Nostalgia In Alice Walker's Poem At Thirty-Nine

Poem at Thirty-Nine by Alice Walker begins with a feeling of nostalgia as she remembers her father, there is a tone of regret in the first stanza, regretting the fact that her father is no longer with her. She wishes that her father “had not been so tired…” since they were suffering from poverty her father could devote much of his time to her, he was too busy “writing slips…” this clearly exhibits how he deeply cared about her to the point that he instructed her on financial matters. There is a darker theme in the third stanza. The phrase “beating” refers to the way her father treated her, she might have felt intimidated by him. He taught her that “telling the truth…..” for him, honesty and truth was more important, because of this, Walker was influenced by her father’s beliefs. However, she could not always live up to his expectations and the truth must have grieved him until the end. Now that her father is gone, she has lost a teacher, a person who could her anything, from cooking to chopping woods. She misses her father more and more. He who “cooked like… dancing…. In yoga…” juxtaposes each other and it shows that he was a generous man who treated cooking line it was a form of art. It is also an oxymoron, it illustrates how …show more content…
In the first stanza, there is a tone of regret, however, in the second part of the poem, her regret is gone and replaced with hope. Walker believes that her father would be proud of her because of their similarities. In the first line, the phrase “How I miss my father…” displays tone of regret and loss, but in the fourth stanza, the phrase “How I miss my father…” is expressed with an exclamation mark, she is remembering all the good times she spend with her father. The narrator is reminiscing about her father. Firstly, Walker talks about her father in a negative way, however her impression of him