Eating Together

The poem is a short lyric poem that emphasizes the personal memories of the speaker—in this case, a lunch occurring “weeks” (Line 9) after their father’s death. As the poem alludes to death, it qualifies as an elegy, paying tribute to the father and recognizing his life by including him in the portrait of the meal.

The authorial context indicates that the speaker is Lee, and the poem is about a family meal after his father died. Many of Lee’s poems focus on his father and personal life, and “Eating Together” continues the pattern of Lee using poetry to untangle his memories.

Conversely, Lee’s belief in a poetic speaker’s “nobody-hood” (See: Background) undercuts the biographical interpretation. A close reading of the poem reveals a speaker without a name or identity, defined by the food they eat and the family that surrounds them rather than by any personal markers. Thus, identifying the speaker as Lee isn’t integral to understanding the poem; rather, the speaker’s role in their environment is what is important: They function as a witness, observing the lunch and documenting what they see with as much objectivity and dispassion as being part of the family allows.

The diction adds to the speaker’s self-erasure. The poem features only one first-person nominative pronoun—the plural “we” that appears in Line 4, “We shall eat it with rice for lunch.” This “we” submerges the speaker’s individuality, collapsing their singular existence into that of their family—the “we” who are having lunch. The poem does contain two first-person possessive pronouns—“my mother” (Line 5) and “my father” (Line 8)—yet the mother and father don’t exclusively belong to the speaker: They’re also the parents of the “brothers” and “sister” (Line 5). The poem lacks first-person singular pronouns like “I” or “me,” making the speaker downplay their subjectivity and present as an objective recorder.

The speaker’s lack of personality is a feature of Imagist poetry (See: Background), a movement foregrounding clear and exact illustration, and foregoing the articulation of feelings. Here, instead of performing the typical elegiac maneuver of showcasing grief, Lee’s speaker uses precise words to illustrate the meal and the death, letting readers infer the emotional content of the lunch from subtext. Sensory language is paramount. The reader can smell the trout “seasoned with slivers of ginger” (Line 2), they can feel the mother holding the trout’s head “between her fingers / deftly” (Lines 7-8), and they can “taste the sweetest meat of the head” (Line 6). This sense-rich description invites the reader to the meal and assigns them a similar function to the speaker: The reader, too, is a witness.

The tone at first supports this Imagist approach. The speaker doesn’t get excited or emotional; Lines 1-4 mimic the dispassionate tone of a recipe, as if readers are learning how to prepare steamed trout: Season it with ginger, sesame oil, and green onion, and serve it with rice. However, even this detached voice cannot help but convey warmth; the speaker’s familiarity with the food being made implies the accompanying kinship that is made explicit when the next lines report that the lunch is for the speaker’s “brothers” and “sister,” and also “mother,” who gets to eat the “sweetest meat of the head” (Lines 5-7).

Still, the poem’s choice of words several times subverts the speaker’s objectivity, suggesting a personality. The word “slivers” (Line 2), for example, injects the poem with aesthetic flare. Lee could have omitted the noun and plainly said, “[S]easoned with ginger”; making the choice to add this kind of color commentary subtly shows the speaker’s interest in linguistic ornamentation. In another moment that undercuts the speaker’s impersonality, the speaker states that their mother will “taste the sweetest meat of the head” (Line 6). The adjective “sweetest” stands out for its qualitative judgment. The speaker clearly desires to eat the head, but must obey established hierarchy—the willing sublimation of desire echoes the purposeful obfuscation of the speaker’s subjectivity. Finally, by imagining his mother holding the trout “deftly” (Line 8), the speaker evaluatively compares his parents, praising both for masterfully handling the fish head like experts. No longer impartial, the speaker has aligned himself with his mother’s succession of his father as head of the family.

Then, the comfort, nurture, and love implied by this union of hearth and family pivots sharply into wistfulness and grief as the poem turns to the speaker’s father, who for weeks has not been part of the lunchtime ritual because he “lay down / to sleep” (Lines 9-10)—figurative language for death. The following simile—the speaker compares their father’s death to an empty snowy road “winding through pines” (Line 10)—furthers the desolate tone. This poetic device marks a sharp transformation in the poem. Moving away from the clear, precise language of its first half, which used no figurative language or comparison, the speaker is suddenly unable to bear direct witness to their father’s death. Instead, he relies on euphemism, softening the idea of death into that of sleep, and on analogy, describing the father’s demise as a solo voyage. Moreover, the word “lonely” (Line 12) explicitly refers to emotion; the speaker has no ability to know the dead father’s feelings, but reassures himself that the father isn’t sad or isolated—a way of managing mourning.