My Father's Whiskey Analysis

In Bobby Rogers’ “My Father’s Whiskey” he describes his father’s bottle of whiskey as”a fifth of Old Charter, Bottled in Bond”. The bottle was kept a secret, only brought out for special occasions. As a child he did not approve of secrets, whiskey or otherwise, saying “Opaqueness was corrupt”. Looking back, now, he understands why his father kept secrets, why he kept quiet. In the line “Best not to tell it all out, these raw syllables which, like any / volatile distillate, need long years to grow sweet” Rogers implies that words, like stories or mistakes need time to become bearable, if you let them out before they are ready they can be painful. One key image in this poem is that of the whiskey bottle itself. The bottle was “bought in the next town over or even further away and kept hidden/ in his sock drawer”. It represents the secrets, pasts, and mistakes that should be kept hidden from the outside world, as it was. A guilty pleasure, as it was, “it would last him for/ years”. This shows that the father, a silent man, was not careless about his use of the alcohol or about his

In the beginning these terms are used to describe the whiskey itself, “Baptist whiskey” and “fifth of Old Charter”, then to give examples of some things it might be used in such as “eggnog” and a “hot toddy”. Toward the end of the poem Rogers writes “It’s a slow drip that replenishes the flavors of an/ interior life the bitter notes blunted /by patient aging in casks of fire-charred oak, the seared staves mellowing the /liquor’s burn because they’ve been/ burnt themselves.” So much of the language in lines comes from the same family of words having to do with alcohol. These lines illustrate how Rogers sees his stories as liquor that needs to be aged before it is let out. As a final example in the last line, he refers to his “raw syllables” as “volatile distillate [in] need [of] long years to grow