“Men at Forty” is a short poem in free verse, its twenty lines divided into five stanzas. The meditative lyric both expresses how it can feel to be at the midstage of one’s life and reflects on the condition of being middle-aged. Although Donald Justice was himself in his forties when he wrote it, the poem is in the third person, the poet wanting to convey an impression not so much of his personal experience as of the way things are. This is characteristic of Justice, although it is not characteristic of the dominant American poetry of the 1960’s, which came to be called “confessional.” As Justice said, in an interview collected in his book Platonic Scripts (1984), he “conscientiously effaced” his self in his poetry.

The poem’s five declarative sentences affirm different facts about the situation of men at forty, all of which have to do with a sense of time passing. The men, one reads, “Learn to close softly/ The doors to rooms they will not be/ Coming back to.” The rooms are metaphoric; they are the rooms of one’s past which adults learn to leave behind—not with a boisterously youthful slam of the door, but with a quiet, perhaps wistful, close. In the poem’s second sentence the men feel the landing of a stair moving beneath them “like the deck of a ship.” Again the image seems not literal but rather to be a way of referring to the impression one has in middle age of being carried along on a voyage. Common human experience is that children take little note of time, whereas it seems to pass more and more swiftly as one ages. Thus, Justice’s poem implies both that one does not have the impression in youth of being carried along (the men at forty feel the movement “now”) and that the gentle swell one feels in middle age may become rougher later on.

The sense of time passing is again suggested in the poem’s third sentence, which notes that men at forty see in mirrors a blend of the present and the remembered past: Deep in his own features the middle-aged man detects the face of the boy he was as well as that of his own father as a middle-aged man. In the only sentence which takes a single line, the speaker states that men at forty “are more fathers than sons.” In this condition, belonging more to the world of the adult than to that of the child, men at forty are being filled, the poem’s fifth sentence mysteriously declares. What fills the men is never made explicit, but the fifth sentence provides a powerful simile which describes it as being like the sound of “the crickets, immense,/ Filling the woods at the foot of the slope.”

Many of Justice’s poems are gracefully expressed within the constraints of traditional forms, but “Men at Forty” proves that he could skillfully write free verse as well. When asked what determines a line in unmetered verse, Justice observed (in Platonic Scripts ) that it seems to be whim but that the poet should enforce the whim so that it comes close to being a perceptible principle. In “Men at Forty” meaning becomes the principle governing when lines are end-stopped and when they are enjambed. The enjambment in stanza 2, for example (“They feel it moving/ Beneath them now like the deck of a ship”), mimics the gentle swell being described, and the enjambment between stanzas 4 and 5, and between the first two lines of stanza 5 (“something//...