Poem At 39

Question 1

Who wrote the poem

Answer 1

Alice walker

Question 2

How is the poem written and what does it suggest

Answer 2

• short lines create a staccato effect, contrasting the flowing feel to the poem that the free verse might suggest
• The staccato suggest that the poet is emotional and determined to deal with a difficult subject in a precise way
• It is structured around the refrain, ‘How I miss my father’ which is repeated 2x
• the 2nd time it’s mentioned, it has ! Which suggests she becomes more emotional as the poem goes on
• the expression is blunt and quite colloquial, gives poem a chatty feel, she confides in the reader about her grief, makes us connect with her almost immediately (it’ll fuel the anecdotes she’ll share later in the poem with more emotion as a result)

Question 3

The 2nd stanza

Answer 3

• 1st about her father’s tiredness, 2nd about why
• It’s dominated by descriptions of money. She explains that she is prompted to ‘think of’ her father when she is ‘writing deposit slips and checks’.
• This is how money enters and withdrawn from banks. It surprises reader that she remembers her father in such a business way, perhaps he wasn’t very affectionate towards her as a child
• This underlines the impression of financial struggle and that her father was too preoccupied with his job to spend time with her
• This is sad because as the reader we get the impression that Walker might’ve had a neglected childhood and we feel a sense of tragedy for her. Even though her father might’ve neglected her in her childhood, she still grieves and misses her father

Question 4

3rd stanza

Answer 4

• ‘He taught me that telling the truth did not always mean a beating’
• double edged meaning:
• suggests father as fair and lenient- if she was honest about mistakes her father wouldn’t punish her so harshly
• ‘beating’ harsh word; in past child abuse common
• maybe hinting at the subject of her novel, the violent and abusive lives of poor black Americans
• Also have a political implication; police brutality towards Black Americans.
• Her father taught her to be honest despite the cruelty of society in which she lived. This would then be a lesson in political defiance

Question 5

Ending if 3rd stanza

Answer 5

• ‘many of my truths must have grieved him before the end’
• her honest expressions of her beliefs caused her father great sorrow
• ‘grieved’ usually means to feel bereavement for a loved one. The bereavement is a metaphor
• perhaps her father felt he’d lost her to a lifestyle he couldn’t comprehend or approve of. Which is Ironic because her father taught her to be fearlessly honest, but this honesty was a source of unhappiness for him.
• Walker’s novel ‘The Color Purple’ describes violent and abusive black men, suggesting them to be as cruel to each other as white people
• Thus walker coming to terms with the fact her father taught her well, but he way she expressed his teachings might’ve hurt him, and for that she is sorry

Question 6

Final Stanza

Answer 6

• She moves beyond the terrible feelings of loss and bereavement, now she has convinced herself that although she lived her life differently from her father, she is still like him
• She writes ‘He would have grown to admire the woman I’ve become’
• she acknowledged her father might not have immediately liked all of her actions, but that he would’ve ‘grown’ or found a way to appreciate her
• The final descriptions are of her, ‘cooking, writing, chopping wood, staring into the fire’ . We already know about her cooking and writing, but the ‘chopping wood’ shows us that she is physically strong and able to do stereotypically-male tasks
• Finally the image of her ‘staring into the fire’ shows that she is a woman who can provide for herself both physically and spiritually; she chops wood for her own fire, and she is able to stare at it in contemplation because she’s also a women of great ideas