Butter

“Butter” by Elizabeth Alexander appears in the poet’s second book-length collection, Body of Life, published by Tia Chucha Press in 1996. It is a lyric poem composed in a single stanza of 25 lines in free verse, with no formal rhyme scheme or metrical pattern. The poem takes a first-person point of view, by which the speaker relates how much her mother loved butter. A litany, or list, of dishes the speaker ate while growing up indicates the presence of an abundance of butter in everything, melting and pooling on every plate. The end of the poem references The Story of Little Black Sambo, written by Helen Bannerman and published in 1899, in which a young boy relinquishes his new clothes to tigers who proceed to fight and chase each other so fast they spin themselves to butter. Butter, in addition to comfort food, is symbolic, as well, of luxury and privilege.

Poet Biography

Born in Harlem, New York, in 1962, Alexander moved to Washington, DC at the age of two. She earned her undergraduate degree from Yale before earning her master of arts at Boston University. Alexander holds a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Her poetry collections include The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996)—in which “Butter” appears—Antebellum Dream Book (2001), American Sublime (2005), and Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 (2010).

In 2015, Alexander published The Light of the World, a nonfiction book she wrote after the death of her husband, artist Ficre Ghebreyesus. The nonfiction reflection, The Trayvon Generation (2022), is an extension of an essay that originally appeared in The New Yorker. Both American Sublime and The Light of the World were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. Alexander is the recipient of the 2007 Jackson Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her many accolades include a Pushcart Prize and the George Kent Award. She has taught at the University of Chicago, Haverford College, Smith College, and Columbia University, and she served as founding faculty at Cave Canem—a nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating African American poets and providing programs for creative and professional development. From 2015 until 2020, Alexander served as Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, and she was elected in 2018 as the President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

In 2009, Alexander recited her poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” at the first Inauguration of President Barack Obama. At the time, she was the fourth poet to read at an American presidential inauguration, after Robert Frost (1961), Maya Angelou (1993), and Miller Williams (1997). Alexander has since been followed by Richard Blanco (2013) and Amanda Gorman (2021).

Poem Text

Alexander, Elizabeth. “Butter.” 1996. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“Butter” begins with the speaker announcing her mother’s unparalleled love of the stuff. The speaker’s mother enjoys butter so much she eats it straight, reveling in the idea of cream transformed. From here the poem becomes a list of foods the speaker ate throughout childhood, the common denominator being that each dish was drenched in butter. The plates vary: “[T]urkey cutlets sauteed in lemon / and butter” (Lines 5-6) could allude to French-style cuisine, while “Yorkshire puddings” (Line 8) hail from British traditions. Butter takes the place of “gravy” (Line 9) on rice, glazes ears of corn, and is the molten condiment for “volcanoes / of hominy grits” (Lines 11-12). Butter is “creamed with white / sugar” (Lines 13-14) and poured on pancakes with syrup before it is “licked off the plate” (Line 17). The speaker then compares herself and her brother to the child in The Story of Little Black Sambo, who eats an enormous stack of pancakes made with the butter created when the tiger who would kill him runs fast enough in a circle to spin itself into butter. In the end, the speaker and her brother are so filled with butter, they radiate with it “from the inside / out” (Lines 24-25).