Poem at Thirty-Nine

1. Poem at Thirty-Nine

2. Themes of the poem • Walker’s relationship with her father. • Semi-autobiographical piece about love between parent and children. • About a different kind of Love to Sonnet 116 – but some links… • Perhaps we could also link it to Rossetti’s ‘Remember’? It is about memory of the dead… • Money?

3. Think… • What do you like or love most about your parents? • What are their failings? Make a mental list. • How much are you like them? Make a mental list of similarities.

4. Think 2… What about the title… Poem at Thirty-Nine. What does it suggest about the speaker? • Experience of life? • Understanding of herself or others? • Appreciation of her parents she didn’t have earlier? • Forgiveness of her dad? • Something else? Perhaps she is leaving her youth behind at this age?

5. Stanza 1 How I miss my father. I wish he had not been so tired when I was born. • The speaker establishes a mood of regret – double regret in fact… • Double because she misses him NOW, but also missed his love as a child?

6. Stanza 2 Writing deposit slips and checks I think of him. He taught me how. This is the form, he must have said: the way it is done. • She starts to think about him and relates a specific experience they had together. • She introduces the theme of money. • Why do you think money was so important to them? • Does her father sound nice or strict?

7. More Stanza 2 I learned to see bits of paper as a way to escape the life he knew and even in high school had a savings account. • She explains that he influenced her from an early age. • But was it a good influence? Look at the word ‘escape’ – why would the speaker want to escape? What from?

8. Stanza 3 He taught me that telling the truth did not always mean a beating; though many of my truths must have grieved him before the end. • A hint of danger enters with the use of the words ‘always’ and ‘beating’. • There is a hint that the speakers ‘truths’ hurt her father – what could they have been? • Notice the semantic fields of ‘truth’ and ‘death’ here. • Is there a connection between the two things?

9. Stanza 4 How I miss my father! He cooked like a person dancing in a yoga meditation and craved the voluptuous sharing of good food. • She starts to think about the positive qualities of her father. • Notice the gentle artistic imagery. This is juxtaposed with the violence of the previous stanza. Why? • So overall what was her father like?

10. Stanza 5 Now I look and cook just like him: my brain light; tossing this and that into the pot; seasoning none of my life the same way twice; happy to feed whoever strays my way. • The speaker sees she is like her father (good or bad?) but suggests that has made her life quite random. • Maybe when she does something that he did, such as cook she wonders about their relationship.

11. Stanza 6 He would have grown to admire the woman I've become: cooking, writing, chopping wood, staring into the fire. • She thinks that there might have been a slow process of relationship building. • BUT maybe it would only have been because she mirrored his manly qualities? • What does the symbol of the fire represent at the end?

12. Some background on Walker • She was divorced before she was forty and some critics think that the poem is partially thinking about the need for a father for her daughter. • Her father was a sharecropper and dairy farmer who earned a very small amount of money every year. • Walker is a political liberal and wishes to emphasise the power and achievements of women.