Eating Alone

“Eating Together” by Li-Young Lee (1986)

A companion poem to “Eating Alone,” “Eating Together” was also published in Lee’s first collection Rose. The poems are used as a frame to develop the narrative of the collection as a whole. This poem juxtaposes the differences between the speaker’s mealtime experiences. Though both poems were written after his father’s death, each one reveals a different aspect of the speaker’s relationship to his father and to his family. When read alongside, the poems inform each other and further explore Lee’s recurrent theme of life vs. death and fascination with food preparation.

“Just Before a Thunder Shower” by James Wright (1961)

Writing earlier in the century, James Wright’s poems also explore themes of loneliness and alienation. Both Lee and Wright compose poems strong in image and simple in rhetoric. For example, the images of the poem are quite clear: barrels of hay, a pair of wind-blown shoes, and a farmer calling his cows into the barn. These separate images come together to set the tone of the poem which suggests the lonely life the farmer lives. Like Lee, Wright uses the simplicity of images to convey a larger subject that reveals an unknown truth.