Fate

Olds, Sharon

Primary Category: Literature / Poetry

Genre: Poem

Annotated by:
Aull, Felice
  • Date of entry: Feb-09-1994
  • Last revised: Aug-21-2006

Summary

This is a poem of acceptance and personal strength. The narrator has given up the effort to NOT be like her father, a self-pitying, "defeated" failure. She accepts him, she becomes him, she is transformed: "I /myself, he, I shined." She understands that fate planted her, like a tulip bulb, in that family, and she is now "sure of [her]rightful place."

 

Commentary

This is one of a number of poems in which Olds describes coming to terms with a father’s alcoholism, and with a troubled family life (see for example, in this database Late Poem to My Father, Of All the Dead That Have Come to Me, This Once).

Primary Source

The Dead and the Living

Publisher

Knopf

Place Published

New York

Edition

1984