From Blossoms

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

Peach Blossoms

In the traditional poetry of Li Po and Tu Fu, peach blossoms often connote seasonal change. Poems such as Tu Fu’s “Alone, Looking for Blossoms Along the River” and Li Po’s “Green Mountain” place fallen peach blossoms on a flowing stream and show them blown by breezes or strewing pathways. Such natural images provide an objective counterpart to implied emotional states such as nostalgia and longing. Lee’s use of peach blossoms plays on the reader’s potential familiarity with their status as traditional images while modifying this tradition with subtle irony. Lee focuses not so much on the blossoms themselves as on the peaches they yield to his speaker in an attenuated, modern form: in a “brown paper bag” (Line 2) and as a word “Peaches” (Line 5) painted on a sign. Like the peaches on the sign, the poem offers a kind of “quotation” of the traditional Chinese image of peach blossoms to suggest some degree of estrangement or distance from this tradition.

Fruit and Dust

Lee similarly estranges the Christian symbols of fruit and dust from their background by placing them in “sweet fellowship” (Line 7) with the poem’s traditional Chinese images. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, fruit is most prominently associated with myths of the Garden of Eden and of Original Sin. As discussed above (see Contextual Analysis), dust is an image frequently invoked in the Christian tradition to illustrate human mortality. The speaker describes the dust here as “familiar” (Line 10) insofar as it is a conspicuously traditional image, something self-consciously presented as a literary allusion. Pairing the peaches and the dust together to indicate the unity of life and death, the poem invites the reader to view the peaches from several different perspectives. The peaches are in a “brown paper bag” (Line 2), a word painted on a sign, hanging from boughs, carried in hands or in bins, their skin is dusty while their flesh is sweet with nectar and sugar, and so on. Rather than attaching a fixed significance to these symbols, the poem encourages the reader to see their meaning as subject to change, transformation, and reinvention.

Travel, Transport, and Transformation

“From Blossoms” is full of images of things moving or carried from one place to another. The opening stanza introduces the setting on the side of the road, while the second stanza reconstructs the peaches’ passage from the orchard in which they grew to the roadside vendor through a series of steps: from “laden boughs” (Line 6) to “hands” (Line 6), to “bins” (Line 7) to the “roadside” (line 8). The third stanza connects these prior images of travel to notions of memory and history through the transformational figure of eating, where we “take what we love inside” (Line 11) and “carry [it] within us” (Line 12) by consuming and absorbing it. By eating the peaches, the speaker asserts that he is also eating the “orchard” (Line 12) that produced them, including the “shade” (Line 13) and “days” (Line 14) in which they grew. Eating provides an analogy for the ways cultural histories, such as Chinese poetry and Christian theology, are both preserved and transformed as particular individuals absorb them.