A visit meant as a social duty turns quickly into a confrontation with age in Hans Ostrom’s “Paying Respects.” The title itself carries a funereal suggestion: people usually pay respects to the dead. Here the phrase attaches to a living old woman, as if the visitors already treat her as a monument, someone to be honored formally rather than met as a person. The central tension is not simply that she is strange; it is that the younger visitors need to make her strange so they can believe they will never become her.
Ostrom builds the poem from short, irregular free-verse lines, and the lack of rhyme gives the language a hushed, halting quality. The line breaks control pace. “The iron garden-gate / was hard and wondrous to open” makes the opening feel slow and effortful, and the break after “open” leaves the gate momentarily ajar in the reader’s mind. “Ornamentation dated it” works two ways: the decoration reveals the gate’s age, and it marks the gate as old-fashioned, belonging to another era. That double sense—age as fascinating and age as alien—runs through the whole poem.
The move from gate to walkway to “her stifling house” narrows the world. Sound and image create the atmosphere: the p’s in “purple / dress and parchment skin” are soft but dry, like paper or faint breath, and the sibilants in “stifling house” and “seconds” make the air feel close. The old woman is described with two powerful images. Purple suggests dignity or funereal formality, while parchment makes her skin seem dry, fragile, and written on by time. She is “saying what she thought / her whole life / had taught,” and the line breaks isolate “her whole life,” as if the visitors can hear the weight of decades but cannot receive the lesson. She is “too old / to pity, too austere to embrace.” Pity and embrace are the usual ways of softening old age; both fail here, because she has moved beyond comfort into something sterner.
The turn comes with the visitors’ self-reassurance: “Our minds assured us / we would never grow / that weird if we ever / grew that old.” The word “weird” is deliberately blunt and defensive. It reveals how fear disguises itself as judgment. The repeated verb “grow” yokes social oddity to physical aging, as if becoming old and becoming “weird” were a single threat. They are “confident” they can “open the gate again, get / away,” retracing their steps as if the path outward belongs to them. But the final stanza removes that confidence. The gate now “stood out there / in advanced darkness,” no longer wondrous but remote and watchful, as if darkness has progressed with the visit. Inside, “the seconds of her clock ate / the minutes of our patience.” Time becomes a predator, consuming not only the old woman’s remaining days but also the visitors’ tolerance. The word “patience” is especially ironic: patience is supposed to be a virtue that helps people endure such visits, yet here it is exactly what time devours.
The poem is significant because it refuses the easy comfort of sentimentality. It does not turn the old woman into a sweet source of wisdom, and it does not let the visitors escape. Instead, it leaves them inside the stifling house, listening to a clock that eats their patience. Paying respects, Ostrom suggests, is not the same as truly respecting; real respect would require acknowledging that the gate will not always open back onto youth. That unflinching look at fear—and at the polite ceremonies we use to manage it—makes the poem linger.