Analisis Puisi Forgiving My Father by Lucille Clifton

forgiving my father
lucille clifton

The poem titled forgiving my father talks about children who have forgiven her  fathers, in the first stanza,  in line 1 until 4 “it is friday. we have come/to the paying of the bills./all week you have stood in my dreams/like a ghost, asking for more time” Show that the speakers must pay bills, the words "bills" here means debt, debt that they must pay every week and debt that always haunts them. in the line 5 and 6 speakers show the reason why she is angry with her father for being the cause of her mother's suicide, it show  “my mother's hand opens in her early grave/and i hold it out like a good daughter.”  The speaker mother wants to end her life but the speaker can save her mother

The second stanza shows the peak of anger from the daughter (speakers)  to her father, as she said in line 8 to 11  “there is no more time for you. there will/never be time enough daddy daddy old lecher/old liar. I wish you were rich so i could take it all /and give the lady what she was due”  she called her father an old liar and there was no time for her father to fix the problem, she hoped her father was born to someone rich so she could enjoy and give to her mother, the lady means mother of the speakers. Anger from the author began to decrease was seen from line 14 to 16 “you gave her all you had /which was nothing. you have already given her /all you had.  she knows the sacrifice of the father to her orher mother. her father struggled and gave everything he had even though not much was given by her father. The word "nothing" means nothing special

In the third stanza, it seems that the speaker has forgiven her father, even though on the line she still shows her disappointment towards him, she said “you are the pocket that was going to open /and come up empty any Friday". her father's money that always runs out every Friday to pay off the debt her father had, until her father decided to end her life, it was seen on line 19 “you were each other's bad bargain, not mine"Bad bargain illustrates his father's decision to end his life," said each other is her father with her own father's mind and made a bad agreement by committing to death.

 And the daughter starts to forgive her father and try to forget the anger that has been collected by him, it can be seen on line 21 “what am i doing here collecting?”, Collecting means all the anger that she has collected so far when her father was still alive, she asked herself why she was angry with his father while her father was gone.