Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year

We briefly discussed “Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-Second Year” in class today. I agree with some of the things that were said about this poem. I think it’s a son writing to his father but what I’m not sure about is if the father is dead or alive. The son is looking at his father after what appears to be a fishing trip, “I study my father’s embarrassed young man’s face. Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string of spiny yellow perch, in the other a bottle of Carlsbad beer” (line 2-5). The son talks about his father trying to be something he couldn’t become, “All his life my father wanted to be bold” (line 10). At the end of the poem the tone changes into regret towards his father for not teaching him or taking him fishing like his father did when he was younger. “Father, I love you, yet how can I say thank you, I would can’t hold my liquor either, and don’t even know the places to fish” (lines 13-15). In that statement the son admits that he might be an alcoholic himself, and that to me seems like the only thing his father ever really showed him. His father was an alcoholic and that’s what the boy grew up with so instead of following in the father he wanted footsteps he only had one person to follow; his alcoholic father’s footsteps which he seems to regret as much as his father not taking him fishing when he was younger.