Most poems about childhood memory reach for something soft: a lullaby, a garden, a warm kitchen. Thomas McAfee's "At Table . . ." gives us a list of table manners instead, and then shows, in its last six lines, what a list like that leaves behind in a person. The poem is about inheritance of a quiet kind: not money or land, but a conscience installed by repetition.
The first fourteen lines look like a sonnet in length, though they run in rhymed couplets rather than any traditional sonnet scheme, and the effect is of a lesson drilled into a child. Feet flat, legs uncrossed, napkin spread "first thing." The rhymes are cheerfully blunt: "across" and "loss," "blessing" and "stressing," "lot" and "got." They sound like the jingles adults use to make commands stick. Notice, too, how the sentences keep breaking across line-ends. "If something's spilled, ignore / It" drops the pronoun onto the next line, so that the rhyme-word "ignore" lands with a small thud, like a door closing. The speaker is not giving us elegant verse; she is giving us instructions at the speed of speech.
What makes this voice so alive is how much it wanders. A pure rulebook would stay on manners. Instead the advice drifts into anecdote ("Why once I couldn't eat / An oyster raw, and now—what a treat!") and into small family politics. The uncle's "long blessing" must be endured without fidgeting, and the mother cannot resist adding that he "always stress[es] / You to God," then smoothing it over: you should be glad so many relatives "care a lot." That slightly awkward pivot from annoyance to gratitude is very true to how parents talk, justifying one rule by appeal to another. The poem hears all this without comment.
The turn in the final couplet of the first section is the most quietly clever moment. "This is how a gentleman should act. / It's manners now but later will be tact." Here the mother stops listing and states a theory: behaviour practised mechanically at nine becomes sensitivity to other people at thirty. Table manners, she suggests, are a rehearsal for kindness. It is a generous idea, and the rhyme of "act" and "tact" seals it neatly.
Then the poem changes gear. "So spoke my Mother, many and many a time" shifts into the adult speaker's voice and a looser, more broken rhythm. He tells us she spoke "adultly, only not with rhyme," which is a sly admission: the couplets we just read were his reconstruction, the rhyme his own addition, the memory shaped into verse by the man he became. That honesty matters. The poem doesn't pretend to be a transcript.
The ending is where the real subject surfaces. He sits down to eat "guiltily," ignoring the napkin and letting his "truant feet" do as they please, and yet the guilt arrives anyway. The word "truant" is well chosen: it treats his feet like schoolchildren skipping class, as though his body still answers to a schoolroom authority. The last line, "What was sin and, where the comma should go," pairs two things that seem unrelated, moral law and punctuation, and lets them stand side by side as equal pieces of knowledge absorbed in childhood. The clumsy, slightly ungrammatical phrasing feels deliberate, as if the sentence itself has lost its footing.
The poem's significance lies in that final comparison. Whether or not he obeys his mother now, her rules have become part of how he thinks, as automatic as grammar. McAfee suggests that upbringing works less by persuasion than by sheer repetition, and that rebellion in adulthood does not erase it, only makes room for guilt. The humour keeps the poem from sentimentality, but the feeling underneath is real: a son, alone at his meal, still hearing a voice he cannot quite switch off.