Apology - Analysis

Writing as a response to faces, not ideas

The poem answers its own opening question, Why do I write today?, with a blunt, almost embarrassed honesty: the speaker writes because certain human faces compel him. This is less a grand artistic manifesto than an admission of what actually moves him. The title Apology suggests he expects to be judged for that motive, as if being stirred by other people’s appearance—especially by the socially overlooked—might be ethically complicated. What he offers is not a defense of poetry in general, but a confession of what, specifically, makes him pick up the pen.

The tone is unsettled and alert. The speaker is not serenely celebrating beauty; he’s trying to account for a kind of attraction that carries discomfort in it—beauty tied to hardship, and attention tied to power.

Beauty that is also terrible

The poem’s first strong knot is the phrase The beauty of / the terrible faces. Calling these faces both beautiful and terrible refuses a sentimental reading. Terrible implies exhaustion, injury, and social brutality—lives that have been worn down. Yet the speaker insists that this very terribleness contains beauty, not because suffering is inherently noble, but because the faces register real history. The poem’s misspelled nonentites (nonentities) intensifies that idea: these are people treated as if they barely exist, and even the word that names their erasure looks damaged. The speaker is drawn to what society tries not to see.

Colored women at dusk: the poem’s chosen subjects

The poem becomes concrete quickly: colored women / day workers, old and experienced, returning home at dusk. Dusk matters here: they are seen at the day’s end, when labor has already taken its toll and there’s no workplace performance left to maintain. Their cast off clothing signals material deprivation and a system of leftovers—what others discard becomes what they must wear.

And then the poem gives them a startling dignity through comparison: faces like / old Florentine oak. Oak implies hardness, age, grain, endurance; Florentine adds an art-history sheen, as if these workers carry the authority of carved Renaissance wood. The metaphor is not pretty in a soft way; it is heavy, brown, weathered, stubborn. The speaker’s attraction is partly aesthetic—he sees sculpture where the world sees expendable labor—but it’s also an impulse toward witness: these faces feel like artifacts of a civilization, proof that something real has been lived.

The hinge: Also and the second kind of face

The poem turns on a single word: Also. After the workers, we get the set pieces / of your faces—addressed now to leading citizens. Set pieces makes their faces seem staged, arranged, rehearsed. Where the day workers’ faces are textured like oak, the leading citizens present a kind of public mask—faces as performance, faces as social furniture.

Yet the speaker admits they stir him too. That is crucial: he’s not claiming purity. He is susceptible to the powerful and the polished; their presence still provokes his attention. The poem’s honesty deepens here, because it refuses the easy story where the poet only admires the marginalized and feels nothing for the elite.

But not / in the same way: a divided attraction

The closing qualification—but not / in the same way—holds the poem’s central tension. Both groups make him write, but one does so through a troubling beauty bound to labor and erasure, while the other does so through display and social authority. The poem won’t let those two kinds of stirring collapse into a single moral category. The day workers’ faces are beautiful because they bear; the leading citizens’ faces are stirring because they manage. Even the phrase your faces feels pointed, as if the speaker is suddenly speaking across a social gap, accusing them of curating what gets seen.

The real apology: what does it mean to be moved?

If there is an apology here, it may be for the speaker’s own motive: he writes because he is aesthetically compelled, not because he has solved the injustice that makes some people nonentites and others leading citizens. The poem risks turning hardship into art—old Florentine oak is, after all, a museum-grade comparison—yet it also pushes back against that risk by keeping terrible in view. The final line does not reconcile the two stirrings; it leaves them side by side, as if the poet is admitting that attention itself is morally uneven, and that his writing begins in that uncomfortable fact.