Sharon Olds Explores Paternal and Sexual Love Between Father and Daughter in Her Poem My Father Speaks to Me from the Dead
Sharon Olds creates an intense scene in “My Father Speaks to Me From the Dead” in which the reader is privy to a dead man’s lusty thoughts about his daughter. The poem’s title implies that the poem’s speaker is her deceased father, who is speaking to her as dirt in a shed. He talks in first person, but although able to talk while dead, has a limited point of view throughout, except for perhaps the last two lines, discussed later. Through its sexual images and jarring line breaks, the poem presents a speaker who could be as equally romantically in love with his daughter as he is paternally.
The speaker’s mother may have despised her daughter, but she did not entertain or act on thoughts of sexual abuse. The poem’s sexual imagery and line breaks draw attention to the speaker’s father’s potential undertones of romantic as well as paternal love, creating an unsettling sense of ambiguity as to the quality of his relationship with her that is never resolved. The speaker’s father attempts to prove his love his daughter is greater than that of the speaker’s mother. Olds creates a father who attempts to hide his pedophiliac urges by expressing his love for his daughter, but ironically succeeds only in implicating himself in the process.
The entire poem takes the form of a speech the speaker gives in a mixture of simple and compound declarative sentences interspersed with two rhetorical questions. The simple sentences are never broken by line breaks, given while the compound ones are enjambed in off-putting ways. In lines 17 and 18, “when I touched your little / anus” is startling not only in the positioning of its unnatural line break, but also by the emphasis it places on the word beginning the next line, anus. The speaker says he “crossed wires with God for a moment” when he touched his subject’s anus, which is an unusual feeling to receive while rubbing oil on a baby – the reader’s first clue that something may be awry in the expected innocent father-daughter relationship. The speaker then goes on to indirectly reference his daughter’s genitals, referring to them by describing them as “between your legs.” The speaker seems unable to state their name directly, as if trying to repress their true identity.
The speaker continues to struggle with his purely paternal claims toward his daughter in line 18, in which he claims he “never hated your shit,” yet further on states that he hated his subject’s facial “eruptions.” He continues to reveal potential sexual attraction for his daughter with this mention, presumably referring to acne. A father with a purely paternal relationship to his daughter would presumably never react so strongly to her acne; that falls more under the spectrum of a passionate lover’s complaint. In the same line, as if to smooth over or balance out this guilty admission, the speaker asks rhetorically, “You know what I love?” The positioning of a sentence about love after a sentence about hate in the same line (together forming the entirety of the line) amplifies the contrast between the speaker’s sentences. A line break immediately follows, allowing the reader a brief moment to register and react with curiosity to the speaker’s sudden mood switch. Immediately therefore, the speaker declares that he loves his daughter’s brain, a seemingly safe, although hasty, switch in tone from the previous sexually charged lines.
The poem continues with a long list of the subject’s body parts the speaker feels he loves (the type of love in this case being uncategorized) – feet, knees, legs, genitals (although unnamed), rear end, navel, breasts, shoulders, hair, heart, and womb. The speaker’s list is more than half comprised of sexualized parts of women (genitals, rear end, navel, breasts, hair), reaffirming the idea that the former may not be viewing his daughter in a completely paternal light. In line 23, the speaker wants to know if his daughter has seen him “looking up / from within your daughter’s face, as she nursed,” which could be interpreted as both a paternal genetic inquiry and a sexual reminiscence or desire in which the speaker takes the place of his granddaughter suckling at his daughter’s breasts.
The speaker compares his subject’s brain to “a woman’s labia,” in line 30, further emphasizing the sexual connection he feels to her. Given this sexual framework within which to work, the passages at the beginning of the poem can be reexamined to provide more sexual content than a first reading might suggest. The slugs of line three are not be merely slithering other the speaker’s body; they are “kiss-crossing” it – another potential reference to the physical expression of romantic love. The speaker continues by claiming “I don’t know / where to start, with this grime on me,” which could be referencing the dirt of the earth he has supposedly been returned to after being cremated, but also the guilty “grime” that rests on him as a result of his sexual feelings or actions toward his daughter while alive.
Along with attempting to hide his sexual feelings for his daughter, the speaker seems to be trying to compete with the mother figure mentioned throughout the poem. He mentions that she despised the subject’s shit, while he loved it. He loves his daughter’s navel, even though it is “the print” of her mother. He loves “even what comes / from deep inside your mother-your heart” (32-3), despite the fact that it too comes from his wife, his only competition in the parental love contest he is creating.
In his attempts to insult the mother while simultaneously prove his own greater love for his daughter, the speaker seems to confuse the daughter with his wife, or to nonsensically switch who he is addressing in a manner remnant of mental illness in lines 22-24: “Of course I love / your breasts-did you see me looking up / from within your daughter’s face, as she nursed?” (The speaker could also be merely addressing his daughter, referring to her grandchild at this point, but this is just one possibility.) The speaker’s failure to realize who he is addressing or to avoid involving his wife, whom he also once regarded in a sexual manner, in his discussion of his supposedly paternal love for his daughter is his downfall.
The speaker attempts to prove his love for his daughter is greater than that of her mother throughout the poem, which constantly draws attention to its potential undertones of romantic as well as paternal love via sexual imagery and line breaks, creating an unsettling sense of ambiguity that is never resolved. In the last two lines of the poem, the speaker claims that the act of moving a hand “is matter’s love, for human / love go elsewhere.”
The line break forces the reader to concentrate on the break between “human” and “love” (perhaps implying the speaker’s sexual love for his daughter falls just short of human, or providing an excuse for his physical attraction to his daughter by insisting that it in no way has an effect on the true measure of human love, his paternal feelings for her,) as well as the ambiguous connotation of the word “love” there and throughout the poem. The speaker inadvertently strengthens the evidence for his pedophiliac inclinations by the sheer force with which he attempts to prove the paternal quality of his love. The reader is left unsettled and unable to distinguish the quality of the speaker’s love for his daughter, let alone its morality, but is left leaning toward a guilty conviction.
