The Cinnamon Peeler

The poem is a lyric: It’s relatively short and reflects the speaker's emotions and desire for the woman. As the poem centers on the speaker and his passion for the woman, it also qualifies as a love poem or an erotic poem, and, because the speaker directly addresses the woman, it's an epistolary poem too. An epistolatory poem contains a direct address from the speaker to someone or something (in this case, the woman), often in the form of a letter.

While the poem doesn’t explicitly mention the speaker’s sex, the contextual background of the poem—the poet and the period of its composition—makes it tough to claim that the speaker is not male. In fact, it’s more likely than not that the speaker is meant to be Ondaatje himself given that he was ending one marriage and entering another at the time of the poem’s writing. His connection to Sri Lanka, with its history of cinnamon production, also serves as a hint in that direction.

The speaker declares, “If I were a cinnamon peeler” (Line 1), immediately revealing that the titular “Cinnamon Peeler” is not literally a cinnamon peeler. The diction—the words used by the speaker—creates an alternate or hypothetical world in which the speaker inhabits a role he does not actually play.