Alice Walker, born in 1944, is most noted for writing The Color Purple (1982) for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. Alice Walker has also written quite a bit of poetry. Like most of her work, her poems speak to the experiences of African American women.

It has been suggested that this poem, "Expect Nothing" was written in response to a childhood experience.

In 1952 Alice Walker was accidentally wounded in the eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. Because they had no access to a car, the Walkers were unable to take their daughter to a hospital for immediate treatment and when they finally brought her to a doctor a week later, she was permanently blind in that eye. A disfiguring layer of scar tissue formed over it, rendering the previously outgoing child self-conscious and painfully shy. Stared at and sometimes taunted, she felt like an outcast and turned for solace to reading and to poetry writing. Although when she was fourteen the scar tissue was removed--and she subsequently became valedictorian and was voted most popular girl and queen of her senior class--she came to realize that her traumatic injury had some value: it allowed her to begin 'really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out.' Because of the accident, she became eligible for and won a scholarship for handicapped students to attend Spelman College, a black women's college in Atlanta, beginning in 1961. Her neighbors raised the $75 for her bus fare to the state capital.

STEP 1: Read Alice Walker's "Expect Nothing"

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.


STEP 2: Read this poem again. Note the poetic devices used.