Poem at Thirty – Nine – Alice Walker

     POEM AT THIRTY - NINE ALICE WALKER

Analysis:

Poem at 39 by Alice Walker is a short free verse poem that is composed in a “stream of thought” style. Each line is short forcing the speaker a quick space. It is a first-person narrative what the speaker about her father.

Lines -: 1 – 5

The first stanza introduces the reader, the speaker's father, this unknown  parent and all the memories go around this parent is going to be the theme of poem. The poet begins by making clear that he deeply misses her father. “so tried” She (the poet) wishes that things has started out differently between them and that he had not been so put upon by life.

Lines 6 -11

She relates her father with money and the writing of   “deposit slips and checks”

This gives a hint that finances were among the seasons her father was “so tried” when she was born. As a young child she had seen him troubled with money matters. Additionally, her father was the one who taught her to handle her own paper finances. His experience with cheques and deposits slips were a skill that he would he be able to pass on. Not happy memory or joyous times.  

Lines 12- 19

As the speaker grew............, she understood the value frugality “as a way to escape”.  the father saved  to move on, to find somewhere better ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,but he could not do without financial support unlike others walkers father did not squander his money, he saved it from the beginning. 

Lines20 -26
her father taught an important fact of life telling him the truth, did not mean “a beating”. Even if a truth is hard to tell or hard for someone to hear doesn’t mean that it should not be told. She was growing up and becoming her own person, making mistakes and explaining them to her father, but these truths have “troubled” and “grieved” him. Father was hiding his stress over his daughter but she saw it.

Lines 27 – 33

Walker reminds the reader of how she misses her father. It is not about her growing up it is about who her father was and how she wants to make him proud.

In this stanzas she speaks on what he loved and what he enjoyed doing. His cooking was like art. He “danced” as he moved through the kitchen effortless and peacefully. His actions were like hose performed in “a yoga meditation” all completely thought out and intentional. Walker says that her father enjoyed the cooking. He “craved the sharing of copious amounts of ‘good food” with those around him.

Lines 30 -40

Now she describes what kind of an impact her father’s habit have had on her own life. She has taken all he taught now she looks just like him. She is similar to him and she is happy about it. Walker says that while she is cooking her” brain” “light” as she tosses to foods around and into the pots. She admired her father and does not live one day like another. She relates the metaphor of cooking and says that she does not season any of her life. She is “Happy to feed whoever strays my way”. This makes clear that walker is just as open hearted as her father was his “sharing of food”.

Lines 41-45

She reflects the past. She believes, from all that she knows about her father. This tells the reader two things. First, that she is proud of who she has become and gain pleasure from thinking her father would have been as well. Second that at some point in their lives he was not proud of her. He would have “grown” to admire her.

The last lines leave the reader with a calm and peaceful feeling. Walker sees her that she thinks of her father would admire her. She is proud her ability to cook and write and chop wood. The speaker has come to a place of peace in which she can stare in to the warmth of a fire and feel joy in her memories.

It is a narrative poem. Extremely personal Tone is informal. The poem is written by Walker when she was 39 years old and reminiscing on the times that she spent with her father. The poem uses the structure of enjambment and lengthy stanza and the theme of Death and nostalgia. Other devices are persona repetition and imagery.

Persona – Herself talking about memories of her father.

Enjambment – gives a great amount of focus to a certain word or phrase.  Single sentence is split into four different lines.    Ex -   I wish he had not been/so tried/when I was born”

                                             I learned to see/……

                                            He cooked of like a person/dancing/in a yoga

Repetition:  How miss my father

Imagery: used a couple times as personification and a metaphor.

Personification – though many of my truths

                              Truth is abstract object

                                It causes pain

A Metaphor -     seasoning none of life / the same way twice.

Themes -             Death and nostalgia

This poem is quite interesting it not only talks about the father; but also relating to Walker’s life by starting with her birth and ending with how she was when she wrote it.