Butter

“Butter” takes a lyric swan dive into the buttery memories of the speaker’s childhood, in which every meal swam and glistened with the dairy-based fat. The poem proceeds in a single stanza of free verse in 25 lines, with no formal pattern of rhyme or meter. The speaker is first person, and the subject is memory, making “Butter” an example of a lyric poem, which typically involves a first-person speaker expressing feeling and emotion.

The poem starts off with the proclamation that the speaker’s mother “loves butter more than” (Line 1) she does, “more than anyone” (Line 2). Her mother consumes it straight from the stick, like a piece of candy, marveling at the science and magic of “cream spun around into butter” (Line 4). From this point, much of the poem involves litany, or a list of foods the speaker ate when she was a child, including “turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon / and butter” (Lines 5-6). Noodles sauced with “butter and cheese” (Line 6) seem ordinary fare for children, even if the pasta is “green” (Line 6). The next menu item casts the dinner table in an international light, as British “Yorkshire puddings” (Line 8) soak in “small pools” (Line 7) of butter. On the speaker’s childhood table, “white rice” (Line 9) gets a pat of butter rather than gravy, “staining [it] yellow” (Line 9). Maize takes the stage next in the form of ears of butter-gazed “corn” (Line 10) and “hominy grits” (Line 12). The remembered childhood table is laden with European influence, as well as grain that originates from Asia and native maize.

At this point the speaker remembers, not a dish, but the promise of one, when she recalls, “[…] butter softening / in a white bowl to be creamed with white / sugar […]” (Lines 12-14). Perhaps this is a future cake or a batch of sugar cookies. In any event, it is the promise of sweetness, rich and pure.

The butter saturation continues with “whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple” (Line 15), and onto flapjacks doused in butter and “Alaga syrup” (Line 18), a corn syrup-based product particular to the Southern United States. The mood is joyous and informal as the last remnants of “butter [are] licked off the plate” (Line 17). Here, the speaker takes a step back to “picture / the good old days” (Lines 18-19). In one moment on the tongue, butter is now shining on the faces of the speaker and her sibling, as they are “grinning greasy” (Line 19). The speaker says they have “watched the tiger / chase his tail and turn to butter” (Lines 20-21). This is a reference to Helen Bannerman’s The Story of Little Black Sambo (1899), a popular and controversial children’s book. In the story, a child is given a set of new clothes by his parents. The child meets four tigers who take his clothing and proceed to argue over which of them looks best in it. They chase each other until they turn into a pool of ghee, or butter, which the child takes home to his mother, who uses the fat to make a big batch of pancakes.

The story is set in India, where Bannerman’s British family lived for a number of years. Her original illustrations, however, portray the characters as racial caricatures of African Black people.

The speaker says, “We are / Mumbo and Jumbo’s children” (Lines 21-22). In criticism of the children’s book, these terms represent slurs, or derogatory names. The speaker says, “despite / historical revision” (Lines 22-23), and “despite / our parent’s efforts” (Lines 23-24). While “Butter” can be taken for a poem about comfort food and the simple richness of the family meal, it’s difficult to ignore the references to colonialism and its effects. The American table is a smorgasbord of international foods and cuisines, and is laden, as well, with evidence of immigration, diaspora, and slavery.

The color white gets four mentions in the middle of the poem. There is “white rice” (Line 9), the product of processing the grain so that the bran is removed, taking it from brown to white. “[B]utter [is] the lava in white volcanoes” (Line 11), a volcano being a thing capable of blowing and spewing fire. The “white bowl” (Line 13) and “white / sugar” (Lines 13-14) imply sweetness along with refinement—a kind of purity, a bleaching out.

The speaker resists this type of refinement when she recalls the shining faces of herself and her brother as happy children, wearing breakfast on their smiling faces. They have been enriched, instead, rather than refined—filled with an extravagance of butter, the substance their mother loved so extravagantly, and shared with them.