For most of the poem, the speaker and his
daughter maintain a solid relationship, given the
circumstances. He recalls pleasant activities that
they have shared in together, like planting her
garden, going out to neighbors’ homes for Hal-
loween, helping an injured bird, and going
through the wildlife museum with her stepsister.
Their relationship throughout these activities is,
however, strained by their growing unfamiliarity
with one another.
The greatest strain on their relationship
comes from a disagreement that is almost trivial
in nature. At the end of section 5, the speaker
recalls how, during the Halloween visit, his
daughter refused to eat her dinner. Not willing
to let her flaunt the law of his household, he left
her uneaten food in her room for days, which
created resentment in her, so that they parted at
the end of the trip angry at one another. This
fight eventually settles itself by her next visit, but
the speaker nonetheless agonizes over the emo-
tional distance that has grown between himself
and his daughter. Looking back, he seems to
understand that his response to his daughter’s
attitude was as much a cause of the problem as
her attitude itself; in being separated from her,
meanwhile raising a stepdaughter who was pre-
sumably already more mature when he arrived,
he has missed out on the opportunity to develop
his sense of fatherhood gradually, and he is there-
fore bound to make mistakes along the way.
Time and Its Passage
Snodgrass adds an element to the reader’s under-
standing of the relationship between father and
daughter by focusing on a particular time of her
youth. Specifically, he follows how their rela-
tionship progresses in relation to the progression
of the seasons. In doing this, he juxtaposes the
natural measurement of time with the unnatural
changes that occurred in his and his daughter’s
emotional lives as their family came apart. Mov-
ing from winter at the beginning to springtime at
the end, the poem never talks about any events in
the speaker’s life without telling readers what
time of year it was when they occurred.
Time is of course an important part of this
relationshipforseveral reasons.The mostobvious
one relates to the father’s sense of the child grow-
ing up quickly. In one section she is a newborn,
and then almost immediately they are playing
together in the yard, and then she has become
rebellious, and her father seems to be caught
unprepared for each new development. This is
true of many relationships between parents and
children, but it is especially true of the estranged
circumstances described in this poem. After the
breakup of their family, their time is not continu-
ous together. They see each other for specific
lengths of time that occur irregularly, and they
have to make the best of that. While the changing
seasons will be roughly the same each year, each
meeting betweenfatherand daughterdrawsatten-
tion to the differences that time has brought.Shame and Remorse
There is a sense of shame and remorse in
‘‘Heart’s Needle,’’ as the speaker comes just
short of apologizing to his daughter for the cir-
cumstances that made their lives more difficult
than they might otherwise have been. The whole
poem takes the form of an explanation, such that
his daughter can, at some time in the future, see
how his behavior was at least well-intentioned.
The complexity of their social situation is laid
out in the first section, where Snodgrass com-
pares his first thoughts about fatherhood to the
sense a farmer has before his fields have grown,
to establish how his daughter’s birth filled him
with anticipation; the ominous imagery of a fro-
zen, snow-covered field lets readers feel the sad-
ness that lies behind that anticipation. The poem
goes on to chronicle missteps that the father took
in his relationship with his daughter, including
pulling her arm too hard when she was an infant
and allowing himself to be distracted from her by
his new family. Going into the poem’s final sec-
tion, it seems that he does not think much of
himself as a father. In the end, however, the
relationship between father and daughter rights
itself through no particular effort of his own,
much to his relief.Style
Varying Rhyme Scheme
Snodgrass gives this poem a comforting sense of
familiarity by using a strong, recognizable rhyme
scheme. While using rhyming patterns that are
easily recognized, though, he also changes the
rhyming patterns frequently, such that the struc-
ture of the poem always feels new. For instance,
the first section follows anabbapattern, with the
words at the ends of the first and fourth line
rhyming and the words at the ends of the secondHeart’s Needle