From Blossoms

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

The Origins of Joy

Structured around its repetition of the preposition “from” in the first two stanzas and “to” in the latter two stanzas, “From Blossoms” is a poem that asks where our joys originate. The peaches’ backstory, in their passage from orchard and boughs, to bins, to vendor, and finally to the speaker, provides an example of the ways that the simplest pleasures contain much more complex histories. The third stanza extends this principle beyond the case of the peaches in its opening lines, “to take what we love inside, / to carry an orchard within us,” (Lines 11-12), transforming the experience of consuming the peaches into a metaphor for the ways histories are both transformed and preserved by becoming memories. These memories help define the individuals who sustain and carry them into the future.

The poem’s allusion to the book of Genesis through the images of dust and fruit attaches its concern with personal and collective histories to existential and even theological questions about what it means to be human. Beyond indicating merely their roadside environs’ lack of cleanliness, the dust that powders the peaches’ skin suggests death’s inevitability. The theological dimension that the biblical allusion adds to this image of mortality relates this general human condition to a myth of our divine origins in God’s creative act. The symbolism of consuming the fruit likewise places these questions of mortality or finite existence in relation to the myth and doctrine of original sin.

This association has the effect of raising the poem’s reflections on enjoyment and mortality to a more cosmic scale, framing the speaker’s everyday act of eating a peach as something more archetypal. This cosmic framing is visible in the gradual transition from a more personalized to a universal “we” that emerges over the course of the three stanzas. While the reader is not likely to identify with the “we” that buy the peaches, they are invited to identify with the “we” that “carry within us an orchard” (Line 12). The poem therefore encourages readers to view everyday acts in terms of a larger pattern of creation, linking them back to their origins.

Transience and Change

From its opening scene, a temporary stop “at the bend in the road” (Line 4), to its final passage, “from blossom to blossom to / impossible blossom” (Lines 21-22), the poem seems to be in continuous movement from one state to another. The titular blossoms, for example, are not the final stage in the tree’s life cycle but are the place of origin from which the peaches begin their journey to the speaker. The speaker’s aim seems not to be lamenting change and loss but rather relishing “nectar at the roadside” (Line 8). Such an affirmation involves linking two understandings of change: change that causes things to perish and change that brings things into being through development. These two understandings of change constitute a spectrum, with dust at one end and fruit at the other. By consuming the dust and fruit together, the speaker implies their inseparability.

This fusion of growth and death does not cancel or negate the latter, as the poem’s final stanzas make clear in mentioning the “impossib(ility)” (Line 22) of only moving from “blossom to blossom” (Line 21) without break. Lee’s violent word choice in “devour” (Line 9) likewise suggests that death is inextricably woven into the life process, as its constant “background” (Line 19). While the poem seems under no illusions that one can escape this fact, the third stanza, with its opening vocative “o” building to the final act of biting into the “round jubilance of the peach” (Line 16), particularly serves to accept and even affirm it.

Community

The poet of “From Blossoms” speaks from the perspective of a shared, collective identity, a “we.” Just as the peaches’ “sweet fellowship in the bins” (Line 7) results from their having been plucked from their native boughs, the poem presents bonds of affiliation and community as forged and strengthened precisely through rootlessness and vulnerability to change. For example, the act of eating the peaches consumes and destroys them, but it also makes them a part of the speaker in the process. Centering the poem on a universal human act of eating, Lee’s scriptural allusions serve to place this act within a cosmic frame that imagines the human community’s mythic creation and fall from grace in Adam and Eve’s eating the apple in the garden of Eden.

Other poems in Rose, such as “Eating Together” and “Eating Alone,” similarly explore Lee’s interest in eating as a communal act. In these poems, the influence and death of Lee’s Presbyterian minister father features heavily. Lee blends this allusion to the western literary and theological tradition with allusions to the Chinese literary tradition in the image of peach blossoms, a feature of Li Po and Tu Fu’s poetry. By grounding these culturally hybrid allusions in their shared biological basis—the need for and pleasure in finding sustenance—Lee gestures toward a cosmopolitan ideal of personhood transcending national boundaries.