Poem at Thirty-Nine Flashcards
Form
- Free verse
- Makes it seem like a free and uncontrolled flow of memory
- Highlights how irregular and fluctuating her emotional state is when recalling these memories
- The unequal stanzaic structure shows the differing emotions she feels regarding different aspects of her father e.g. the good, the mundane, the bad
This means there is no set rhyme scheme, meter or stanzaic structure
Main themes
- Memory
- Loss
- Love
- Childhood
- Regret
Many personal pronouns: e.g. ‘I’ and ‘he’
Makes the memories personal and nostalgic for her
Lots of enjambment
Creates a sense of the memory being out of control though happy
Large and frequent variation in line length
- Shows her tumultuous experience in recalling these memories
- Somtimes she feels grief, other times joy
Title
- Suggests she is an adult
- This shows that she is recalling memories of her childhood with nostalgia
- It also shows the sporadic nature of this recollection and how it happened at a random time, highlighting how it is out of her control
‘How I miss my father’
- Anaphora (later in the poem)
- The repetition highlights the nostalgia she feels regarding her memories of him
‘I wish he had not been so tired’
This reflection shows he was working hard for her
‘when I was born’
- ‘born’ is a temporal marker and is end-stopped and focused
- This creates a more serious tone and shows that he has been caring for her for a very long time
‘deposit slips’, ‘checks’ and ‘bits of paper’
- Mundane, monetary items
- Shows the pragmatic advice her father gave, showing he truly cares for her
‘I think of him’
Shows how his advice and character truly had an impact on her as she thinks of him when doing things related to finances
‘I learned to see bits of paper as a way to escape the life he knew’
- Shows the adversity he faced but how he is trying to ensure she never has to face it through a metaphorical ‘escape’
- Solidifies her respect and love for him, and how his advice was truly useful and she followed it
‘and even in high school had a savings account’
Proves that she did in heed the advice of her father, showing her respect for him
‘he taught me that telling the truth’
- Alliteration
- Shows the importance of the advice her father gave her in this regard
‘did not always mean a beating’
- A beating could be a metaphor for the conseuqnces in life
- Shows how he was stressing the importance of honesty but also being honest himself by saying some consequences are inevitable
You could read that he himself was authoratarian and beat her, showing he had two sides to his character
‘though many of my truths must have grieved him before the end’
- Personification of ‘truths’
- Shows how she regrets causing him pain, highlighting her love for him
- ‘Before the end’ is a euphemism showing her grief and difficulty in dealing with his death
‘How I miss my father!’
- Anaphora, but with an exclamation mark
- This highlights her increasing emotion as more memories of her father come out
- However, it also indicates a volta from a more mundane and then serious tone of the last two stanzas to a happier and more passionate one
‘He cooked like a person dancing in a yoga meditation’
- Simile
- Comparison to dancing how natural cooking came to him and how he was happy doing it
- Cooking and food may be symbolic of his conviviality, friendliness and general good will which Walker loves and respects him for having
‘and craved the voluptuous sharing of good food’
- Tones of sensual pleasure, but also his love (‘craving’) for charity
- Highlights his magnanimity and how he lived to gratify others which she loves and respects him for doing
‘Now I look and cook just like him’
- Assonance
- Highlights the similarity between what he was like and what she has become
‘my brain light; tossing this and that into the pot;’
- The metaphor of her brain being light shows how happy she is doing this
- The lack of specificity in the words ‘tossing this and that’ shows how he is doing it for the sake of doing it because she is happy doing it
- This means that she is copying her fathers actions because she loved the person he was so she wishes to become somebody similar
‘seasoning none of my life the same way twice;’
- Metaphor
- Shows the variety she enjoys in her life now because he recognises how many good things there are in life (maybe due to her father)
- This shows she has ‘escaped the life her father knew’, mostly thanks to his advice
‘happy to feed whoever strays my way’
- Metaphor for her being happy to help anyone
- This shows how she is now analogous to her father meaning she respected him when he was alive and is now striving to be like him
‘He would have grown to admire the woman I’ve become:’
- Confirms the fact that she has become similar to him or has followed his advice
- This means she misses him and respected the person he was as she is now striving to become like him
‘cooking, writing, chopping wood, staring into the fire.’
- Asyndetic list
- It gives examples of all the things she is doing to be similar to her father or that would please him
- The asyndetic list makes it seem endless, showing the extent of how she is striving to be like him
