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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."
Primary Source
The Dead and the Living
Publisher
Knopf
Place Published
New York
Edition
1984
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).