Form: "The Victims" by Sharon Olds

An American poet born and raised in San Francisco, California, Sharon Olds earned a BA at Stanford University and then continued her education at Columbia and received a PhD. Over the years she has received many awards including: The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, The National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and The James Laughlin Award.

The Victims

 

When Mother divorced you, we were glad. She took it and
took it in silence, all those years and then
kicked you out, suddenly, and her
kids loved it. Then you were fired, and we
grinned inside, the way people grinned when
Nixon's helicopter lifted off the South
Lawn for the last time. We were tickled
to think of your office taken away,
your secretaries taken away,
your lunches with three double bourbons,
your pencils, your reams of paper. Would they take your
suits back, too, those dark
carcasses hung in your closet, and the black
noses of your shoes with their large pores?
She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it
until we pricked with her for your
annihilation, Father. Now I
pass the bums in doorways, the white
slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their
suits of compressed silt, the stained
flippers of their hands, the underwater
fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the
lanterns lit, and I wonder who took it and
took it from them in silence until they had
given it all away and had nothing
left but this.

 

“The Victims” written by Sharon Olds is a poem with structure that depends on its shifts in tone, focus, attitude, and subject to divide the poem. The poem is divided into two major parts. The speaker’s attitude in the first part of the poem (from line 1 to 17) reveals anger towards her father. She evokes him by referring to him as “you” (this you being used can almost be seen as disrespectful towards the father).  The subject throughout the poem is not solely about the victims (the speaker’s mother and siblings) but it is about the father. In the first part of the poem he is revealed to have an extravagant life at work separate from the one he has at home. The speaker refers to his fancy clothes (lines 12-14) and his descendent lunches (line 10); but he loses it all after his divorce and after being fired. The speaker reminisces how her mother had constantly taught them to be happy about his failures; were they truly the victims?
The poem shifts in the second half of line 17 and this second half of the poem brings to light a whole new definition of victim.. Suddenly, instead of calling him “you” she refers to him as “father”.  The speaker begins to have sympathy for her father which shows through her sympathy for “bums in doorways” with “their suits [are] made of residual waste (lines 18-20).
Change is a significant factor in the poems structure. The change of views from the speaker’s childhood to later years about her father creates a structure which makes up the meaning of victims and therefore the meaning of the poem itself.