Victims

The speaker of this poem starts out as a young child and then midway through the poem switches to that same child as an adult. Again there is no particular rhyme or rhythm to this poem, however the commas and periods add pauses in all the best places. I it is easy to hear this daughter almost talking to her father, with such a spiteful tone.

I believe with this poem the tone takes a major role is developing its meaning. In the beginning, the little girl starts out so hateful of her father. “”When mother divorced you, we were glad.” Just this first line of the poem says a lot about her attitude towards her father when she was young. It goes on to say that as their father lost everything they “grinned” inside. However I think when she grows up there is a slight tone change. I believe her talking about the bums when she gets older is a metaphor connecting the bums with her father. Her father lost everything after the divorce, his family his cloths his job, and she was happy as it happened. The whole poem talks slowly about how her father loses his family job and then possessions. She specifically focuses on him losing his suits. “would they take your suits back, too, those dark carcasses hung in your closet”. And when she sees the bums she mentions something about their suits as well. “suits of compressed silt”. She does not feel remorse for her father, however instead of being so hateful it is more pity and speculation. What drives a man to loose everything until he sits in a row of bums so pathetically?

The next literary device that is essential to this poem it’s diction. When the girl talks about the suits she describes them as “dark carcasses”. Having such a dark description for such a simple item helps develop the tone in her voice as a child. The hate that she felt for her father. The way she describes the bums is also interesting. She almost describes them as shark like with, “white slugs of their bodies gleaming,..stained flippers of their hands, underwater fire of their eyes.” Its such a dark and angry description of a person. White slugs gets across the picture of a lazy man who does not see much sun. I believe their hands are stained from the wrongs they have committed against their families. And the underwater fire in their eyes are the evil inside of them. And she sees all of this in her own father which makes it easier for her to understand them, just not how they got to the point they are at.

I particularly liked the reference to Nixon in this poem. “We grinned inside, the way people grinned when Nixon’s helicopter lifted off the South Lawn for the last time”. This is a metaphor relating the way Nixon was a let down to the nation just as her father was a let down to her family. As for the overall poem, I thought having the speaker start out as a child and end as and adult was very clever. I liked the question that it rises in the reader at the end of the poem. I also like this poem because I think every person that reads it can get a different interpretation of it from their own experiences.