Poem Analysis: The Victims By Sharon Olds

“The Victims” “The Victims” by Sharon Olds is written about a child that holds a heavy hate towards their father. Through the use of diction, Sharon Olds creates a tone of resentment in “The Victims”. The tone is set through both the connotation and denotation behind the specific words that she uses. Olds creatively practices these tools when she changes the construction of the language about half way through the poem. The beginning of the poem is written from the perspective of a child, allowing different emotions expressed to be more easily depicted and understood. Words such as “we were glad” make it clear that both the mother and child were happy about the circumstances (line 1). Later on the readers find out just how happy the characters are when the line “the way people grinned when/Nixon’s helicopter lifted off the South/Lawn for the last time” comes into play (lines 5-7). The denotation behind these lines is happiness, the people were grinning when Nixon left office. The connotation behind these …show more content…
In this section, the speaker talks about how everything that the father has being taken away. The “office” and his “secretary” and not to mention his “lunches with three double bourbons”, all of these can be had by anyone (line 10). A secretary can always be hired, most people go out to lunch, and the pencils and paper are nothing big. The connotation behind these words is much greater than what was originally said. The fact that the father has his own office and secretary infers that he was higher up the food chain. It also means that he not only had power at home, but that he had power in his workplace as well. Essentially, the speaker is taking away all of the power that the father had ever possessed. When the speaker then talks about the clothing in the closet, the readers can deduce that a shift in language might take