The Gift

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Authorial Context

Li-Young Lee explained the impetus for “The Gift” in an interview with Bill Moyers, collected in Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee (see Further Literary Resources for more the sources mentioned in this section):

I was with my wife in a hotel and I woke up and heard her sobbing. I looked for her and she was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, sobbing and holding her hand. I noticed that her hand was bleeding, and when I looked there was a splinter under her thumbnail. My father was dead at the time, but when I bent down to remove the splinter I realized that I had learned that tenderness from my father (Ingersoll, Pages 35-36).

Lee plays with time in “The Gift” in an attempt to replicate this real life experience: A situation in the present reminded him of the past by accident, so he is expressedly not trying to write a moral-lesson poem in which the past provides some kind of framework for how to live his adult life. In other words, Lee is only reminded of the story of his father and the “iron sliver” (Line 5) when he finds himself responding in kind to his wife. He does consciously decide to replicate what his father did for him when he was seven. Instead, he behaves unconsciously in the way his father modeled for him decades earlier, only realizing the source of this behavior after the fact. In “The Art of Memory,” scholar Teruko Kajiwara explains that in Lee’s poetry, “the shadow of the present is projected onto that of the past” (Kajiwara, Page 130) rather than vice versa. Lee’s father is so omnipresent in his life and behavior, well after his death, that the man continues to influence his actions whether he realizes it or not.

Rhetorical Context

Rhetorical context considers the interactions between author, audience, and content as a way of understanding our reaction to a text. Such a focus is apt for “The Gift”: Lee welcomes readers into the poem in stanzas three and four when he addresses them directly during the shifts into the subjunctive and imperative moods. In stanza three, Lee complicates the poem’s straightforward narration of a past event by introducing a counterfactual fantasy—a “what might have been” that involves the reader as an invisible and confused observer: “Had you entered that afternoon / you would have thought you saw a man / planting something in a boy’s palm” (Lines 14-16). Lee uses the combination of the subjunctive mood (a verb form that expresses wishes or imagined versions of reality) and the direct address to guide readers to view the events as he prefers for the meaning he seeks to create. He wants his audience to connect the action of removing the splinter to “planting” (Line 16)—a connection that will bear fruit when the reader realizes that the father’s gift has planted in his son the knowledge of how one treats those one loves through his tender and kind care. This revelation only happens at the end of the poem when “I did what a child does / when he’s given something to keep. / I kissed my father” (Lines 33-35). As the reader understands based on stanzas three and four, “The Gift” is not the splinter but the attentiveness the father practices.