Poetry is full of important words to give the reader context clues about the poem that is being read. “forgiving my father” by Lucille Clifton is a great example of a poem that uses important words to give a deeper meaning to the poem than what is seen on the surface, and through thorough analysis this meaning can be found. These words give the reader a sense of what is going on in the world of the speaker, like the speaker in “forgiving my father” forgiving her father’s debts after he has since died. Clifton’s use of signifying words and past tense, lack of capitalization, metaphors, and similes are pertinent to understanding the resentment of the speaker and what lead her to feel the way she does about forgiving her father.

Words are, obviously, an important aspect of this poem. One of the key words to begin understanding the poem is in the title: “forgiving.” The word “forgiving” can have two different meanings, but in the instance of this poem, the meaning is about forgiving or canceling a debt, a financial debt to be specific. Evidence to support this claim is throughout the poem in several lines. One of these lines is, “what am i doing here collecting?” which is then followed by, “you lie side by side in debtors’ boxes.” (Clifton). These two lines put together help to make the reader understand that the speaker is collecting money for the debt of her dead parents, the people who are lying beside each other in debtors’ boxes. Proof that her parents are dead is found in the use of past tense when referring to her parents throughout the poem, as seen in the line, “you were each other’s bad bargain.” (Clifton). Her parents’ deaths are important to the poem because once someone dies, their debts are usually placed onto their relatives. Another key part of evidence to showing the reader that she is financially forgiving her father is Clifton’s tone in the poem. She seems extremely resentful in the way she speaks about her father. This is shown when the speaker calls her father an “old lecher” and an “old liar” in the second stanza (Clifton). These words show exactly how she feels about her father because they are words that have negative connotations and are aggressive. The tone that is present in the entire poem plus the signifying words gives clues to the reader that the speaker resents her father, and she is not forgiving her father of wrong doing. 

More evidence to support the idea of the speaker forgiving a financial debt is found in the final stanza. She says in the first stanza, “it is friday. we have come / to the paying of the bills.” and in the final stanza, “you are the pocket that was going to open / and come up empty any friday.” (Clifton). From these two lines, the reader can infer that her father never had money to pay the bills, and considering his daughter is collecting money to pay off her parents’ debt, he clearly did something frivolous or irresponsible with the money instead of paying the bills. His careless use of money then causes the speaker’s mother to also go into debt. The speaker says, “i wish you were so rich i could take it all / and give the lady what she was due,” (Clifton) which shows that she believes her mother deserved better than what her father gave her mother. This line also shows compassion and understanding towards her mother because she wanted her mother to have more than she actually had.

A concept mentioned throughout the poem is time, or lack thereof, in some points of the poem. Clifton writes, “there is no more time for you. there will / never be time enough” (Clifton). The fact that her father also has no more time reaffirms the idea that he is no longer alive. This line also alludes to her father never having enough time to collect money for the bills, since his pockets always came up empty on Fridays. The idea of time is also shown in the repetition of the word “friday”. Every week, on the same day, the father never had money to contribute to paying the bills. Looking further into this fact, the reader begins to understand the speaker’s borderline hateful tone towards her father. This fact also helps to convey how much of an annoyance it was that he never helped to pay the bills, and now, how the speaker must come up with the money that her father never seemed to have to pay off his debt.

This leads into the way Clifton does not capitalize any word in the entire poem, including the title and the word “I,” which are two things that always tend to be capitalized in any sort of writing. The lack of capitalization in the poem could be used to convey the speaker’s emotion and tone towards having to forgive her father’s debts. She is, essentially, tired of having to settle what her father did. It is tedious and disheartening for the speaker to have to repay a debt that she had absolutely no part in creating. Her parent’s dug themselves into this hole, but now, she has to fill it because her parents are both dead. This is shown in the final stanza where she says, “you were each other’s bad bargain, not mine.” (Clifton). This line explicitly shows how she feels that she should not have to be responsible for handling the financial mistakes of her parents, mostly her father, made. “I” not being capitalized in the poem could also convey that she is “speaking” is a hushed tone, like she knows what she has to do and has come to terms with it, but she is still trying to stay calm over the fact she is paying the debt of someone else.

This quiet exasperation is felt through the metaphor in the poem where the speaker refers to her father as “the pocket that was going to open / and come up empty on any friday.” (Clifton). Her father is, again, shown through this line as being completely unreliable, which has caused frustration in the speaker since she was a child until now. He is unreliable because he knew that the bills were to be paid on Fridays, yet he does not save money to contribute to paying them off. She uses another literary device in the first stanza when she says, “you have stood in my dreams / like a ghost, asking for more time” (Clifton). This line is particularly powerful because ghosts are said to still be in the human realm because they have unfinished business to take care of, so they are automatically given more time to complete whatever they must after death. This line shows that even in death, her father is still making excuses and asking for more time, his pockets still coming up empty.

“forgiving my father” by Lucille Clifton is a powerful poem about financial forgiveness and resentment felt towards the person who created the debts you must now pay off. Context clues throughout the poem help the reader to come to important conclusions about the speaker and her father. These clues help to show the reader, through many words and devices, how the speaker feels about her father, his debts, and the situation she is now in because of a father who gave her nothing.
