Mary F. C. Pratt's poem begins with a promise before it says what is being promised. "It will return. It is / returning." The pronoun has no noun to lean on, and the reader has to wait for the sun to be named in the title and the fourth stanza. The grammar moves from future to present progressive in two short sentences, so confidence grows as we read. The evidence is quiet and domestic: at six o'clock the candle on the table no longer throws "a sharp / circle." The light outside is thinning it out. The speaker proves the sun's return by noticing that a small flame has become less necessary.
The second stanza turns to the cost of the winter just ended, and it does so in plain, clipped phrases: "a tough / winter, a tough fall. / Four dead, my own / new scars, the surprise / of seventy years." The poem never explains these losses, and that restraint is its strength. "Four dead" sits beside "my own new scars" with no comment, as if grief and the speaker's own body were part of one tally. "The surprise of seventy years" can be read two ways: astonishment at having reached such an age, or at having survived this particular winter. The poem doesn't choose, and both readings add to the sense of fragility.
The third stanza admits need, and the verb form matters. The speaker doesn't say "I need" but "I'm needing / morning bird song," then "I'm needing / good news." That ongoing form matches "is returning," "is warming," "are giving." Nearly everything in the poem is in process, which makes the speaker's wanting feel like part of the same slow turn. The birds, a robin and a cardinal, and the maples "giving / their juice" suggest a northern climate where sap runs at winter's end. That is an inference from the imagery, but the details are specific and convincing.
Then comes the joke at the poem's center. Just as spring stirs, "my old / religion makes it Lent." The word "reversal" shows the speaker's feeling that the calendar of the church has arrived at the wrong moment, asking for abstinence when nature is finally offering plenty. The sentence also spills across a stanza break ("just as the sun // is warming through the wind"), so the reader tips over the gap just as the speaker is tipped into Lent. "My old religion" is wonderfully offhand, like a long-standing relative who still insists on the family rules. The response, "Well, all right," is the poem's most human moment. It's a shrug with some humor in it, not quite surrender and not quite resentment.
The final stanza turns that shrug into an argument: "If the meat is gone, / I might as well fast." The logic is wry. Winter has already stripped things away, so why not make the loss deliberate? A rule that felt like an imposition becomes a way of giving shape to what has already happened. The poem doesn't mention Easter or any religious consolation. Its hope rests on something astronomical and plain: "Someday again, days / will be longer than nights." The opening certainty of "It will return" has loosened to "Someday," a more modest word, and the last line is almost entirely small, steady words: "I just have to wait." The word "just" carries both weariness and acceptance.
Formally, the poem is five stanzas of five lines each, in free verse with no rhyme. Its rhythm is the rhythm of speech, with short lines and frequent breaks in the middle of phrases ("winter candle / light," "my old / religion"). These breaks make the speaker sound like someone thinking aloud and finding the next word. The tidy stanzas give that spoken voice a calm frame.
The poem is significant because it treats hope as a practice. The title's "trusting" is an active verb, something done over time and without proof guaranteed. Pratt joins two calendars, the church's and the sun's, and lets them sit together without forcing a victory for either. The result is a poem about aging, loss and endurance that stays modest in tone and ends by choosing patience.