Grade 9 Notes: Poem at Thirty-Nine
Poem at Thirty-Nine looks like the easiest poem in the anthology and is actually one of the hardest to write well about, because its method is plainness — and candidates who call it ‘simple’ have missed the poem entirely. Revise it as a shape: two halves hinged on one repeated line whose punctuation changes, grief turning into celebration turning into inheritance. Learn the movement-by-movement arc, the handful of load-bearing words analysed below, and the comparison pairings — Section B is a comparative essay, and your second poem is half your answer. The poem is printed in the paper, so the skill is not memorisation but knowing in advance which words you will close-read and which partner poem sharpens Walker most.
Character studies
The speaker
A woman at thirty-nine auditing her life — and finding her father in the totals
The speaker is a grown woman pausing at the threshold of forty to take stock, and the poem is the audit she performs: what did my father give me, what did it cost, and what have I made of it? The voice is close to Walker’s own — a daughter of the segregated American South remembering a sharecropper father who taught her to handle money and to tell the truth — but the poem earns its place in the anthology because the audit is universal: every adult eventually measures themselves against a parent. What makes this speaker remarkable is her refusal of both easy positions. She will not idealise the father (his exhaustion, his temper and the threat of the strap are all in the record) and she will not stay in mourning. Across the poem she moves from missing him, through remembering him honestly, to the discovery that she has become him — cooking with his joy, feeding strangers, improvising a life — and finally to the poem’s quiet verdict: that he would have grown to admire her. Grief matures into inheritance in front of us, and the plainness of her language is the guarantee of its honesty.
The father
A tired, honest, joyful man — remembered whole, flaws left in
The father never speaks in the poem and is dead before it begins, yet he is its most vivid presence: a poor Southern farming man raising a large family under a system built to keep him poor, who nonetheless handed his daughter three inheritances — competence with money, the habit of truth, and joy at the stove. Walker builds him from two apparently opposite panels. In the first half he is the worn provider: exhausted at her birth, teaching bank forms as an act of protection, a man whose discipline could turn violent and whose world was narrow enough that his daughter’s adult truths would grieve him. In the second half he is almost extravagant: a cook who moved like a dancer, who fed people for the sensual pleasure of it. The poem’s achievement is refusing to choose between the panels — the strictness and the generosity are one man, and the daughter who inherits both is his best portrait. He matters in the exam as a study in honest characterisation: an elegy that idealised him would be weaker than this one, which loves him with the temper and the tiredness still showing.
Thesis statements
- Walker builds the poem as an audit: short free-verse entries, both columns honestly filled — and the final balance is not the father’s worth but the daughter’s, certified in his imagined voice.
- The poem’s one repeated line is its entire structure: identical words, a full stop become an exclamation mark, and in that single changed character grief finishes turning into celebration.
- Plainness is the poem’s ethic, not its limitation: a poem about learning truth-telling must itself refuse ornament, and Walker writes the elegy the way her father taught her to write cheques — exactly, and for the true amount.
- Walker presents inheritance as translation, not transmission: each survival-skill the father taught returns enlarged in the daughter, which is why the ending must imagine him growing into admiration rather than simply granting it.
- The poem’s tenderness is inseparable from its economics: in a world where the landlord kept the books, banking lessons were love — and the anthology’s least lyrical nouns carry its most protective feeling.
- The elegy succeeds because it is unfair to no one: the father’s exhaustion and temper stay in the record alongside his joy, so the closing admiration is a verdict reached on evidence, not a memorial courtesy.
Essay plans
- Compare how the poets present memories of a parent in Poem at Thirty-Nine and Piano. — Both poets show a domestic act reopening the past, but the memories behave oppositely: Lawrence’s ambush him and drag him backwards into childhood, while Walker’s are summoned, weighed and converted into the adult she has become — resistance ending in collapse against welcome ending in inheritance.
- Compare how the poets present the relationship between father and child in Poem at Thirty-Nine and Do not go gentle into that good night. — The anthology’s two father-poems face death from opposite sides and in opposite voices: Thomas, before the death, commands his father to resist in the strictest form the anthology contains; Walker, years after, releases hers into memory through free verse — and where Thomas’s love refuses the death, Walker’s love completes it by becoming the man herself.
- Compare how the poets present what parents give their children in Poem at Thirty-Nine and If—. — Both poems are inventories of inheritance, but they are written from opposite ends of the transaction: Kipling’s parent lists conditions a son must still meet, while Walker’s child lists gifts already absorbed — so Kipling presents legacy as a test with a prize, and Walker presents it as an estate already being spent, generously, on others.