1 / 12

Poem at Thirty-Nine

Poem at Thirty-Nine. 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…

royce
Download Presentation

Poem at Thirty-Nine

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  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.

More Related