I have given almost all my books away over the last five years or so because I didn't want to move them out to Maryland in 2014 and then I didn't want to ship what I had left and what new books I'd bought to Kellogg a year ago. I have some days, though, like today, when I would like to have some of them back. When I read this assignment, the first poem that popped into my mind was Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 ("That time of year thou mayst in me behold"), but I decided I didn't want to write about the inevitability of death. Instead, I spent the afternoon searching for another poem.
The poem I decided to share is, technically, not an autumn poem. It's about peaches and peaches are ripe and often ready to pick in August -- well, and on into September, but it is a harvest poem and autumn is the season of harvesting, so I gave myself a pass and decided this poem would be acceptable. I hope you think so, too.
From Blossoms
Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
From sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
I have a long history with this poem dating back to 1993 when Rita Hennessy and I started team teaching philosophy and composition and we used to play a video tape of Li-Young Lee reading his poetry and being interviewed by Bill Moyers. You can listen to that interview here and, in a separate video, hear Li-Young Lee read "From Blossoms", here.
I can't remember what Rita and I used to say about this poem in class and I don't remember how and why it was part of our philosophy curriculum.
So, as I read this poem again today after years of not having read it, it was as if I'd never read it before; so, as I write how I experience this poem now, on September 23, 2018, my reflections are fresh, and, for all I know, might parallel what I said in class about it starting back in 1993.
Today, the one phrase that stands out to me in this poem is "sweet fellowship in the bins." The speaker of the poem is experiencing an ecstatic moment, a moment in which suddenly s/he is experiencing the unity, the connectedness, the fellowship of all things.
This fellowship or connectedness is embodied in the peach. Look at all that resides in the round ripe loveliness of this peach: the blossom it grew from; the "laden bough" it grew on; the hands that harvested it; the dust of summer; summer itself. To eat the peach is to eat the orchard, to take the sunshine and the labor and sugar of the peach inside oneself and to suddenly experience the fellowship of the peach with all that brought it into being, all that nurtured its growth, all that made it possible to be in a bag on the roadside ready to eat, yes, but also ready for anyone who is awake while eating this peach to experience the jubilation of all that this peach is connected to, is in sweet fellowship with.
I remember back in the spring of 1983, I was leading a seminar in literature of the British Renaissance. The students and I were reading the play The Duchess of Malfi. It features an odd moment when the Duchess is made ill by eating a green apricot. In the course of our discussion, Bill Davie went on a splendid digression about the science of fruit ripening and helped us see that when an apple or peach or apricot begins to ripen and become sweet, it is part of its endlife, its death process. We eat dying things when we eat ripe fruit. When we say an avocado isn't ready to eat yet because it's too green, we could say, instead, we need to let that avocado die more.
So much of autumn's beauty lies in the what happens when fruits and vegetable are dying and need to be harvested or when leaves are reaching the end of their life cycle and turn red and yellow and orange and begin to fall off the trees. Back when I was a kid, our fathers used to further the death of leaves by burning them and the smell of burning leaves was one of my favorite sensations of autumn.
So when the speaker of "From Blossoms" says "There are days we live/as if death were nowhere/in the background", s/he is right. In this poem, death is not in the background. It's in the speaker's hand and mouth. It's inside the speaker. But that death, the ripening of the peach, is in sweet fellowship with life. It came from blossoms. It came from the life-giving elements of summer. It came from the living hands that plucked it from its heavy bough. This poem invites us to experience life and death as inseparable, in union with one another, and suggests that in the autumn, when we experience this union, we might also experience ecstasy.
I have a long history with this poem dating back to 1993 when Rita Hennessy and I started team teaching philosophy and composition and we used to play a video tape of Li-Young Lee reading his poetry and being interviewed by Bill Moyers. You can listen to that interview here and, in a separate video, hear Li-Young Lee read "From Blossoms", here.
I can't remember what Rita and I used to say about this poem in class and I don't remember how and why it was part of our philosophy curriculum.
So, as I read this poem again today after years of not having read it, it was as if I'd never read it before; so, as I write how I experience this poem now, on September 23, 2018, my reflections are fresh, and, for all I know, might parallel what I said in class about it starting back in 1993.
Today, the one phrase that stands out to me in this poem is "sweet fellowship in the bins." The speaker of the poem is experiencing an ecstatic moment, a moment in which suddenly s/he is experiencing the unity, the connectedness, the fellowship of all things.
This fellowship or connectedness is embodied in the peach. Look at all that resides in the round ripe loveliness of this peach: the blossom it grew from; the "laden bough" it grew on; the hands that harvested it; the dust of summer; summer itself. To eat the peach is to eat the orchard, to take the sunshine and the labor and sugar of the peach inside oneself and to suddenly experience the fellowship of the peach with all that brought it into being, all that nurtured its growth, all that made it possible to be in a bag on the roadside ready to eat, yes, but also ready for anyone who is awake while eating this peach to experience the jubilation of all that this peach is connected to, is in sweet fellowship with.
I remember back in the spring of 1983, I was leading a seminar in literature of the British Renaissance. The students and I were reading the play The Duchess of Malfi. It features an odd moment when the Duchess is made ill by eating a green apricot. In the course of our discussion, Bill Davie went on a splendid digression about the science of fruit ripening and helped us see that when an apple or peach or apricot begins to ripen and become sweet, it is part of its endlife, its death process. We eat dying things when we eat ripe fruit. When we say an avocado isn't ready to eat yet because it's too green, we could say, instead, we need to let that avocado die more.
So much of autumn's beauty lies in the what happens when fruits and vegetable are dying and need to be harvested or when leaves are reaching the end of their life cycle and turn red and yellow and orange and begin to fall off the trees. Back when I was a kid, our fathers used to further the death of leaves by burning them and the smell of burning leaves was one of my favorite sensations of autumn.
So when the speaker of "From Blossoms" says "There are days we live/as if death were nowhere/in the background", s/he is right. In this poem, death is not in the background. It's in the speaker's hand and mouth. It's inside the speaker. But that death, the ripening of the peach, is in sweet fellowship with life. It came from blossoms. It came from the life-giving elements of summer. It came from the living hands that plucked it from its heavy bough. This poem invites us to experience life and death as inseparable, in union with one another, and suggests that in the autumn, when we experience this union, we might also experience ecstasy.
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