In the poem “The Victims,” Sharon Old speaks to her audience ultimately about divorce and the effects it has on families; she was in one of those families, which led to ultimately losing her father figure for good. Divorce is a terrible thing and has bad effects on the family. After reading her poem, we see that her attitude changes towards her father and throughout her poem the way she writes things makes it clear when we read it that at first she had so much hate for her father but towards the end she grew this sympathy for her father. The first part of the poem really sets the mood of what you think the poem is going to be: hatred. The poem is first in past tense. The first thing that I noticed was the very bitter way they thought of the dad. Sharon Old uses diction in such a way that it makes you feel the hate they had for…show more content… Sharon does a wonderful job of giving us different images to lead into what her thoughts and feelings are. In line eighteen, as she “pass[es] the bums in doorways...” (18), she begins to feel this sympathy towards the image that she once had of her father. The author goes on to describe the appearance of the bums on the street keeping in mind that her father could look the same if not very similar. Usually no one cares about bums and no one takes care of them, in a sense maybe they put themselves in those shoes so some readers might think why would they help? Sharon uses different symbols to really tell how badly the father suffered after all of this happened. The words used were: “…flippers…underwater…/…ships gone down” (21-22). These words could symbolize how the father has drowned in all of these bad things that have happened; the bad events that happened in such a way that made this man lose everything in which Sharon sees him as a bum, worthless and out of her