High grade analysis of Poem at Thirty Nine

In this video, we cover:

• Context & The Significance of 39: How reaching adulthood provides the distance needed to understand a parent as an ordinary adult shaped by hardship.

• Stream of Consciousness & Enjambment: How the poem’s fluid structure mirrors an internal monologue, contrasted with the heavy pause of the end-stopped opening line ("How I miss my father.").

• Generational Exhaustion & Financial Duty: Unpacking the sadness in "I wish he had not been so tired when I was born," and how "deposit slips and checks" symbolize the heavy burden of providing for a family.

• Imperfect Memory & Reconstructing the Past: How modal verbs like "he must have said" reveal how we actively reconstruct our memories of loved ones from imagination and partial recollections.

• "Bits of Paper" as Escape: The juxtaposition between seemingly trivial paper and the profound act of escaping hardship, reflecting a parent's wish for their child to have a better life.

• Discipline vs. Clashing Truths: Exploring the strict, traditional moral lessons of honesty ("telling the truth did not always mean a beating") alongside the quiet sadness of "many of my truths must have grieved him".

• The Structural Volta: The exclamation mark in the repeated refrain "How I miss my father!" shifting the tone from subdued melancholy to joyful celebration of his spirit.

• Cooking as Meditation: Analysing the simile comparing his cooking to "a person dancing in a yoga meditation," balancing focused calm with joyful, generous hospitality.

• The Extended Cooking Metaphor: How her own carefree, improvisational approach in the kitchen ("brain light," "tossing this and that") reflects both her biological inheritance and her hard-won freedom.

• The Final List & Paternal Pride: Breaking down the closing catalogue—cooking, writing, chopping wood, staring into the fire—to show how self-sufficiency, creativity, and the ability to rest combine to earn her father's lasting admiration.

Timestamps

• 0:00 – The Significance of 39: Adulthood, Reflection, & Parent-Child Dynamics

• 1:55 – Stanza 1: The End-Stopped Opening, Stream of Consciousness, & Paternal Exhaustion

• 4:22 – Stanza 2: Deposit Slips, Checks, & Parental Financial Responsibility

• 6:22 – Imperfect Memory: "He Must Have Said" & Creating Images of the Past

• 8:45 – "Bits of Paper": Writing, Money, & Escaping Her Father's Life

• 10:56 – High School Savings Accounts & Early Financial Prudence

• 11:51 – Stanza 3: Discipline, Truth-Telling, & "Truths That Must Have Grieved Him"

• 15:45 – Stanza 4: The Volta, The Exclamation Mark, & A Shift to Personality

• 17:13 – Dancing in a Yoga Meditation: Focused Energy, Hospitality, & "Voluptuous Sharing"

• 20:39 – Stanza 5: "Now I Look and Cook Just Like Him" & Nature vs. Nurture

• 21:40 – The Extended Metaphor: Brain Light, Tossing This and That, & Variety of Life

• 24:40 – Stanza 6: "He Would Have Grown to Admire": Confidence & Resolution

• 25:34 – The Final List: Practicality, Creativity, Self-Sufficiency, & Staring into the Fire

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There are also study materials on the site that can help with this IGCSE:

• Fiction Technique Bank: An extensive revision toolkit outlining key linguistic and structural devices, complete with explanations and model examples to show you how to analyse writer's craft rather than just spotting techniques.

• Unlocking Shakespeare: A complete student guide packed with practical reading strategies, contextual breakdowns, and methods to decode Early Modern English without getting stuck in the language.

• Still I Rise Teaching PowerPoint: A fully resourced, line-by-line slide deck exploring form, structure, poetic devices, and historical context for focused study or revision.

• Poetry Technique Bank: A dedicated guide designed specifically to master poetic form, metre, rhyme schemes, and structural choices across both seen anthology and unseen poetry questions.

Lesson Transcript

0:00 – The Significance of 39: Adulthood, Reflection, & Parent-Child Dynamics

This is in many ways an autobiographical poem because the reason it's called "Poem at 39," Alice Walker wrote it when she was 39, and the father that she's talking about is her father. That being said, I don't think that means we can only view it through the lens of, you know, thinking about Alice Walker's life and how we see that reflected in the poem. Actually, on a much wider scale, this is about parent-child relationships and the way that our parents shape who we are and influence us and the relationships that we have with them. I do think there therefore is also uh themes of memory and grief and identity mixed in with this, but they're all inextricably tied into looking at parent-child relationships as well. So we'll go through all of that as we start going through the poem.

But I think the title: yes, 39 because she was 39, but also that age—I'm not going to say middle age, because I'm in my 30s and I'm just in complete denial and refuse to accept that your 30s can be seen as middle-aged! But it certainly symbolizes an age where you are officially an adult now. There there's no kidding yourself that you're young and down with the kids; you are a grown-up, and you have lived enough life to look back on it and actually have a better understanding of your parents, because you're able to see them as adults as well. As opposed to, I think often in parent-child relationships, the child can look up at their parent as a sort of idol, as, you know, as your parent, that that figure, that concept of the one who always knows what to do and keeps you safe, etc., etc., rather than necessarily just being an adult who perhaps has absolutely no idea what they're doing. And Alice Walker is now able to do that; she's able to have that reflection.

1:55 – Stanza 1: The End-Stopped Opening, Stream of Consciousness, & Paternal Exhaustion

What we see when we go to the first line of the poem is this immediate sad tone: "How I miss my father." I think the end-stopping is really important in creating that sad tone; it creates a heavy pause. Now this poem has a lot of enjambment in it that is about trying to make it feel like thoughts coming out slowly, like she's slowly thinking and reflecting on things, and so it has a very natural flow to it, like someone just sort of thinking out loud. And we would call this a stream of consciousness, because it's essentially like a sort of internal monologue. It doesn't have that overly crafted style of um someone thinking through everything and really planning out what they're saying. So I think that short sentence with the end-stopping makes it feel like that's her overarching feeling before all else: just that she misses him.

When she then says: "I wish he had not been so tired / when I was born." There's a couple of different things to pick out here. So first, the "I wish," creating a sort of tone of regret. And when we think about why there is regret, it's, you know, not regret for something she's done, cuz obviously she wasn't born yet; it's just, you know, wishing something could have been different between a parent and child. And telling us that he had been tired, what that alludes to is like the struggles that her father would have faced, the challenges he would have faced that have worn him down. And it represents the fact that our parents, you know, they had a whole life before we ever were in it, and his clearly hasn't been an easy life. And so that juxtaposition between him being tired—you know, he's lived a life and it's been tough—and her being born—she hasn't lived any life yet—widens the gap between them. They're not starting from an easy place, even though, you know, she hasn't done anything, she's just been born. There's already this challenge that she's entering into that I think that "I wish" suggests impacted their relationship. The tone of regret could be a regret of how the challenges her father had in life impacted their relationship.

4:22 – Stanza 2: Deposit Slips, Checks, & Parental Financial Responsibility

And the fact that, if we think about this stream of consciousness, the way that the uh enjambment runs on into the next stanza: "Writing deposit slips and checks / I think of him." Now I think that tiredness becomes linked with the deposit slips and checks, and of course what they represent essentially is they represent work and financial responsibility: going and making that money as parents need to do.

Now for those of you who are of a certain age, you might not even know what these things are. Don't worry, just quick explainer: back in the day when you did not have computers to do anything, if you wanted to put your money from your job in the bank, you needed to do it with paper; you needed a deposit slip. If you got paid money, you were paid it on a piece of paper called a check, and you deposited it. So don't stress too much about what is a deposit slip, what is a check; key point is they symbolize money, and in this case, him writing them is his responsibility to keep things paid for. He has bills to pay, and so on and so forth. So the fact that she remembers him because of that, it's like a key thing we remember about our parents is the responsibility that they held. And in some ways you could say, like, our parents are almost defined by how they fulfill their responsibilities to us.

6:22 – Imperfect Memory: "He Must Have Said" & Creating Images of the Past

She then has this short sentence: "He taught me how." So he taught her how to write deposit slips and checks. You might be thinking: okay, well what can I say about that? The language is so simple and so plain. And I don't disagree with you, but I think there is a reason for that, and we'll be able to come back to that in a second. We can take this sentence almost at its face value: in addition to meeting his parental responsibilities in, you know, keeping the lights on, that's another responsibility he met was educating his daughter and preparing her um for the wider world out there.

When it says: "This is the form, / he must have said: / the way it is done." What's interesting about that conditional of "he must have said": if we think about the theme of memory, it reflects the imperfectness of memory. She can't remember things he outright said, and so in a way she is, because of imperfect memory, having to create a version of him herself. Like, he didn't actually necessarily say these things, but because she knows him as a whole, she can sort of imagine what he would have said.

There's two aspects of that that are kind of quite complicated philosophical things if you think about it: it's how we create someone, how we build someone up in our memories is inherently imperfect because we can't remember everything, but is also a subject of uh subject to our own just sort of imagination. We assume how they would have presented things, assume what they would have said. It also becomes the way that she speaks about him, very telling of: who does she think that he is? How does she think—what does she think he is like? If we think about the way that the language is, like I was saying before, it's very simple, it's very plain. And when you look at that—"This is the form," "the way it is done"—the declaratives: very certain. And so I think that the way she's written the opening to this poem has echoes of how her father would have spoken: someone who was not about flowery language, it was to the point, it was simple, but also with a strong air of authority, which I think is what we've got in these lines: "This is the form, / the way it is done."

So the picture she's building of this father up to this point is very much someone who is about meeting their responsibilities, making sure their children know how to meet their responsibilities, and is a very strong authority figure, but also someone who has faced some challenges.

8:45 – "Bits of Paper": Writing, Money, & Escaping Her Father's Life

And that's what we're going to keep seeing in this next section of this stanza, where she says: "I learned to see bits of paper / as a way to escape / the life he knew / and even in high school / had a savings / account."

The "bits of paper" line is interesting, and I think there's a couple of ways to interpret that. If we start with the more sort of autobiographical argument that we could make, the "bits of paper" could be an allusion to the fact that she is a writer um, and the fact that she quite literally makes her living by writing on pages and and having paper with her novels printed on it. It could also be a way of referring more widely to money, cuz of course cash is also on paper as well. But by referring it to it as "bits of paper," she's using that understatement in order to suggest that she didn't see the value in it in the way that her father did. She doesn't have the same value as her father in how she views money, reflecting the way parents and children can be different.

But at the same time, the fact that this "bits of paper" is within a line where she says, "I learned to see bits of paper as a way to escape the life he knew," we've got a juxtaposition between something that seems quite trivial—"bits of paper"—versus something that seems incredibly significant: escaping a particular life. Now I think that undervaluing of "bits of paper" with "escape": she does not want to live his life. If you're wanting to escape something, you know, yes, it you know, it denotes you want to get away, and in this case, it's from getting away from her father's life. This is all an allusion to the way parents want their children's lives to be better than their own um, and that she is aware of the particular hardship from a young age that her father is facing. So even if she doesn't necessarily value these bits of paper in the way that others do, she is able to recognize their importance because her father has taught her that importance.

10:56 – High School Savings Accounts & Early Financial Prudence

That's why we had this: "and even in high school / had a savings / account." Now the "even in high school": high school of course symbolizes the teenage years. Not saying this to be shady to all my teenagers watching this, but teenagers are perhaps associated with immaturity, uh naivety, and most definitely not financial prudence, which is why she's using this adverb of "even," because she knows that it's not typical for a teenager to behave in this way. So our savings account represents that financial prudence, and the fact that she had it in high school shows that she has learned from her father from a young age. Uh, he has had an impact on her, perhaps reflects that she respects his opinion, and hence has listened to his views and and done what he thinks she should do.

11:51 – Stanza 3: Discipline, Truth-Telling, & "Truths That Must Have Grieved Him"

While this stanza focuses on the more practical skills that her father has taught her, our next stanza is more about the moral values that her father has instilled in her, when she says: "telling the truth / did not always mean / a beating."

So in the time period in which she would have been a child, beating your children was a fairly common discipline approach. On the one hand, she is showing that he is quite traditional and strict in that it could sometimes mean a beating. On the other hand, it really shows how he values honesty, as represented by telling the truth, and it shows how he's trying to—he takes perhaps sometimes a different approach to disciplining his children.

It's interesting that she then has this line: "though many of my truths / must have grieved him / before the end." So "before the end" is a euphemism for his death. The fact that she has to phrase it in that way um might suggest that she doesn't feel ready to sort of say it out loud; it feels too sad to properly just say "before he died." And when she says "my truths," again autobiographical element: uh, it could be alluding to the fact that she was bisexual um, and perhaps therefore alluding to the really common homophobia that would have existed at the time that she was a young person, and that perhaps her father didn't accept that. Even without that autobiographical element, though, it's just this reflecting this idea of like "my truths" being her values, and so for them to have grieved him, it's referring to the way that, you know, parents and children don't necessarily always agree.

So it's like in this stanza, we had a way in which he impacted her and gave her a particular value and she really followed it and listened to it; on the other hand, here we have a reference to the way that that wasn't always the case. Though note again, she's using that phrase "must have"; she isn't 100% sure. Now we can't be 100% sure why she's not 100% sure, but potential reasons: perhaps alludes to a lack of communication between them um, you know, he didn't talk about his feelings. It could perhaps refer to the way that parents sometimes protect protect their children by not telling them everything, by, you know, keeping their mouth shut about things that children do that they don't necessarily agree with, because they respect: you know, it's my child's life, they can do what they want, I'm not going to try and influence them. And also can just reflect what I was saying before: the way that with our the imperfectness of memories, we have to create an element of the person we're remembering, because we cannot have known absolutely everything about them. It's very possible, it's within the realm of possibility, none of her values upset him before the end, but the very fact that she is assuming that suggests something about the way she viewed him as being very different to her, and that therefore there must have been a clash of values between them. So the way that she chooses to remember him is saying as much about her as it says about him, if that makes sense. It's making a comment on what their relationship must have been like and the way that she perceived him, for her to think this must have been what he would have felt. I kind of feel like I'm in the film Inception in the way I'm trying to talk about memory, but I hope this is all making sense! If you need me to clarify something, you can just drop a comment.

15:45 – Stanza 4: The Volta, The Exclamation Mark, & A Shift to Personality

Up to this point, the tone has been fairly subdued; it's been quite slow, it's been quite uh pensive, relatively sad, you know? It's it's been a lot about her father's struggles, his challenges, the way they perhaps did or did not agree. But that's all about to change now, because we have this volta of: "How I miss my father!" with this exclamation mark at the end signaling something much more passionate, something much happier, frankly.

Now why do we have a volta? I think there's two ways of looking at it. One, if we take the fact that this is like a stream of consciousness poem: as she's thinking about her father and going back down memory lane, she sort of started with what she remembers sort of most, which is the more traditional form of her father. But as she's done remembering that, more things get to come forward; the smaller things get to come forward, and in this case, that is going to be her father's personality. So there's who he is as a parent—that's what she's talked about so far—and now she's going to reflect on his personality. And the volta of the joyfulness comes in remembering: you know, he may have been a very traditional, strict dad who didn't always agree with her, but just who he was as a person was really lovely. And that's what we're going to see in this stanza.

17:13 – Dancing in a Yoga Meditation: Focused Energy, Hospitality, & "Voluptuous Sharing"

So she tells us that: "he cooked like a person / dancing in a yoga / meditation." So note: we've got our first clear-cut metaphorical language in the form of the simile. Remember how I was saying before the language was really plain and simple, perhaps that echoing the way her father was: simple, direct authority? Now that we're entering much more metaphorical language, it creates an imaginative, creative playfulness that in turn is reflective of, you know, the imaginative, playful, joyful person her father could be.

Calling him "a person dancing in a yoga meditation"—it's a really cool image really, because on the one hand, you've got the dancing creating images of energy, of joyfulness, and then you've got that contrasting with the yoga meditation connoting calm and focus. And when you combine those two, we essentially get sort of focused energy, but also a fun that has not come through in anything else that we've been talking about so far. So he's a very different person when he's just getting to do his own thing for himself.

That being said, he's not a selfish person by any stretch, because we're told that he: "craved the voluptuous / sharing / of good food." Now "craved" denotes an intense desire for something, but what he's craving is not just the food itself, because that's typically how you use "crave": you talk about craving a particular food. What he's craving is the act of sharing it. So what that tells us about him is that he's a really generous, hospitable person who wants to be around others. Now while the language here is, you know, fairly straightforward and obvious—we're very much talking about like the denotations of things—what's significant about it is the image of the father that is being created here, and how it again is contrasting with the father that we had before, who seemed to have a really difficult life. This creates an image of a life filled with, you know, good company, good food, enjoyable times as well. So it wasn't all bad, all hard all the time.

You've also got this this word "voluptuous." Now when used in this context talking about the uh food, it's about taking that strong pleasure in enjoying something. So this idea of taking pleasure and enjoying something is just, again, really different to the image of the father we've had before with the difficult life, who's just faced endless adversity. And his—and it reflects the way that, you know, our parents are complex people; there can be many elements to them, and she's really joyfully remembering a particular part of him.

I think though, structurally in the poem, it is significant that this is third. You know what I was saying before about the first thing that comes to mind is the way he focused and fulfilled his parental responsibilities, um his family responsibilities? Well, no, the first thing that came to mind is he was tired, then his responsibilities, then his discipline, his values, and then this is actually fourth—a really positive memory of him, but is perhaps not the strongest memory, again if we're taking that stream of consciousness of what came to her first.

20:39 – Stanza 5: "Now I Look and Cook Just Like Him" & Nature vs. Nurture

She then shifts to think less about her father and more about herself and the way in which her dad has impacted her. So she says: "Now I look and cook just like him." And the internal rhyme between those words just reinforces that sense, that connection between them, which is important to note when we considered that in an earlier stanza, the whole thing of "the truths must have grieved him," that's a way in which they perhaps didn't connect—there was perhaps a lack of communication or a clash of values. At the same time, there is also a lot of positive connection between them, a lot of similarity between them as well.

What's also significant about the actual words themselves: "look" is symbolic of a like biological similarity—we look like our parents—whereas "cook" is more about like personality, how they have shaped us in a particular way. You can almost view it as like a nature and nurture: you know, the nature of who we are, our biology, and the way they have nurtured us, the way she now cooks.

21:40 – The Extended Metaphor: Brain Light, Tossing This and That, & Variety of Life

And she says that her: "my brain light / thoroughly stirred / tossing this and that / into the pot." I think there are two ways to interpret this metaphor. I think the first is that it creates a feeling of her being very carefree, which of course is a really big contrast to the way her father lived: this tired man with his financial responsibilities of deposit slips and checks. The fact that she is carefree can reflect that she has successfully escaped the life he has had—a really positive impact on her, and she's been able to have a much less difficult life than he had. I think it also though just creates that playful energy that she had that her father had, you know? She's she's not worrying, she's not stressing, she's just enjoying the act of cooking.

The "tossing"—the verb "tossing" also just reinforces that carefreeness: she doesn't have to worry about the way things are done. And again, note that that is arguably quite different from our father of "this is the form, this is the way it is done." He's very kind of rigid and strict, and she comes across as being quite different and like having a lot more freedom, having a lot more versatility in the way that she cooks and behaves. And yet she's saying she cooks just like him! So it's this element of, you know: he had to be different, and he's he has taught her as a parent a much more rigid way of being, but as a person, he was much more free. And she has taken that from who he is as a person, perhaps reflecting the way again with parent-child relationships: parents don't always teach their children what they intend to teach their children um; children pick things up just from observing their parents and learning who their parents are, and take after them in ways we might not have anticipated.

"seasoning none of my life / the same way twice." So the fact that this uh cooking has gone on in a metaphorical way for quite a few lines now, we can call this an extended metaphor. And this part of the extended metaphor is essentially the fact that she gets to enjoy a great variety of life. So I think all the different parts of the metaphor are essentially reaching the same conclusion: she has escaped the life her father had. He was tired, he was limited, he had a difficult life; she is free, she gets to experience a variety of things, she's carefree.

But it also reflects the uh influence her father's personality had on her, because of the echoes between the fun, the energy, the generosity to others that is reflected as well in the "brain light," the "tossing this and that," as if it's just like a sort of game if you will, and then the: "happy to feed / whoever strays / my way." That generosity of spirit there as well. So in some ways she's now different from her father; in other ways, she's actually really like him. You could also argue the "happy to feed whoever strays my way," what I was saying before about we teach our children things we didn't expect: she's kept that value of the importance of generosity with others; that was another one of his values that he didn't necessarily explicitly teach her, but she has maintained.

24:40 – Stanza 6: "He Would Have Grown to Admire": Confidence & Resolution

What's interesting about the way this final stanza begins: I've talked before about the "must have, must have," and that sort of conditional tense suggesting an uncertainty of how well she knew her father. This time she says: "He would have." Much more certain this time um, and much more confident in the way that she's talking about him now. The fact that she says: "He would have grown to admire / the woman I've become:" What she's acknowledging there is, although their relationship could be difficult, they could clash, the truths grieving, she ultimately believes that parent-child relationships develop in such a way that her father would have come to understand her and like the person that she has become.

If we think about why, essentially that's what the colon represents, right? She's now going to explain why she thinks her father would have admired her. And so the key thing in the analysis of this stanza is: what is in that list? Why does she think her father would have admired the woman that she's become?

25:34 – The Final List: Practicality, Creativity, Self-Sufficiency, & Staring into the Fire

So if we look at the list: "cooking, writing, chopping wood, / staring into the fire." What's interesting about this list is, on the one hand, it's very practical, because it's, you know, physical tasks that require doing: very, very practical. But at the same time, also creative. There's also an element of being self-sufficient: she can look after herself. So she has the elements her father would have been proud of, of like being self-sufficient and practical, but also she has the fun, she has the creativity, she has the enjoyment in life.

I think the "staring into the fire" could represent a sort of—I don't know if the word would be luxury, but certainly a sort of carefreeness or freedom to be still, to do nothing, which when you're someone going through a difficult life who always has to work work work and can never rest, the capacity to rest actually says a lot about the life you get to live, the sort of the leisure you get to have.

I think staring into the fire, though, could also be interpreted in a completely different way. So one way to interpret it is absolutely the sort of peace and leisure that she gets to have in her life that's really different to her father. Another way to look at it is if we view the fire more as a metaphor, as a symbol of adversity, of challenge that she's facing, and the fact that she stares into it: that very confident, certain behavior symbolizing the way that she stands up to challenges that she faces, she does not back down from them. She's faced up to challenges and adversity just as her father did, and that is the way that it ends.

So regardless of the way that you interpret this line, you can see that the reason she feels her father would admire the person that she's become is because of that simultaneous way that she has taken on some of the best parts of him and the impact he has had on her and her values, but also the way that she's been able to make her own life and be different and do her own thing, and the way that he could have respect for that as well. And I think that's a really interesting part of parent-child relationships: the way that your child can embody so much of who you are, and yet also be so different from who you are.