What Catherine said about "their" children. Just changing "their" to "the" would fix Sam's problem, I think.
I like the sonnet very much, but there are spots where I find the diction seems a little pumped with air, though so skillfully one might not even notice at first. In L3, for example, "and well" is really just there to fill out the line, I think, since the whole point would have been conveyed by "alive again." Is "and well" suggesting that all of them, without exception, were unwell for some time before they died?
In L4, I can't help feeling that the tense has been mangled a bit to end on "begun," since it would be more natural to keep to the present tense with which the entire scene is being described, i.e., to say, "when lighter talk begins."
I'm with Sam on "fragile hands." We get it. She's 90. We don't expect her hands to be made of iron. In the next line, the same sort of strain that gave us "begun" instead of begin gives us the candles being blown "away," as well as "each" and "candle flame" instead of just "candle."
Unlike Sam, I do like "manifold commands."
I may be the only one here to quibble slightly with the last line. I find "strength" to be a solid but insufficiently good word to carry so much of the weight of the poem's conclusion. It's not a poet's precisely chosen word, but something anyone might say. I also find the line a bit imprecise in terms of who is speaking about "strength". Is the speaker saying that the woman herself is claiming to have been strong? Or is the speaker giving her own gloss and summary of the woman's conversation, telling us her own conclusion that what the woman said demonstrated strength?
In any event, what does the last line really add? The poem tells us in L13 that she immediately returns to the subject of her dead frieze of men the moment the guests all leave, and we know quite well that the men are dead and presumably were buried, and we know quite well that these were tragedies in the woman's life, so we already know that the woman must have been very strong to endure what she has endured and to keep moving forward. Why do we need the last line to hit us over the head and to make explicit what was already perfectly clear? I'd prefer a last line that gives us another telling physical detail, perhaps. Maybe show us where she now puts her hands. Or reveal to us who the speaker is (now that the guests have gone away) -- another man perhaps? I don't have a specific suggestion, just the general idea that L14 isn't strong enough to close on since everything it says has been well established in the poem before then.
Comma at the end of L2.
Strong sonnet.
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