Poem at Thirty-Nine

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Poem at Thirty-Nine
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Themes of the poem

• Walkers 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 Rossettis
  Remember? It is about memory of the dead
• Money?

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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.

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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 didnt have
  earlier?
• Forgiveness of her dad?
• Something else? Perhaps she is leaving her youth
  behind at this age?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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?

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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.

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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?

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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.