From Blossoms

“From Blossoms” appeared in Li-Young Lee’s first volume of poetry, Rose (1984). The volume explores Lee’s memories and experiences as an immigrant raised by Chinese parents who converted to Christianity. The death of Lee’s father features prominently throughout the volume. While on its surface presenting a simple narrative about buying peaches from a roadside fruit seller, “From Blossoms” uses the figure or metaphor of fruit and fruition to explore the relationship between sensuous enjoyment, memory, and transience. The poem tracks the peaches’ growth, harvest, sale, and consumption, as well as the buyers’ own experience of eating them, before turning to reflect on the ways lost origins always influence the fleeting joys of worldly existence.

In its concern with the interdependence of life and death, joy and sorrow, Lee’s poem shares much in common with Romantic poems like John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The poem’s celebration of earthly pleasures and embodied experience, combined with its subtle invocation of biblical scripture such as the Book of Genesis and Christian liturgy such as the Book of Common Prayer, place Lee in the company of American Transcendentalists like Walt Whitman. At the same time, Lee’s recurrent preoccupation with themes of exile, estrangement, and memory—hallmarks of immigrant experience—are here threaded through the meditation on the peaches’ origin, transit, and final destination. Lastly, in the striking traditional image of peach blossoms, the poem echoes the more ancient literary resources found in Chinese poets like Li Po and Tu Fu. The result is a profoundly blended experience.

Poet Biography

Li-Young Lee was born in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1957. Both of Lee’s parents came from powerful Chinese families: His father was the personal physician to Mao Zedong while his maternal grandfather was China’s first Republican President. In 1959, the Lee family fled Indonesia, where Lee’s father had helped found Gamaliel University, to avoid anti-Chinese sentiment. The family spent five years travelling through Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan before settling in the United States in 1962.

Lee spent his early years in Seattle before moving to Pennsylvania at age 6, where his father attended seminary and eventually became a Presbyterian minister. Enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh, Lee began studying with the poet Gerald Stern. It was during this time that he began seriously writing poetry. Lee would eventually attend the University of Arizona and the State University of New York at Brockport. Published in 1986 at the age of 29, Lee’s mentor Gerald Stern heralded Rose as a major contribution to American letters in his forward to the first edition. The volume was awarded the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Award from New York University.

Lee has published five volumes of poetry, a memoir, and a collection of interviews. A writer lauded with numerous accolades, Lee’s collection, The City in Which I Love You, was selected for the 1990 Lamont Poetry Collection, while his 2001 collection, Book of My Nights, won the 2002 William Carlos Williams Award. The Winged Seed: A Remembrance (1995) centers around Lee’s memories of his parents, particularly during his childhood in Indonesia and while his father was working as a biblical scholar in Pennsylvania. The memoir received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Poem Text

Lee, Li-Young. “From Blossoms.” 1984. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

A lyric poem written in unrhymed free verse, “From Blossoms” consists of four stanzas comprised of five to six lines. The first stanza sets up the poem’s general narrative context, as the speaker describes buying a “brown paper bag of peaches” (Line 2) at a fruit stand on the side of the road. The lines also hint at the background histories of both the peaches and the speaker. The opening line mentions the blossoms of the peach tree that produced the peaches while the fourth line describes the “road” (Line 4) from which the speaker turned to buy them.

The second stanza reverts to the peaches’ origin on “laden boughs” (Line 6) and their transport in “bins” (Line 7), while juxtaposing this flashback with reflections on the “dust of summer” (Line 10) that the speaker consumes along with the peaches. By presenting himself through the pronoun “we” (Line 9), the speaker implies that others, and perhaps all people, share in this condition of eating the dust of summer. The roadside dust that powders the peach’s outward skin presents a sharp contrast with the succulent “nectar at the roadside” (Line 8). These lines likewise contrast the erotic undertones of “nectar” (Line 8) with the more violent intimations in the speaker’s use of the word “devour” (Line 9) to describe the act of eating or consumption.

The last two stanzas move from the immediate narrative context to present a more abstracted meditation on the nature of experience. The third stanza builds on the previous stanza’s eroticism in its opening line, “o, to take what we love inside” (Line 11), using the figure of interiorization to suggest that things “carry” (Line 12) their histories “within” (Line 12) themselves. The final stanza then pursues the implication behind the idea that a peach could contain its history (“to carry within us an orchard”) by suggesting that “death” (Line 18) or mutability is a constant “background” (Line 19) to our worldly joys and experiences.