Poem at Thirty-Nine

Alice Walker

“How i miss my father.

I wish he had not been
so tired
when i was
born”

(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright)

VOCABULARY

Deposit slips - ​a written piece of paper that is used when depositing money into the
bank
Checks - ​‘cheques’ in English spelling, a signed piece of paper that is used to
withdraw or transfer money from one bank account to another - they used to be used
as a form of payment
Yoga - ​a form of spiritual and physical exercise that centres around breathing and
body movement
Meditation - ​part of yoga practise, or a more general spiritual practise which centres
around focusing or clearing the mind and letting go of stress, worries or fear
Voluptuous - l​ uxurious and pleasurable, also often used to describe feminine form

STORY/SUMMARY

Stanza 1: The poet says she misses her father and wishes he’d been less tired when
she was born - perhaps a metaphor to suggest that he was always working or had no
time and energy for her.

Stanza 2: When she writes money deposit slips and cheques (checks), she thinks about
him and how he taught her to manage finances. She saw keeping track of and
managing money as a way to escape from her parents’ lifestyle and started saving very
early, even in high school.

Stanza 3: He also taught her to tell the truth, even though sometimes she may have
gotten in trouble for it, and sometimes it may have hurt him to know the truth.

Stanza 4: She remembers him cooking, and how this was an almost spiritual act for
him. He enjoyed the process of cooking and the act of sharing food.

Stanza 5: The poet now thinks about herself, and how she copies her father’s behaviour
(as well as his appearance). She cooks in a similar way, using the process of cooking to
switch off and enjoy herself, equally she enjoys the process of feeding others.

Stanza 6: Finally, she realises he would have been proud of the woman that she’s
become. Her behaviour is similar to his own, both domestic and creative.

SPEAKER/VOICE

The speaker in the poem is Walker herself, drawing on her own personal experiences
and memories to explore how we connect to family and tradition, and how our own
lives are influenced daily by our upbringing. There is a ​nostalgic tone ​to the poem as
Walker reflects on her relationship with her father happily, but with a tinge of
sadness as we realise he is no longer around.

LANGUAGE

Antithesis - ​‘dancing/in a yoga meditation’ seems like a contradictory phrase and is

perhaps an ​oxymoron. ​Dancing usually connotes swift movement, whereas the act of
meditation requires calm and stillness. However, we can think more metaphorically
about these contrasts in order to shed light on Walker’s intentions - she is trying to
convey the way in which her father was graceful and skilful at cooking and regarded it
as a form of artistic and creative expression, like a dancer’s approach to their dance.
Equally, when he was cooking he cleared his mind from thoughts and worries, and was
able to find a place of calm and stillness during the act of preparing food - we could say
that it placed him into a ‘meditative state’ of mind, which was part of the enjoyment of
it. Both dance and meditation have further connotations of spirituality, suggesting that
the man was also sensitive and engaged with his higher self - the dancing in particular
may echo the later tribal images that Walker lists in the final lines: ‘cooking, writing,
chopping wood,/staring into the fire’.

The ​adjective ​‘voluptuous’ is an unusual word choice as it has feminine connotations of

beauty and curvaceousness. However, the poet uses it here to describe ‘the sharing of
food’, demonstrating how a domestic act of creating and sharing meals brought
pleasure and luxury into her father’s life. Though we associate cooking stereotypically
as a traditionally female act, we can see that the poet’s father was non traditional in this
sense, as he derived pleasure from cooking and the act of socially sharing meals. We
could interpret this as a way to honour his feminine aspects, which are contrasted with
the more masculine, practical attitude to finance and saving in the previous paragraph -
the poet too, despite being female, embodies both these aspects; like her father she
enjoyed and took seriously the act of looking after her money, and she also enjoys
communal cooking.

Repetition - ​The opening line ‘How I miss my father’ is repeated halfway through the
poem (with an added ​exclamation mark for structural emphasis). This shows that the
idea is important to her, and perhaps the underlying message of the poem - she wants
to cherish her father’s memory and remind herself of the significant impact he had on
her life.

Visual Imagery - ​There are several strong images in the poem, particularly centred
around cooking - ‘tossing this or that into the pot’, ‘chopping wood’, ‘writing’ - mostly
rural and domestic images to reflect Walker’s upbringing and her continued domestic
traditions.

FORM/STRUCTURE

The title - ​this refers to the age Walker was when she wrote the poem. Thirty nine
can be interpreted by many as signifying the transition into middle age - for many
people, it represents becoming a mother or father and adopting a more parental
approach to life, which is perhaps why Walker chooses to reflect on her own father
when she reaches this age.

Volta - ‘Now I look and cook just like him:’ the colon at the end of this line creates a
dramatic pause, making it stand out and showing its importance - this signifies the
turning point between reflecting on the poet’s father and then thinking about herself
and her similarities to him.

Free Verse - ​The poem is written in a free verse structure, with variable stanza and
line length and no set metre or rhyme scheme. This imitates the way in which the
poet’s memories of her father come flooding back to her, and gives the poem a
natural, rambling shape as it progresses through different ideas. The overall effect
feels as though Walker is allowing the thoughts and memories to come back and
grow naturally in her mind.

Elegy ​- though the title suggests that the poem is about herself and her own ageing
process, we could also interpret it as an elegy - a way to commemorate the dead by
honouring Walker’s father and his continued influence on her daily life. Though he is
gone, his impact on her is everlasting and she finds herself both growing to ‘look...
just like him’ and copying his actions and routines.

Short lines - ‘I wish he had not been / so tired /when I was/ born’ - the lines in the
first stanza are particularly short, which may communicate a sense of disconnection
or anger on her part, as she feels that in a way a perfect father should have been
there for her at birth. The short lines also perhaps convey the sense that the memory
of Walker’s father is at first undeveloped, she starts by thinking of a negative - his
absence or lack of engagement when she was born, later the lines become longer as
she recalls more of his important influences in her life as she grew older, showing
that she grew equally to appreciate him and his influences as she matured.

ATTITUDES

● The ageing process is enjoyable - ​The age ‘Thirty-Nine’ signifies a transitional

point between youth and middle age. Walker does not seem concerned about
reaching this age or leaving her youth behind, instead she admires ‘the woman
[she’s] become’ and realises that her father, too, would have been proud of her.

● Generations sometimes find it difficult to fully understand or relate to one

another - ​Walker starts with a negative observation of her father: ‘I wish he had
not been / so tired /when I was/ born’, which makes us initially interpret him as
an absent or disinterested figure, who either worked too hard and avoided his
family duties or who was awkward and unsure of how to engage with little
 children. The father is far more sympathetically portrayed later on, when Walker
is older he teaches her a lot and she learns to appreciate his positive qualities -
as well as finding that she copies them in her own life.

● We start to copy our parents’ behaviour as we mature - ‘​Now I look and cook
just like him’ - Walker observes that she has become increasingly like her father
as she’s matured, almost subconsciously or genetically in a way that she didn’t
deliberately intend. She also observes that in some ways, modern humans are
similar to our primitive ancestors - ‘cooking, writing, chopping wood, / staring
into the fire.’ Some rituals are passed down through time across generations.

● Generosity and Kindness are positive parental traits - ​Walker particularly

admires the nurturing and teaching qualities of her father - the way in which he
taught her how to manage ‘deposit slips’ and ‘checks’ to keep track of her
finances, and the way he encouraged her to tell the truth - the line ‘telling the
truth ‘/did not always mean/ a beating’ suggests that her father valued honesty
and encouraged this in her, and that he knew how to discipline moderately - it
may or may not suggest that he did beat her sometimes, but if this is the case
then we should interpret it with sensitivity of different cultural norms, when
Walker was a child it was a common form of discipline so it doesn’t necessarily
mean that the father was cruel or liked beat her, more that it was just normal to
do so at that time.

CONTEXT

● Stream of consciousness - ​the poem draws on the Modernist tradition of

‘stream of consciousness’, a type of writing that seeks to capture the movement
of memory and thought processes by trying to use a natural fluid description of
thoughts, rather than a rigid structure.

● Walker was born in 1944 in a rural town in Georgia, USA. Her parents were
poor, her father was a sharecropper (a type of farmer) and her mother worked as
a maid and seamstress to support her eight children. She was the youngest
child.

● Walker was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, a
prestigious award for Literature. A lot of her work explores African American
history and social structures.
 THEMES

Family
Daily activities
Parenting
Ageing / Maturity
Primal rituals
Nourishment (Spiritual and Physical)

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