The victims
Analyzing: “The Victims” by Sharon Olds
“The Victims” by Sharon Olds is a poem, which gives us an elaborated and refined view of a tortured family in our modern society. It describes the immature resentment of the young speaker and her family towards the father, and the more mature expression of sympathy of the grown up speaker.
The poem is divided into two parts, easy to spot due to a sudden change in the verb tenses, speaker, tone and purpose.
The first part of the poem, transmits to the reader the hatred that flows within the family. The resentful and grave tone makes the best companion for the long awaited occasion: the divorce from the father. The speaker’s objective, of underlying the poor situation of the “victims”, is achieved by the description of the vicious character of the oppressing father: Bibulous, absent, infidel. Metaphors are profusely used by holds to describe dad’s figure: “your luncheons with three double bourbons” this sentence gives us a hint of the alcoholism of the father, that has we can infer from the poem often led to violence, to either his daughter or his wife. The metaphor: “your suits back, too, those dark carcasses hung in your closet” is not only important for the identification of the father as a “work-alcoholic” but it also has a predominant role in the determination of the tone of the poem’s first segment, in fact the use of such an “ugly” word as carcasses, is not casual, but is meant to share with the reader the sense of disgust and delusion that the young speaker proved towards her father. I personally think that the meaning of this sentence does not simply ends here, in fact I believe that “dark carcasses hung in your closet” shares a similarity with the common saying: “skeleton in the closet”, and therefore bears the meaning of hiding a guilty secret, which in this case could be infidelity.
The concluding segment has a more mature speaker, thus the whole tone, and meaning of the poem is changed. The grown up
“The Victims” by Sharon Olds is a poem, which gives us an elaborated and refined view of a tortured family in our modern society. It describes the immature resentment of the young speaker and her family towards the father, and the more mature expression of sympathy of the grown up speaker.
The poem is divided into two parts, easy to spot due to a sudden change in the verb tenses, speaker, tone and purpose.
The first part of the poem, transmits to the reader the hatred that flows within the family. The resentful and grave tone makes the best companion for the long awaited occasion: the divorce from the father. The speaker’s objective, of underlying the poor situation of the “victims”, is achieved by the description of the vicious character of the oppressing father: Bibulous, absent, infidel. Metaphors are profusely used by holds to describe dad’s figure: “your luncheons with three double bourbons” this sentence gives us a hint of the alcoholism of the father, that has we can infer from the poem often led to violence, to either his daughter or his wife. The metaphor: “your suits back, too, those dark carcasses hung in your closet” is not only important for the identification of the father as a “work-alcoholic” but it also has a predominant role in the determination of the tone of the poem’s first segment, in fact the use of such an “ugly” word as carcasses, is not casual, but is meant to share with the reader the sense of disgust and delusion that the young speaker proved towards her father. I personally think that the meaning of this sentence does not simply ends here, in fact I believe that “dark carcasses hung in your closet” shares a similarity with the common saying: “skeleton in the closet”, and therefore bears the meaning of hiding a guilty secret, which in this case could be infidelity.
The concluding segment has a more mature speaker, thus the whole tone, and meaning of the poem is changed. The grown up