Poem 39 - Analysis

Waking at thirty-nine: an earned, slightly defiant optimism

Lawson’s poem turns on a small miracle of mood: I only woke this morning and suddenly the world is fair. That fairness isn’t naïve; it’s the surprise of a man who expected to feel used up and instead finds himself intact. The speaker is going on for forty with scarcely one grey hair and scarce a sign of crows’ feet—details that matter because they are physical proof that he has survived more than time: he has survived pressure. Even the line In spite of all my sins undercuts any saintly self-portrait. The central claim feels like this: turning forty can be a second beginning, not because life has been kind, but because the speaker has endured enough to claim a new kind of freedom.

The tone is celebratory, but it’s a celebration that keeps glancing over its shoulder. The repeated toasts—Then here’s the Forties; We’re good for ten years more—sound like a man talking himself into hope in public, insisting on his own future as if it needs to be declared aloud to become real.

The Forties as a chant against being erased

The refrain (The Forties! The Forties!) works like a rallying cry, but also like a charm against relapse into the past. Each time the poem returns to We’re good for ten years more, it frames life as a series of contracts renewed decade by decade. That is both hearty and precarious: the speaker’s confidence is measured in ten-year increments, as if he’s learned not to promise more than he can guarantee. The poem’s energy comes from this tension—between the boldness of the toast and the careful limit placed on it.

Notice how the Forties get renamed each time: living, then wide, free, then wiser, then stronger. The speaker isn’t just aging; he’s trying on versions of himself, searching for the adjective that finally fits. The decade becomes a room he’s determined to enter, not just a number he’s forced to carry.

Teens and twenties: stolen childhood, then hard-earned comradeship

The poem’s fairness is sharpened by how bleak the early years were. The teens are black and bitter, a smothered boyhood’s grave, and the speaker is reduced to blunt labels: farm-drudge in drought-time, then a weary workshop slave. Those phrases don’t romanticize poverty; they compress it into breathless labor. The speaker’s promise for the Forties—We’ll find time in the Forties / To have some boyhood there—is not nostalgia but a form of restitution. He wants to reclaim an inner life that work and harsh conditions buried.

The twenties arrive as a different kind of intensity: noble, bravest, full of man to man closeness. Yet even here, the praise is double-edged. It’s man to man in trouble, in working and in drink, and even in fighting for money or praise. The camaraderie is real, but it’s forged in strain, competition, and escape. When the speaker hopes for more Bohemian days in the Forties, he isn’t simply asking for fun; he’s asking for a version of freedom that doesn’t have to be purchased with self-destruction.

The thirties: a decade disowned

The darkest turn comes with the thirties, which the speaker calls the fate years. The language shifts from boasting to endurance: I fought behind the scenes; I held them not but bore them. The most striking line is They were no years of mine—a radical act of refusal. He treats that decade like an occupying force, something that happened to him rather than something he lived. By saying the thirties were more cruel / And blacker than the teens, the poem suggests that adult suffering can feel worse than youthful deprivation because you understand it more fully and have less room to dream your way out.

And then, with a snap of arithmetic, he frees himself: they are going from me, / For I am thirty-nine. It’s not that the pain vanishes; it’s that the calendar gives him a lever. The approach of forty becomes a legal boundary line: the speaker can finally declare the old sentence served.

A challenging question the poem leaves behind

If the thirties were no years of his, what does it mean to call the Forties good old before they even arrive? The poem’s bravest gamble is that naming can remake experience—that saying wide, free or wiser might help make it true. The refrain sounds jubilant, but it also sounds like a man determined not to lose another decade to forces behind the scenes.

What the world is fair really means here

By the end, the poem’s fairness is not a claim that life has been just. It’s closer to a claim about perspective and survival: after drought-time, slavery-like work, drinking, fighting, and a decade of faceless fate, the speaker wakes and finds he is still capable of beginning. The Forties are imagined as compensation—boyhood recovered, Bohemia reclaimed, strength and wisdom consolidated. The final toast—here’s the stronger Forties—lands as both celebration and vow: if time is going to keep moving, he intends to meet it on his feet.