“The Victims” Response

1) What are the main ideas in the poem?
When I read “The Victims,” by Sharon Olds, the main ideas that came to my mind were vengeance, karma, and the effects of divorce on children and parents. The poem starts being written from a child’s perspective, and it ends with a grown up point of view. It seems that not only the child has suffered the father’s abuse, but the mother and siblings too. Throughout the poem, the children in that family are taught to hate their father while the mother takes everything away from him until he is reduce to be a beggar. The poem ends with the same person reflecting on who the real victims were in the story.

2) What about the structure/movements of the poem?
The poem has two very well differentiated parts: the first part that is written in past tense, and the second part, which is written in present tense. The poem starts hating the father and being happy when the mother divorced him, and it ends feeling some kind of sympathy towards the father. The author accomplished this shift in the poem thanks to the descriptions and the change of tense, but most importantly, thanks to the comparison of the father to bums.
Another thing that I noticed about this poem is that every phrase in each line is not complete; it’s like the author chose to cut the phrase to jump to the next line. I mean, the ideas and phrases in the poem are complete, but Olds cut them to create some kind of “mystery”. This resource or device made me want to continue reading the poem to get its entire idea (I noticed the same thing in her other poem “Sex Without Love”).
The poem does not have an established meter or rhyme.

3) Your interpretation of the symbols in the poem:
- “When Mother divorced you, we were glad.” The author indicates that maybe she and her siblings celebrated the fact that their mother divorced their father.
- “She took it and / took it, in silence, all those years and then / kicked you out, suddenly, and her / kids loved it.” With the phrase “She took it”, she’s referring to some kind of abuse that the mother had to go through. Again, the children were happy when she pushed him out of the house.
- “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.” The fact that the father was fired caused them some kind of contentment, but that wasn’t enough for all the years of abuse they went through. That’s why she’s comparing it with people’s reaction when Nixon escaped; they wanted him to be charged for the things he and his administration did wrong.
- “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? ” As I said before, it wasn’t enough punishment that the father was fired, so they were glad thinking all the things taken away from him. In these lines we can also find a description of who the father was: maybe a business man with an alcohol problem. The word “carcasses” gives me the idea of someone completely distant from his family. Another important thing here is that everything related to the father was dark and black.
- “She had taught us to take it, to hate you and take it / until we pricked with her for your / annihilation, Father.” It seems that the mother was the one who took everything away from him, and turned the children against him. This is the first line in which she mentions him, which is contradictory since they wanted to annihilate him; they wanted him to disappear.
- “Now I / pass the bums in doorways, the white / slugs of their bodies gleaming through slits in their / suits of compressed silt, the tainted / flippers of their hands, the underwater / fire of their eyes, ships gone down with the / lanterns lit,” here is when the poem shift to the present tense and compares the father with “bums” and also with “ships gone down” because he lost everything he had; it’s like he drowned in the situation. She repeats the word “suits”, but this time it wasn’t black, it was made of “compressed silt” another indication of his poverty.
- “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.” With the repetition of “took it” the author is reflecting that there are many people going through the same situation. She’s also thinking about who was the real victim after all.

4) Does the title fit the poem’s purpose?
The title fits its purpose because it’s referring to what the poem is going to talk about. I think that everybody in the poem were victims but at different times and in different ways.

5) Your response:
The poem is addressing family issues related to divorce. Who are the real victims in a divorce? I think that everybody are. However, the author hints us that in the end she feels that her father was the victim. I think that that’s related to the fact that she compares him to bums, and that’s because they had nothing and nobody cares about them. At the beginning of the poem she was very angry, but towards the end that feeling changed to sympathy.
Even though I think that everybody in a divorce are victims, but at different times and in different ways, I incline myself to believe that the real victims are the children. That’s because most of the times they have nothing to do with the parents’ problems, however, they are stuck in the middle of the situation. This poem describes situations that nowadays are still very common in a divorced family: turning the children against each other parent, fighting to take everything from each other, finding content in each other’s misery, etc.
Although, I insist that everybody is a victim in a divorce, we have to keep in mind that if you weren’t a good parent you can’t expect good things from your children; what goes around, comes around.