Eating Together

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Authorial Context: Lee and His Family

Lee has claimed that he uses poetry to help him sort through his memories. Lee revered his parents, and this biographical lens explains some of the content of “Eating Together”—the portrayal of a seemingly typical lunch for the family that turns out to be in the middle of mourning the patriarch. This revelation explains the family dynamic that the poem examines: The mother will now get to eat the head of the trout—“the sweetest meat” (Line 6)—something that the father used to do “deftly” (Line 8) before he died. The implication is clear: Before the father died, he led the family, but now the mother will do so. Importantly, the siblings accept the mother’s new position without question; the poem is not an exploration of power imbalance. Instead, Lee traces the way the living parent remains at the top of the family’s hierarchy, smoothly slipping into the father’s old place even as the family mourns the death that necessitated the transition. This positive portrayal reflects Lee’s relationship with his own parents, who encouraged him and his siblings to create art and ask questions, bonding over painting and music.

The death of the speaker's father in the poem relates to the death of Lee’s father, who had diabetes; Lee and his mother were his primary caretakers until he died in 1980. Lee’s close connection to his father connects to the simile at the end of the poem, where Lee compares death to a “snow-covered road” (Line 10) with no roads or cars. The father is “lonely for no one” (Line 12), just as Lee’s father didn’t die alone—he had his family members by his side.

Literary Context: “Nobody-hood” and “Imagism”

Although “Eating Together” has autobiographical elements, the poet intended readers to interpret the poem without knowing Lee’s life story and background. Comparing his approach to that of renowned 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson (as reflected in her poem, “I’m Nobody! Who Are You?” [1891]), Lee averred that “[t]he ambition of a poet is to write to a state of nobody-hood, to write from an anonymous source, and to the extinction of the personality” (Breaking the Alabaster Jar, 88). In Dickinson’s poem, her speaker ridicules people who want to be somebody; Lee’s speaker in “Eating Together” lacks any markers of identity: The speaker has no name, gender, personality traits, overt desires, or preferences. The speaker is “an anonymous source”; what defines them instead is their relationship to their family and the lunch. The speaker isn’t an individual entity but a part of the “[w]e” (Line 4)—the family that eats the trout and rice.

Gerald Stern’s introduction to Rose emphasizes Lee’s “love of plain speech” (Stern, Gerald. Rose. BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986, p. 9). Lee’s forthright diction connects him to the early 20th-century poetic movement called Imagism. American Imagist poets, such as Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and William Carlos Williams, believed that poems should provide the reader with a precise image, championing crisp objectivity in a way that matches the design of the speaker’s “nobody-hood.” In “Eating Together,” Lee gives the reader a nuanced portrait of a family eating lunch and a speaker recalling their father’s death; showing Lee’s idea that poetry’s purpose lies in manufacturing clarity of perception, not developing a personality.