Most poems about childhood boredom treat it as something safely over. Thomas McAfee's "Sunday" does the opposite: the speaker hated Sunday as a child, and he hates it still, now that his hair has gone gray. The poem is about how one dreaded day outlasts every attempt to escape it, and about how it has come to stand for something larger than a day of the week: the fear of aging, of loneliness, of a life that has shrunk to a few brown, repeating hours.
The first stanza sets the trap with a catalogue. Sunday arrives as a sequence of rituals: the preacher's "pitch," the late breakfast, the comic strips that seem to "bleed," the politicians "licking / Their lips before carving up the world some more." The language is sharp for a poem about domestic routine. Even the dinner is described with a gluttonous, faintly sickly relish: "Mahogany-red ripe ham (pineapple crusted)," oysters, asparagus, "effete dessert." Everything is too rich and too much, which fits the word McAfee uses for the day itself, "maudlin-rich." The "groggy nap," the drive, and the girl-orchestra on the "big box-shaped radio" complete a picture of a day that is comfortable, respectable, and suffocating. Note the clumsy, blocky phrase "big box-shaped radio": the rhythm lurches as if the poem itself were bored.
The second section turns from the day's rituals to the speaker's attempts to defeat them. He smokes "three packs of cigarettes," reads "trash," sits through a film, doesn't shave, doesn't dress. The simile he reaches for is telling: he behaves "like a bored, befuddled child running to crime." The adult has become the child again, and nothing has changed, since Sunday remains "the same devout, dyspeptic time." That pairing is the poem's cleverest stroke, because "devout" and "dyspeptic" describe both the religious solemnity of the day and its effect on the stomach. Piety and indigestion become one thing. The day's colors, we are told, "reduce to brown," a flat, drab single note after the red ham. The speaker admits he has grown "eccentric," ignoring knocks at the door and having removed his phone two years ago. The line "silence is good for my ears" is meant as a defense, but it reads as a confession of isolation.
The poem's formal habits support this mood. McAfee leans heavily on rhyme, but not in a tidy pattern: "grow" and "so," "noon" and "soon," "dusted" and "crusted," "reach" and "peach," "fed" and "bred." Many of the rhymes arrive in couplets, often with a slightly comic thud, and the line lengths wander. The effect is of a voice that is both formal and rumpled, like a man who has not dressed. The meter is loose and conversational, and the rhymes keep landing a little too neatly, the way Sunday's routines do.
The turn comes with the allusion to Tantalus, the figure from Greek myth condemned to stand in water he cannot drink and beneath fruit he cannot reach. McAfee makes it homely: a "fuzzy peach," a branch that swings up, water that "recedes when I bow my head." Sunday becomes a punishment of perpetual near-satisfaction. From here the poem exposes its real fear. It is not really Sunday he dreads but "false teeth" and "a grizzled mixed-up head," the "merciless offense" of the shaving mirror. His closing statement, "I wouldn't be nineteen in any sense," is a grim, surprising twist: he does not want his youth back either, since youth was where the dread began.
The final tercet is the poem's most startling image. Sunday has "multiplied," fed on "sexing pills," and bred "six ugly children," each one dreaded. It is an odd, almost grotesque joke, and it works because it turns a single day into a family of days, a week's worth of dread, with Sunday as the ugly parent of them all. The poem ends not with consolation but with a flat, repeated "dread."
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to be noble about its subject. It is petty, specific, and funny, and out of those small irritations it builds a convincing portrait of a mind dreading time itself.