From Blossoms

In the traditional poetry of Li Po and Tu Fu, peach blossoms often connote seasonal change. Poems such as Tu Fu’s “Alone, Looking for Blossoms Along the River” and Li Po’s “Green Mountain” place fallen peach blossoms on a flowing stream and show them blown by breezes or strewing pathways. Such natural images provide an objective counterpart to implied emotional states such as nostalgia and longing. Lee’s use of peach blossoms plays on the reader’s potential familiarity with their status as traditional images while modifying this tradition with subtle irony. Lee focuses not so much on the blossoms themselves as on the peaches they yield to his speaker in an attenuated, modern form: in a “brown paper bag” (Line 2) and as a word “Peaches” (Line 5) painted on a sign. Like the peaches on the sign, the poem offers a kind of “quotation” of the traditional Chinese image of peach blossoms to suggest some degree of estrangement or distance from this tradition.

Lee similarly estranges the Christian symbols of fruit and dust from their background by placing them in “sweet fellowship” (Line 7) with the poem’s traditional Chinese images. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, fruit is most prominently associated with myths of the Garden of Eden and of Original Sin.