Li-Young Lee: life, work, and literary significance

Li-Young Lee "The Gift"

The Gift" by Li-Young Lee

The first stanza of this poem speaks to every generation in every culture on earth. The first stanza shows readers a father, who is gently pulling a metal splinter from a son's hand. It is true that a person can die from metal poisoning, but the more important the father took care of the son, protecting his own flesh and blood. But the way in which he did that is so gentle and sweet; every family should read this poem once a year.

My father recited a story in a low voice," the poem explains, and the reader knows that the father did this to distract the son from paying too much attention to the wound, and the hurt that may happen when it is pulled out of the skin. "Before the story ended, he'd removed the iron sliver I thought I'd die from," Lee writes, which explains how caring and efficient his father is; and in the next stanza, readers understand that what the story was about doesn't matter, it's the love that was sent to the son through the sound of his father's voice.

A father and mother have a certain sound to their voices when they are taking care of the young ones. It is voice that can be scolding, explaining, reassuring, or just comforting. In this poem, Lee says that his father's was a "well of dark water, a prayer." That is a wonderful way to express his father's voice. A well of dark water is thought of as very deep, very deep. And deep is a symbol here of how much a father loves his son.

In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, editor Deborah L. Madsen of the University of Geneva writes that Lee's father "...becomes a constant in his writing, not only as a personal and mythical father-figure, but as the source of the evocative biblical imagery and power language that permeate the poems" (Madsen 2005).

In fact, Madsen continues, when Li-Young Lee was a boy, his father taught him Chinese poems from the "Tang dynasty" and he also taught Li-Young Lee the Psalms from the Bible, and readers can note how Li-Young goes about "blending" these themes into his writing.

In the second stanza of the Gift, the poet, whose own hand has been rescued from a dangerous metal splinter, notices his father's hands and how those hands are tender sometimes and harsh at other times. "The flames is discipline he raised above my head..." is a picture that every boy has gone through because every little boy has disobeyed at some time, and either been threatened by his father, or actually physically punished.

The third stanza invites the reader into the picture that Li-Young Lee is painting through his poetry. "Had you entered that afternoon you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy's palm," the poet writes. The scene would have been a father hovering over his son's hand, and the person entering would not know right away what was happening. Maybe the father is reading the boy's palm in some kind of astrology or fortune-telling move? But no, the poem leads the reader to think that the father was planting something in the boy's hand, like a father likes to plant good ideas and good values into a boy's life. The symbolism seems to be that the planting of "a silver tear" could be a tear from the pain of the metal splinter being pulled out, or the tear of the fear in the boy's heart that he might not recover from this injury.

And maybe too there is a "tiny flame" being planted, a flame of hope, a flame of inspiration, and a flame of recovery? We know from his biography (http://www.artandculture.com) that Li-Young Lee's father was imprisoned by the Sukarno regime in Jakarta, Indonesia, during the time Li-Young Lee was an infant. The Sukarno fascist regime hated Chinese, and Li-Young Lee's father (who had been a personal physician to Mao Zedong) got caught up in that vicious hateful moment of jailing Chinese people in Indonesia. That time in his dad's life might have also been a time for reflection, a time when he re-dedicated himself to being the best father he could be. The tiny flame could be a flame of freedom for the reader, no matter what his father's motives were, no matter what the poem was really supposed to mean. In the book American Poets Since World War II, Fourth Series, Joseph Conte of State University of New York (Conte 1996) writes that Li-Young Lee is "a poet unafraid of exceeding tenderness, and agile enough to walk the tightrope between anger and fear." In this poem, there is a tightrope between the fear of being injured or killed by one's carelessness (as in getting the splinter in the first place), and perhaps the fear of being punished by a strong father who has warned you about being careful around metal shavings and splinters.

And then the poem takes the reader from the boyhood incident with the splinter to a husband who is now helping his wife by removing a splinter. Does the husband sing a low song like a deep well with dark water? The reader doesn't know. The reader is touched by that intimate moment with the father, the passage of time, and love is within the lines of the poem throughout.