Rite of Passage

“Rite of Passage” by Sharon Olds is a poem originally published in her 1984 collection The Dead and the Living. The poem later appeared in 2004’s Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002. Often known for its Confessional style, Olds’s work draws on her family life, both as a child and as a mother, to make broader statements about contemporary society. The setting of Olds’s “Rite of Passage” is a first-grade child’s birthday party, and the speaker and mother of the birthday boy—likely Olds herself, given her regular use of autobiography—describes the group of young boys and their conversations and behavior. Like much of Olds’s work, the poem uses a scene from ordinary daily life to make greater observations about human nature—in this case, male behavior and the ways in which violence and dominance can show up very early in life. Olds uses the personal scene to explore the themes of Violence and Masculinity, Loss of Innocence, and A Mother’s Influence in society at large.

Poet Biography

Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco and raised in Berkeley, California. She often discusses her parents and upbringing in her work, including the strict Calvinist religion that Olds was often at odds with. She attended Stanford University and later earned her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her first collection of poems, Satan Says, was published in 1980, at the age of 37. She has published numerous books of poetry, including The Dead and the Living (1984), The Gold Cell (1987), The Matter of This World (1987), Sign of Saturn (1991), The Father (1992), The Wellspring (1996), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Unswept Room (2002), One Secret Thing (2008), and Stag’s Leap (2012). Her recent books include Odes (2016), Arias (2019), and Balladz (2022). A collection of her selected works, Strike Sparks, was published in 2004.

Olds often discusses her early love of literature, including work by Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. Although she is often considered a Confessional poet and has been compared to Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell, she considers Muriel Rukeyser and Galway Kinnell, whose writing primarily focused on broader social issues rather than the personal, to have had a greater influence on her work. Labels notwithstanding, Olds often uses her personal experiences as material for her poetry, including her childhood, which she often described as wrought with her father’s alcoholism and abuse, as well as her rebellion, as an eventual atheist, against the “hellfire Calvinism” of her parents. Later, Olds’s work broadened its subject matter to include more historical and socially driven topics like World War I, the Tulsa Race Riots, and the death of Marilyn Monroe. Her more recent books, like Odes and Balladz, experiment with traditional forms.

Olds has two children with ex-husband David Olds. She currently lives in New York, where she teaches at New York University. Her honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the T. S. Eliot Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Poem Text

Olds, Sharon. “Rite of Passage.” 2004. The Poetry Foundation.

Summary

Sharon Olds’s “Rite of Passage” is set at a young boy’s birthday party. The speaker is the boy’s mother, and her son is celebrating with a group of fellow first graders, whom the speaker describes as “short men” (Line 3). The children “stand around” (Line 5) at the party and occasionally break out in “small fights” (Line 6) and rivalries, comparing each other’s ages and sizes. The speaker observes the behavior of the boys, including their discussions of age and their ability to triumph physically over boys who are younger than them. The speaker then focuses on her own son, describing his “freckles” (Line 16) and her interpretation of his smallness, which reminds her of his birth. Her son then speaks, making the pronouncement that, as older children, he and his friends could “easily kill” (Line 22) a smaller, younger child. The other boys agree, “playing war” (Line 26) while they celebrate the birthday and life of the speaker’s son.