The Gift

“The Gift” is an autobiographical free verse poem that explores the past and the present, and shifts between descriptions of real events and imagined alternate realties. The poem begins in the past, with Lee describing something that happened when he was a child: “To pull the metal splinter from my palm / my father recited a story in a low voice” (Lines 1 and 2). The quality of the father’s voice is significant as it symbolizes the man’s kindness, which mesmerizes the child until he “watched his lovely face and not the blade” (Line 3). In the second stanza, Lee emphasizes the importance of his father’s loving manner: “I can’t remember the tale / but hear his voice still, a well / of dark water, a prayer” (Lines 6-8). The father’s mood and behavior is focused on keeping his son at ease during this event; his gentleness is not a front, but is a deeply seated quality, like the dark still water in a well.

Stanza two highlights the importance of point of view in this poem. The father’s actions are filtered through the son’s remembrances and sensations. In keeping with a poem that is largely about memory, Lee focuses on what he can remember and what is beyond his recall. He is unable to remember the story his father tells, but the clear memory of his father’s soothing tone implies that this was a regular feature in their lives together. Lee can also “recall his hands, / two measures of tenderness / he laid against my face” (Lines 9-11). Once again, Lee emphasizes his father’s kindness and care. His father’s lessons still reverberate throughout his life, in keeping with the poem’s focus on the loss of his father and how his absence shapes the family almost as much as his presence did when he was alive.

The father’s hands can do many things: The “two measures of tenderness / he laid against my face” (Lines 10-11) give way to “the flames of discipline / he raised above my head” (Lines 12-13). These lines connote the father’s medical training and his later vocation as a Presbyterian minister. As a doctor in China, Lee’s father learned the “discipline” necessary to relieve others’ suffering and to heal their ailments. Even removing a splinter, a minor medical procedure, shows signs of his proficiency. The flames “raised” “above my head” has the quality of a blessing or a benediction, that ties the father’s past as a doctor to his present as a minister.

Stanza three is a direct address that sets up a hypothetical situation imagining the reader—or “you” (Line 14)—witnessing the scene between father and son. While they share a moment of communion, this observer would misunderstand the situation: “Had you entered that afternoon / you would have thought you saw a man / planting something in a boy’s palm” (Lines 14-16). Instead of watching a father delicately repair his boy’s injury, the reader would encounter a moment of magic—an older man introducing “a silver tear, a tiny flame” (Line 17) into the boy’s hand, thus not only misinterpreting the event, but also mistaking this silver object for “the gift” of the poem’s title. Though easily corrected, this misinterpretation introduces the slipperiness of memory. Lee presents the events of “The Gift” as realistically as possible, but the reader misconstruing the splinter’s removal implies that Lee also may not remember the story as well as he assumes he does.

Stanza three continues the counterfactual into the present, imagining the reader haunting the boy’s entire life: “Had you followed that boy / you would have arrived here, / where I bend over my wife’s right hand” (Lines 18-20). Lee’s action here is mysterious at first. Though readers may connect it to the father’s action in stanza one, Lee builds suspense by not explaining his purpose until the fourth stanza. In the meantime, in keeping with the title, “The Gift,” Lee suggests that he is offering his wife something tangible.

The fourth stanza shifts from the subjunctive to the imperative, giving instructions to the reader. “Look how I shave her thumbnail down,” he declares, “so carefully she feels no pain. / Watch as I lift the splinter out” (Lines 21-23). This is the first reference to pain in the poem. Though as a child, Lee thought he would “die from” the “iron sliver” (Line 5), his father’s story was so captivating, and his actions so tender, that young Lee felt no pain. In stanza four, Lee illustrates how much he learned from his father in that moment, and presumably in others as well. The adult Lee boasts that he can remove a splinter as well as his father did, implying that his love for his wife is akin to the love his father felt for him as a child.

The rest of stanza four returns to the flashback: “I was seven when my father / took my hand like this” (Lines 24-25). The abrupt shift away from the wife shows that her part of the story is over. Though her splinter occasions the poem, Lee is most concerned with “the gift” he received from his father. Just as Lee lifts the splinter from his wife’s thumb, he shifts to the moment after his father removed the “iron sliver” (Line 5) from his palm, traveling back in time almost cinematically.

Lee slightly sardonically recalls his melodramatic childhood reactions to injuries in his description of what could have happened in the splinter’s aftermath:

and I did not hold that shard

between my fingers and think,

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin.

Ore Going Deep for My Heart (Lines 26-30).

Left to his own devices, the boy would have wildly overestimated the danger he’d been in, building complex and fantastical lore around the small metal fragment—so much so that he would have personified it as an “assassin” determined to penetrate his “heart.” His father’s intervention circumvented all of this, deflating the boy’s tendency towards overblown gesture—because his father calmed him, the boy “did not lift up my wound and cry, / Death visited here!” (Lines 31-32). Rather, the son did not make any more of the event than the father did. Removing the splinter was merely a chore. What matters is the father’s gift—a lesson that arrives in the poem’s final three lines:

I did what a child does

when he’s given something to keep.

I kissed my father (Lines 33-35).

The “iron sliver” (Line 5) is not “The Gift” of the title. Instead, that gift is one of kindness and care. The father treats the son with “two measures of tenderness” (Line 10), teaching him how to express love through gesture. The son applies this lesson, years later, in his relationship with his wife.