Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is life the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

The poem I chose to respond to is called “Men at Forty” by Donald Justice. I decided to write a response to this poem because it has a life meaning to it. When Justice wrote this poem he was in his early forties and is probably writing about what he was feeling and the emotions he was going through at this time. Many times people think that only women go through emotional midlifes, but men also do too. At many times all people can really do is think about when they were a child and all thing silly little things they would do. In lines 9-12 Justices states, “And deep in mirrors / They rediscover / The face of the boy as he practices tying / His father’s tie there in secret”.  When the character of the poem looks in the mirror remembers how he would always try to tie on his father’s tie when his father was not around. I think this is a wonderful poem because almost everyone can relate to this type of feeling at some point in their life.