Most poems about ordinary life either sneer at it or sentimentalise it. "Round of Hours" does something harder: it admits what the speaker has given up, then argues that what remains is enough. The opening lines set up the ledger of loss. She "might have traveled to a wider plane," she "cannot boast of seeing pyramids," she has not seen greener fields or "richer / Fruited" skies. The word "boast" is telling. It suggests a world where experience is a kind of currency, and she is quietly declining to compete. Then comes the pivot, a single dash and a confession of love: "I love the meticulous jogging on of time."
That phrase is the poem's central idea in miniature. "Jogging" is a humble, rhythmic, slightly comic word, a trot rather than a gallop, and "meticulous" gives the trot dignity. Even the parenthesis conceding that this is "Dull time to some" seems to shrug, as if the speaker has heard the objection a hundred times and is unbothered. Her love is for repetition itself: the setting of "silver at dusk / About a linen, clean and neatly mended." The mended linen matters. It is not new or grand, but cared for, and the poem's whole value system lives in that detail.
The second half of the first stanza turns domestic routine into something close to ritual. The table is laid "As if a greater Presence comes each night / To supper." Notice the careful hedge, "as if." The speaker never claims a visitor arrives; she behaves as though one might, and the behaviour is what transforms the room. The inventory that follows, "goblet / Or of cup . . . the plate of bread . . . the aroma," is slowed by ellipses, so that the reader lingers over each object the way her hands must. The bread leads her thoughts outward to "stronger / Hands than mine" that tended the harvest. It is a brief, generous moment of humility: her comfortable evening rests on other people's labour, and she knows it.
The poem's form supports this mood. It is in free verse, with no regular rhyme scheme, and the long lines sprawl and enjamb across line breaks ("richer / Fruited," "stronger / Hands"), so the sentences seem to unroll at the pace of an unhurried evening. The rhythm loosely echoes a plain, conversational iambic stride without ever locking into it, much like the "jogging" it describes. The repeated "I love" works almost like a refrain, tying the stanzas together where rhyme might otherwise have done so.
The second stanza turns from table to window, and the imagery becomes more visual. The "crystal windows," curtained "Not elegantly yet with color," and the tassels "dangling from the leveled shades" divide the "saucy street" into "perpendiculars." That last word is delightfully unexpected in a poem about comfort. It is geometric, almost architectural, and it shows the speaker ordering her small world into clean lines. The street outside is "saucy," lively and a little cheeky, and the curtains hold it at a pleasant distance. Yet she does not shut it out entirely: at dusk she can "let the first star of a moon-shell in." The image is lovely and slightly strange. A star arriving like a shell suggests something small, curved and found, and it hints that the wide world she gave up on has not vanished. It can still be admitted, on her terms, through a window she controls.
The final stanza is where the poem earns its title and its depth. The routine, she says, "Seems silently an altar that I serve." The verb "serve" does double duty, since she serves meals and she serves an altar, and the two meanings fuse. The word "seems" is again careful, keeping the claim modest. Then the confession: "Confused by many worlds, and so much doing / I light the lamps, and wait to share the wine . . ." The poem ends not with a conclusion but with a trailing ellipsis and an act of waiting. She does not explain who will share the wine. The openness is the point.
What makes the poem significant is its quiet defence of a life usually overlooked. It suggests that attention, rather than adventure, is what makes experience large, and that mending linen and lighting lamps can be a form of devotion. In a world "confused by many worlds," it offers a small, steady alternative.