Anthony Hecht's poem "The End of the Weekend", written in the first person, ostensibly describes the narrator's conflicted experience of sex with his girlfriend ("my girl") in his father's house. In combining sexual undertones, religious connotations and images of nature, Hecht underscores the narrator's self-consciousness and guilt about sexual intimacy.
After heading upstairs with his girlfriend, the narrator hears "an endless wind/ Whips against the headstones of the dead and wails/ In the trees for all who have and have not sinned", prompting him to lock the bedroom door even though "we are alone". The constant transitioning between language of sensuality and imagery of watchful and violent nature reflects the narrator's conflict between his physical desires and his spiritual self. He allows himself to be distracted during lovemaking by a noise upstairs, resulting in his encounter with "A great black presence beats its wings in wrath". From descriptions of mice skeletons and a grey fur mass in the creature's mouth, the "presence" is clearly an owl, yet it also represents a watchful, all-seeing, vengeful god-figure in the narrator's subconscious. In that moment, the narrator seems to identify with the mouse caught in the owl's beak, revealing his guilt at succumbing to physical desires; his perception of the owl's "wrath" implies an awareness of having sinned.
The poem adheres to an ABCBCA rhyme scheme -- the first two stanzas follow this form strictly, but the last two are increasingly loose in structure, mimicking the narrator's growing distraction.
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