Poem at Thirty-Nine

• This is a semi autobiographical narrative poem about the poet’s relationship with her father, who was a sharecropper

• The poem is about a women’s relationship with her dad

• It has a nostalgic mood and is about memory and loss

• The poem looks back at fond memories – it remembers the good things

• The style of the poem is conversational• The poem sounds like she is talking to someone

• The use of enjambment (how the sentences continue on to the next line) slows down the pace for the reader and makes the poem seem more like a meditation about loss

• It is written in free verse and each stanza deals with a different aspect of her narrative

• Each stanza tells a different part of her story about her dad

• 1. This establishes a mood of regret

• 2. The narrator describes how she learned practical aspects of dealing with money from her father and also that she didn’t want the life of poverty that he experienced.

• 3. She uses the words ‘did not always’ which suggest that sometimes her father did beat her when she told him something he didn’t want to hear. The word ‘grieved’ is fitting because she means when something upset her father, but it is also suitable because her father has died.

• 4. The anger and beatings of the previous stanza are juxtaposed with mentions of cooking/yoga/meditation.

• 5. Metaphorical language is used to explain the ways in which she feels she is like her father, ‘seasoning none of my life twice’.

• 6. She feels her father would have been proud of who she has become, ‘cooking, writing, chopping wood’. She lists practical abilities she has, but also that she is reflective and able to think about life ‘staring into the fire’.