From Blossoms

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

Lee wrote “From Blossoms” in unrhymed free verse, a style shared by one of his literary models, Walt Whitman. Unlike Whitman’s long, extended lines, though, Lee favors the more frequent line breaks of American modernists like William Carlos Williams. Each stanza of five or six lines is comprised of a single sentence. Rather than using regular iambics (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable), Lee relies on a more flowing, falling cadence whose effect depends largely on the frequent trochaic rhythms—a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable—of words like “blossoms,” “peaches,” “laden,” and “nectar.”

Alliteration

While metrically irregular, “From Blossoms” produces a sense of musical patterns through alliteration, or the repetition of consonants. Alliteration is particularly apparent in the opening stanza with its abundant plosive consonants like “p” and “b” in phrases like “brown paper bag of peaches” (Line 2) and “bought from the boy” (Line 3) and in the second stanza’s dental consonants such as “d” in phrases like “peaches we devour, dusty skin and all” (Line 9). Like the alliterative, repetitive phrasing in final lines like “joy to joy” (Line 20) and “from blossom to blossom” (Line 21), such musical patterns convey a sense of linkage and connection. Many cultures use words that sound similar as mnemonic devices—tools for making something easy to remember—so that a phrase like “blossom to blossom” might automatically invoke an association in some readers’ minds with the phrase “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” or the mere mention of peach blossoms might invoke memories of Li Po and Tu Fu’s poetry. By contrast, Lee also chooses to refrain from using another common mnemonic device: rhyme.

Enjambment and Anaphora

“From Blossoms” utilizes two different ways of using lineation or line breaks to convey a sense of both movement and recurrence by balancing enjambment—sentences or phrases that continue from one line to the next—with anaphora—literally, “carrying back,” or the repetition of a phrase at the beginning of a line. The first stanza relies more strongly on enjambment in lines like:

from blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward” (Lines 1-4).

Enjambment gives the reader a sense of the speaker’s travel through the American landscape. The repetition of “from” at the opening of the second stanza signals a turn towards anaphoric repetitions that will continue for the remainder of the poem: “from laden boughs, from hands, / from sweet fellowship in the bins” (Lines 6-7). This anaphoric repetition of the same phrase communicates the peaches’ historical background in the orchard, something they “carry within” (Lines 12) themselves. The poem’s final lines present an almost perfect blending of enjambment and anaphora in lines line “from joy / to joy to joy” (Lines 19-20) and “from blossom to blossom to / impossible blossom” (Lines 21-22).