gain insight into the mindset of the narrator, of the poet, of Howe.

The audience learns that the narrator just wants this winter of her life to pass and for spring to come. Readers are not left to take away this negative empathy for the narrator, instead, they are shown the narrator finding glimmers of hope and optimism near the end of the poem. They learn the narrator will catch glimpses of herself and feel a cherishing for their “own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat.” The narrator is reminded that, despite how bad things seem, she is still alive: “I am living. I remember you.”

After learning how personal this poem was to Howe, the poem suddenly started having a much stronger emotional impact on me. It connected with many of my suppressed emotions—the ones that are usually hinted at in many of my creative pieces. I am not the most fluent in the complexity that is emotion, but I always do strive to leave some emotional impact on my readers.

A poem deep with emotion, written from the heart; a message conveyed through the narrator’s thoughts and actions, rather than just being stated; imagery and figurative language throughout to help the reader understand clearly; a topic that allows the reader to contemplate or reminisce about some aspect of life.

“What the Living Do” is an amazing example of the kind of writing I aspire to match.

The first problem my brain was having was that I couldn’t follow the non-linear structure of the poem. Howe throws the reader into the middle of a situation in the first stanza with details such as “bike crash and slamming kitchen door, the boys scrambling into the back woods,” only to then jump to the narrator describing her mother and father in the second stanza, before talking about a dream the narrator had years after the events described in the poem in the third. For the longest time, I couldn’t follow that narrative—I kept getting ideas jumbled together.

After I pieced together some sort of timeline of the events in the poem (which, by no means, is guaranteed to be accurate), I tried to piece together the vaguer details the narrator includes in the poem. There were two details that stood out to me: the first is in the fourth stanza when the narrator’s mother and father have no words for each other and have drifted apart, “the one hundred and nine years between them walking away like a man who has knocked on the wrong door”; the second is in the sixth and last stanza when the narrator runs after her father after he leaves the house because the narrator believes the father was “about to say something [she] want[s] to hear.”

These two details caught my eye because they explain so much of the poem’s narrative without the poem ever needing to explicitly say what these details refer to.

The first detail is about the narrator’s parents drifting apart, and, presumably, are getting divorced. This seems to have had a profound effect on the narrator, to the point where she has dreams of her father having had married another, years after the events of the poem.

The second detail is about the narrator needing to hear something from her father before he leaves, but throughout the poem, what she “wants to hear” is never alluded to. Unless, we look to the title of the poem, “Apology”.

Is the narrator looking for an apology from her father? Or does she want to hear him consoling her after she apologizes? Or does she want to hear the father apologize to the mother? Although I believe it to be the first option, this question as to what the narrator wants to hear and what the title means is a very open-ended question.

This “not being able to hear what she wants to hear” is made further a tragic circumstance because it is hinted at throughout the poem that the father had died all these years ago.

Now, I won’t get into any conspiracy theories of how the father died, but I will point out a couple of details that hint towards this fate. “About to ask a question like, like my father, his last week living” is one such detail, also when the narrator has the dreams about her father, “the facts dissemble” (probably meaning, the narrator feels that her father is still alive, that the fact he’s dead no longer matters).

There is so much I want to say about this poem, but that’s for another time. Feel free to analyze the poem yourself to find the details and nuances that I didn’t touch upon here; there is way too much to unpack in this poem and I just wished I could do it justice here.