Butter

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1996

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

“Butter” is a lyric poem written in a single stanza of 25 lines. It is free verse, meaning that the poet employs no formal pattern of meter or rhyme. That doesn’t mean, however, that the poem is without music. Lyric verse, as the name implies, generally features a sense of musicality. “Butter” achieves its music through variations of meter and other poetic devices. Although the pattern varies, elements of prosody—or patterns of rhythm and sound—exist. For example, in Line 3, after the speaker’s mother takes a pinchful of butter from “the stick | and eats | it plain, | explaining” (Line 3). The line is in iambic tetrameter, wherein there are four feet (units of meter), each one containing an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. This pattern is called a rising meter. It feels a little like a march, positive and forthright.

An example of falling meter occurs on Line 2, with “more than anyone” (Line 2), wherein a trochee—a foot with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable—is followed by a dactyl—a foot with a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.

Elsewhere, the poet uses spondees, or a foot composed of two consecutive stressed syllables. Spondees in “Butter” include “white rice” (Line 9) and “white bowl” (Line 13). Both syllables in the foot carry equal weight.

Repetition

The most obvious use of repetition in “Butter” is the repetition of the word “butter” (Line 1). In the 25 lines of the poem, the word occurs 14 times, twice on Line 6. Butter bubbles up on almost every other line, until the last third of the poem, when it becomes scarcer, occurring on every fourth line from Line 17 to the final line, where “butter” is the last word of the poem. The idea, perhaps, is abundance to the point of excess: There’s no such thing as too much of a good thing. It symbolizes, too, the richness of the family meal—the experience of it as well as the food itself.

Another example of repetition echoes the notion of abundance: “My mother loves butter more than I do, / more than anyone” (Lines 1-2). Where some butter might add a dollop of deliciousness, more is better. By the time the reader reaches the last third of the poem, butter is transformed yet again. Butter is the metaphorical result of watching “the tiger / chase his tail” (Lines 20-21), and butter is the bright—“one hundred megawatts” (Line 25)—light that lets the children of the speaker’s memory shine.

Allusion

Throughout much of the poem, the images the poet employs are concrete—where “white volcanoes / of hominy grits” (Lines 11-12) is lyric in its language (and very possibly symbolic of a greater idea), it is also a concrete image of grits on a plate with a caldera of hot butter at its mounded center. The food is real enough to smell and taste, even as the language opens an opportunity for deeper consideration.

Allusion—or reference to a text or idea from outside the work—enters the poem on Line 20, when the speaker and her brother have “watched the tiger / chase his tail and turn to butter” (Lines 20-21). The reference is to the 1899 children’s book, The Story of Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman. Criticized for racial stereotyping and its use of racial slurs since the early-20th century, it continues, in revised forms, to be produced today. In referencing this material, the poet reveals the persistence of racism “despite / historical revision, despite / our parent’s efforts” (Lines 22-24).

In the end, however, butter prevails—“butter” (Line 25) has the last word.