Burchfield’s ‘Six O’Clock’

by

Frank X. Roberts

American painter Charles Burchfield’s (1893-1967) painting entitled “Six O'Clock” strongly evokes suppertime on a winter's evening in a working-class home during the Depression era. Through the window a passerby sees a common scene of a family preparing to eat its evening meal. Outside is a calm, cold night with snow piled high around and on the house. Burchfield's intention was to evoke emotion through the natural elements of landscape. My poem presents the same view, only in words. The poem is a sonnet in 14 rhyming lines with an acrostic built in (for the reader to find). It is, you see, really quite a seasonal poem for Christmas.  

Memories are lost or fading places,
Enclosed within their chipped and golden frames,
Mixing in the mind their magic traces
Of conjured up emotions and old names.
Replete with these, Charles Burchfield’s “Six O’Clock,”
Its orange light spills warmth upon the snow;
Entrances where a once familiar knock
Stayed supper's happy noises, long ago.
On rigid paint expectant heads can't turn,
Felt are the friendly smiles we cannot see;
Help, mind and eye, the artist's hand to fix
Old kitchens where the bright coals always burn;
Make Burchfield's brush rekindle memory,
Ever keeping on the wall the clock at six.

 
Note: The painting is owned by the Everson Museum of Art (New York), and the copyright held by Burchfield Homestead Society of Ohio. Unfortunately, BiblioBuffet was not able to obtain permission to include the image, but Heritage Magazine used it as the cover on their Winter 1997 issue. We hope you find Frank Roberts' poem to be as exquisite as the original painting.
 

Frank's extensive career in teaching and librarianship began when he taught English in the U.S. From 1961 to 1963, as part of a Columbia University program called “Teachers for East Africa,” he taught English and American Literature in East Africa. There he met his wife, Dorothy. They returned to the U.S. where he simultaneously taught and finished two Masters’ degrees, in Education and in Librarianship. In 1968 they returned to England where Frank taught Library Studies, and adopted Hodge, a cat who later traveled around the world with them. In 1972, Frank was “seconded” for two years to teach at Makerere University in Uganda, East Africa, but left reluctantly after one year when the tyranny of Idi Amin became intolerable. From there it was back to England, then Australia and finally  to America in 1979, to Buffalo where Frank earned his doctorate. Later they moved to Colorado, where he was Professor of Library Studies at the University of Northern Colorado until retiring in 1997. Frank published James A. Michener: A Checklist of his Work with a Selected Annotated Bibliography (Greenwood Press) in 1995. He has written on bookmarks, specifically on medieval bookmarks, his special area of interest. A poet by avocation, he writes eclectically but traditionally. Frank and Dorothy live in Colorado with two very senior citizens of the feline persuasion. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it