According to noted poetry critic, Helen Vendler, Sharon Olds' poetry is "self- indulgent, sensationalist, and even pornographic."
Olds’ poem, “The Victims,” consists of 26 uneven lines of free verse with Olds’ customary haphazard line breaks. One of her least “pornographic” efforts, the poem is certainly guilty of self-indulgence and sensationalism.
Adult looking back
The speaker of the poem is an adult child looking back at the break up of her family when her mother divorced her father. The speaker addresses the father: “When Mother divorced you, we were glad.” The speaker and her siblings are glad, because “[the mother] took it and / took it in silence, all those years.” What she “took in silence” is left up to the reader to imagine.
By leaving such an important motive to the imagination of the reader, the speaker weakens the thrust of her accusations against the father. The only hint of the father’s misdeeds is that he enjoyed “lunches with three double bourbons.” On the other hand, the mother “had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it / until we pricked with her for your / annihilation.”
The mother teaches her children to hate their father, perhaps because he had three double bourbons for lunch. Maybe the father was a cruel alcoholic, who beat the mother and children, but there is no evidence to support that idea.
The father was fired from his job, but only after the mother kicked him out: would he have been able to keep his job if he had been a cruel drunk? So the reader has no evidence that the father was guilty of anything, but the mother taught the kids to hate the father and wish for his death. The mother comes out a less sympathetic character than the father.
Then and now
The poem breaks into two parts: the first is a description of how the family felt then, and the second part jumps to now: “Now I / pass the bums in doorways.” It becomes clear that it is the bums in the doorway who have reminded the speaker of her father getting kicked out of their home and getting fired from his job.
The speaker then speculates about the “bums,” about whom she knows absolutely nothing: “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.”
What an arrogant reaction! Without one whit of evidence that these “bums” did anything to anyone, she assumes that they are like her father, who lost it all because of what he did, but the reader still does not even know what the father did either.
Commentary
This poem, like many of Sharon Olds’ poems, offers some masterful descriptions. The father’s business suits: “those dark / carcasses hung in your closet, and the black / noses of your shoes with their large pores.” 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.”
These fine images deserve a better place to reside. The poem is unconvincing and seems to exist for the sole purpose of displaying a few well-wrought images.
*****
Sharon Olds is also a November poet, born November 19, 1942, in San Francisco, California. For the featured November poet, please see “November Poet – Vachel Lindsay,” which focuses on Lindsay’s “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight.”
