No. 10 · Alice Walker
Poem at Thirty-Nine
At thirty-nine, Walker looks back at her dead father: the man who taught her about money, truth-telling and cooking, and whom she has grown to resemble. Grief runs through the poem, but its tone is loving rather than sad, because missing him and becoming like him turn out to be the same thing.
The poem at a glance
The poem moves through small, everyday memories: a father ‘so tired’ when the speaker was born, lessons with deposit slips and cheques, the discovery that honesty could be dangerous, and his generous, expressive cooking. In the final stanza the past tense gives way to the present: she now looks and cooks just like him, and imagines he ‘would have grown to admire’ the woman she has become. Nothing dramatic happens; the whole tribute is built from ordinary domestic life, which is exactly the point.
Methods that matter
Form: free verse and the lowercase ‘i’
The poem is free verse in short, heavily enjambed lines, many of them nearly monosyllabic, so the memories arrive in small pieces, the way memory actually works. Walker writes her childhood self with a lowercase ‘i’: a small self beside a large, tired father, and perhaps a self not yet fully formed. The lack of formal pattern also suits a relationship that was never neat or resolved.
Repetition that intensifies
‘How I miss my father’ opens the poem with a full stop and returns later with an exclamation mark. The words are identical; the feeling has grown. That single change of punctuation is one of the best small AO2 points in the anthology: the poem does not just state grief, it shows grief gathering force as the memories accumulate. The semi-colon after ‘a beating’ works the same way, a pause that lets a dark fact sit before the poem moves on.
Mirroring: becoming the father
The last stanza is dominated by present participles (cooking, tossing, seasoning, dancing), verbs of ongoing life set against the finished past. The near-rhyme of ‘look’ and ‘cook’ makes the resemblance audible. The tribute is not a gravestone but an imitation: the father survives in his daughter’s habits, and admiration flows both ways across death.
Key quotations
| Quotation | Method | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| ‘How I miss my father.’ | Repetition, punctuation shift | Returns with an exclamation mark: identical words, intensified grief, a structure of feeling rising. |
| ‘telling the truth / did not always mean / a beating’ | Enjambment, understatement | The line breaks make the reader wait for the shock: honesty in this childhood carried real risk. |
| ‘Now I look and cook just like him’ | Internal rhyme, tense shift | Past becomes present: resemblance is the poem’s answer to loss, and the rhyme makes it sound settled. |
| ‘the woman I’ve become’ | Ending, imagined perspective | She judges herself through his imagined eyes: pride and mourning held in one quiet phrase. |
Compare it with…
Half-past Two (the set pairing): both find huge significance in everyday events, a cooking lesson here, a detention there, seen through a child’s eyes. Piano: both adults are pulled back to a parent by memory, but Walker’s return is willed and consoling where Lawrence’s is involuntary and humiliating. Do not go gentle: two children of dying or dead fathers, one raging against the loss, one making peace with it.
Think it through
- Is this a sad poem? What evidence is there that Walker is happy in her father’s memory?
- The mother is never mentioned. What does her absence suggest about the poem’s focus?
- Why end with cooking, of all the father’s lessons? What does food allow the poem to say that money and truth-telling do not?
Towards the exam
Practice question: Compare the ways the writers present the significance of everyday events in Poem at Thirty-Nine and Half-past Two. Plan three integrated comparison points (perspective, form, how the ordinary becomes extraordinary), write for forty minutes, then take it to the marking desk.