Fifth Grade Autobiography

The title of this poem, “Fifth Grade Autobiography,” suggests that the speaker presents this poem as a response to a school assignment. Like Langston Hughes’s well-known “Theme for English B,” this gesture creates two presumed audiences: a teacher or fellow class members and the poetry reading audience who experiences the poem. This layered approach adds a level of complexity to the poem, as the poetry reading audience must balance their consideration of the poem as a creation of the adult poet while also understanding it as a representation of a younger speaker’s thoughts. This complexity is evident in the shifting verb tense in the poem. The shifts between past and present indicate the distinction between the biographical facts of the poem, like the speaker’s age, and the enduring memory of the details of the photograph, which appear in present tense. While the adult speaker of the poem might recall more nuanced memories of their grandfather, the fifth-grade speaker recalls that “He smelled of lemons” (Line 21) and remembers “his hands” (Line 22) most of all.

The school assignment aspect of this poem impacts the occasion for writing as well as the experience of reading the poem.