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. While the adult speaker seeks to capture the sensations associated with the inhabiting of a fifth-grade self, the fifth grade speaker writes in response to a teacher’s prompt. As such, the teacher strives to describe the photograph’s content comprehensively, moving deliberately from one member of their family to the next. Once the speaker describes each of the three family members, they blend recollections of the two most significant figures in Stanza 3 by reflecting back on what had happened the day before the photograph and flashing forward to their grandfather’s subsequent death.

By the end of the poem, readers may wonder whether or not the speaker has truly fulfilled their class assignment. Because the poem rarely references the speaker directly, it does not meet the requirements of an autobiography from the perspective of an adult. The speaker seems to imply that factual details of the speaker’s life matter less than their relationship to others, most importantly to their grandfather. They rely on memory and an eye for detail to respond to the assignment rather than focusing on a litany of the events that capture their young life.

This focus on memory is the adult speaker’s true subject. While the younger speaker writes an autobiography for their teacher, the poet, through the words of her speaker, considers both what stands out to her about the photograph and how her impressions help her make sense of the past. As a result, the photograph is a starting point that leads to the more significant meditation on memory present in Stanza 3. The four-year-old’s attitude toward their brother and the act of “staring jealously” (Line 17) at him appear more important than the details of setting, as they introduce the memory of riding on horseback with their grandfather, a memory that is more lasting and evocative than anything depicted in the photograph. The poem’s evocative tone and effectiveness result from its success as both a fifth grader’s “autobiography” and an adult’s consideration of the passage of time.