Stanley Kunitz’s poem “The Portrait” explores how loss, abandonment, and childhood incidents last with people long after they have passed.
As much as this poem is about the speaker, it is also about his mother. He begins the poem introducing the fact that his father committed suicide in a public park when his mother was still pregnant with him. He does this with very plain language, not using any similes or metaphors, to set up the reality of his childhood. It was just a fact to him, nothing more or less, but he became curious as children tend to when something is off limits to them.
The mother obviously feels very abandoned at this time, left to raise a child all by herself. She is angry at him for leaving and locks everything about him up, not even speaking his name. By not addressing the loss, grief, and anger she has, she ends up lashing out and hurting her child for being curious about his own father. This stays with him long after it is done, much like his mother’s grief and anger stays with her. And, much like her, he probably never addressed how this affected him out loud, until he wrote the poem.