Eating alone is a great poem written by Li-Young Lee, it is showing how lonely and sad is the writer, and how he spent every meal alone. It a very emotional and affective poem, it has a lot of different meanings and emotions that the author stated in the poem. Now I will discuss the rhythm and the meter of the poem, and identify the subject of the poem and the speaker tone in it. I will also try to explain the whole poem in this essay. The whole poem was talking about Lee’s father (the subject of the poem). He focused a lot about his father and how he misses him a lot, and how he spent all the night cooking and eating alone every night. He also mentioned how cold and bare is his nights without his father. Also, he mentioned that he saw his father in the morning waving from the trees, but it was just the shovel. Lee also went back in time remembering the days he used to walk with his father side by side, that briefly brought joy to his life. However, this joy didn’t last long, when he returned to reality, he remembers that his father death. The poem doesn’t directly say that his father is dead, but some cues were given in several stanzas, for example when he said, “I still see him bend that way-left hand braced on knee, creaky to lift and hold to my eye a rotten pear” this shows that his father have aged, also when he said “Once years back. I walked beside my father among the windfall pears” that also shows that years back his father was old, so those two stanzas suggest that lee’s father is dead now. The tone of the speaker was very sad, cold and lonely for misses his father. Evidence that support that he misses his father can be found in the poem. The second and the third stanza reflects how he feels about the weather and I think he meant the fall season in which he uses a cold tone “the garden is bare now. The ground is cold, brown and old”, he clearly just mentioning the negative sounding around fall. A lonely tone also found in the last few stanzas, when he mentioned that his food is almost cooked “White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame oil and garlic. And my own loneliness. What more could I, a young man, want.”. The part where he said, “And my own
Lee perfectly uses the weight of peaches to illustrate his idea that they subject to the law of gravity that force everything to weighs down. Lee uses peaches to explain his father’s life, labor, love and death. “and his arms grow weak, as he labors under the weight of peaches.” This poem also has a powerful tone of feeling complexity as well as bitter sweetness of nostalgia as he begins with “No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.” The sweetness means a kind of taste or tenderness however he describes it in terms of weight and he generate his powerful idea about emotional complexity.
The tone of despair and loneliness is carried on to the proceeding stanzas, and is more evident in the last two. By saying that “Water limpid as the solitudes that flee
The tone of the poem changes as the poem progresses. The poem begins with energetic language like “full of heroic tales” and “by a mere swing to his shoulder”. The composer also uses hyperboles like “My father began as a god” and “lifted me to heaven”. The use of this positive language indicates to the responder that the composer is longing for those days – he is nostalgic. It also highlights the perspective of a typical child. The language used in the middle of the poem is highly critical of his father: “A foolish small old man”. This highlights the perspective of a typical teenager and signifies that they have generally conflicting views. The language used in the last section of the poem is more loving and emotional than the rest: “...revealing virtues such as honesty, generosity, integrity”. This draws attention to a mature adult’s perspective.
The use of the warm and cold temperatures is used to signify the childhood Hayden had. The contrast also sets the mood for the poem as well. Overall, the mood is drawn to be sad. The dialogue such as “Blue back cold” (2) and “cold splintering” (6) was used to represent the irritation and bitterness Hayden had with his dad. On the other hand, warm dialogue such as “Fires blaze” (5) and “Rooms were warm” (7) depicts the memories that were good and memorable with his father.
There are clues throughout the poem that express the man’s past experiences, leading him to have a hostile tone. The speaker represents his past as “parched years” that he has lived through (7-8) and represents his daughter’s potential future as
In the poem the speaker tells us about how his father woke up early on Sundays and warmed the house so his family can wake up comfortably. We are also told that as he would dress up and head down stairs he feared ¨the chronic angers of that house¨, which can be some sort of quarrel between his father and his mother in the house. This can also lead the reader to believe that the father may have had been a hard dad to deal with. However the father would polish his son's shoes with his cracked hands that ached. This shows the love that the father had for his son and now that the son has grown he realizes what his father did for him. The sons morals and feelings have changed him because as he has grown to become a man he has learned the true meaning of love is being there for one's family and not expecting it to be more than what it is. Consequently this teaches him a lesson on how much his father loved him and how much he regrets not telling him thank
While in stanza two he begins to explain it was a “bleak december”, Clearly setting the sad and seemingly depressing mood. But as the stanza moves on the sadness is filled with creepy suspense as it states that not only the speaker is up late at night on a late, and bleak December night, that the statement “And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor” finding out that the statement is explaining how the fire in the fireplace is slowly dying out, and the very few pieces of coal the “dying embers” seem to create creepy ghost like shadow around the room which creates the depressed and the creepy suspense filled mood.
To begin the poem, Lee begins by recalling an experience in which he was singled out in class for not knowing the difference between the words “persimmon” and “precision”, probably due to the differences in the Chinese and English Language. This being the first stanza introduces the readers to how Lee finds himself in the position of a cultural outsider to this new American culture. The persimmon in this stanza elicits a more negative memory but is the first interaction between cultures where the persimmon is one of the main focal points. As Steven Yao mentions, “these initial lines establish the body as the site upon which the issue of ethnicity, in its personal as well as social dimensions, will play out over the
It seems as though even when the narrator was in the warm temperature of the house, he still felt cold and reluctant to wake up.He was unappreciative and he speaks indifferently at his father. In this passage, the narrator is trying to show the extreme irony on purpose. Comparing how he treated his father to how much his father has done for him, shows a strong ironic feeling and helps the narrator give out the sense of sorrow when he followed the passage with his
This essay is about the poem which is called “Gooseberry Season” and it’s by Simon Armitage. I will be looking at the character of father in the poem and look at the different techniques that are used to describe the behaviour of the father. At the start of the poem the character of the father seems to be kind, generous and caring as he lets a stranger stays in the house when the stranger comes and asks for water. This shows his generosity and niceness. Later in the poem he becomes angry and has jealous. At the end of the poem he is a murderer.
In the second stanza it is the semantic field of cold: ‘winter’, ‘ice’, ‘naked’, ‘snow’. All these lexical items give us a feeling of cold which evokes loneliness, unknown, fear.
The speaker refers to the night as his acquaintance. This implies that the speaker has a lot of experience with the night, but has not become friends with it. Thus, because even the night, which has been alongside the speaker in comparison to anything or anyone else, is not a companion to the speaker, the idea of loneliness is enhanced. In addition, “rain” (2) is used to symbolize the speaker’s feelings of gloom and grief, because there is continuous pouring of the rain, which is unlikely to stop. In line 3, “city light” is used to convey the emotional distance between the speaker and society. Although the speaker has walked extensively, he has not yet interacted with anyone – thus distancing himself even further from society. Moreover, the moon, in lines 11 to 12, is used as a metaphor of the speaker’s feelings. The speaker feels extremely distant from society that he feels “unearthly.” The idea of isolation and loneliness in this poem is used as the theme of the poem; and the use of the setting and metaphors underscores the idea that the speaker feels abandoned from society.
As the speaker casually calls their parents, a setting of calm expectations is established. While greeting the speaker, the mother’s decision to “run out and get” (1) the father highlights the lack of urgency that is present. The mother is calm and fetches the father in an expected and relaxed fashion, further establishing the calm expectations of the ongoing call. The mother additionally states that “the weather here’s so good” (2). Heaney’s use of the word “good” reflects the setting of the mother and father’s home; the atmosphere of where they live is pleasant and unperturbed. The “weather” serves as a projection of the father’s own state, implying that the father is in good health and that death is not yet looming over him. The last spoken words in the poem reveal that the father was conducting “a bit of weeding” (3). The word “weeding” highlights the capability of the
This is significant because it emphasizes the melancholy and mournfulness that he depicts with imagery in the first stanza. Later on in the second stanza, he author describes the tree the narrator would have planted as a “green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs”. The author uses visual color imagery of the color green to describe the sapling in order to emphasize just how young the newborn was when he died. Later on in the poem, the narrator speaks of himself and his brothers kneeling in front of the newly plated tree. The fact that they are kneeling represents respect for the deceased. When the narrator mentions that the weather is cold it is a reference back to the first stanza when he says “of an old year coming to an end”. Later on in the third stanza the author writes “all that remains above earth of a first born son” which means that the deceased child has been buried. They also compare the child to the size of “a few stray atoms” to emphasize that he was an infant. All of these symbols and comparisons to are significant because they are tied to the central assertion of remembrance and honoring of the dead with the family and rebirth.
I interpreted this poem as a very sad one. A love unrequited by the pursued. In the first two lines the poem tells you to forget about the love you share and hear a tale of this. Not to literally forget, but possibly put aside. The man is a winter breeze, cold and rough and sort of roams the land. The woman is a window flower, shut off from the outside. This sets up the separation.