Eating Alone

In his poem “Eating Alone” Li-Young Lee celebrates the simple joys in life while embracing death as an unavoidable reality. Death is a natural part of daily existence and the poem seeks to mourn the passing of the speaker’s father by recognizing the many small deaths that occur in the natural world. These natural cycles situate the speaker within a larger truth, helping him to transcend the ego and accept his own mortality by contrast. In interviews, Lee has likened this process to “the discovery of solitude,” a personal journey in which the speaker explores the meaning of life through sensations of loneliness.

Though the poem’s subject is the speaker’s grief, Lee avoids sentimental clichés and overwrought expressions of sadness. Instead, the tone of the poem is more austere, which permits the speaker clear and unaltered seeing. This austerity sets the mood of the poem: quiet and reflective. While the speaker encounters the natural world, he is able to thoughtfully detach from his sorrow and observe it through a lens of objectivity. Thus, the speaker’s consciousness effectively travels beyond the constraints of his own ego (or a fixed emotional self-identification) and is expanded by the vastness of the world around him. He is not trapped by sadness but set free because of it.

The speaker’s transcendence is apparent within the poem’s first stanza. His focus lies outside of the self: “I’ve pulled the last of the year’s young onions. / The garden is bare now. The ground is cold, / brown and old” (Lines 1-3). Though the speaker occupies a first-person self-identification (the “I” subject), he is more concerned with the state of the garden. He recognizes the seasonal effect on the ground—it is bare, cold, and old—and the garden’s earth is the poem’s first encounter with death. Death inspired imagery continues: “[w]hat is left of the day flames / in the maples” (Lines 3-4). The speaker gauges time in quantitative intervals similar to the way a dying person might ask themselves, “how much time do I have left?” The poem’s second death is the passing away of daylight into nightfall. Such metaphoric deaths often occur in the natural world without much thought or notice. Each close of day is an essential part of life without lament—they are cyclical and beyond human cause or concern. The speaker is attuned to these realities, these daily deaths, because death has become real for him. Rather than ruminate over the emotions attached to this fact, the speaker remains distant from his feelings. He simply records his observations. Already, the speaker is outside of himself, searching for meaning in the external world.

In the following lines, the speaker becomes aware of his own solitude. He watches as a cardinal takes flight. There is nothing around him, save the garden and the trees. Again, the speaker does not attribute this realization to any emotional response. He instead continues his work and washes the onions he has pulled up from the earth. He takes a drink of water and notices the coldness of the hose’s metal mouth. Even though the speaker is aware of the death in his surroundings, he focuses his attention on the sensations of being alive. He drinks the water because he is thirsty and water consumption is essential for life. He digs up the onions knowing that they will not survive in the hard winter ground. He preserves what is living, knowing the reality of what can die. He does this for himself, knowing that he is alone and is therefore solely responsible for his own wellness.

The speaker then recalls a memory of his father. This memory is not sentimental nor is it retold with any explicit emotion. But the memory does have a powerful significance for the speaker—it is richly detailed and connects to the understanding of his father’s passing. The memory holds a lesson about the nature of life and death, a lesson his father instills within him by showing him the pear. With the fruit, the father teaches the speaker to see how death contributes to the extraordinary wonder of life. The speaker learns to pay attention to the smallest details. Such devotion to seeing enables the speaker to enjoy life despite painful circumstances.

This lesson is enacted in the third stanza, when the speaker believes he has seen his father. Though it is obvious the speaker misses him, he does not allow this longing to prevent him from enjoying the sensations of life. The speaker describes the shovel he mistook for his father as “flickering” in the “deep green shade” (Line 19). Lee’s diction choices reveal that the speaker does not resent the shovel, but he finds the experience both mysterious and beautiful. Much like finding the hornet in the pear.

In the final stanza, the speaker continues to enjoy life despite the pain of loneliness. He relishes in the details of preparing his dinner and cooks the onions he dug up from the garden. Here, the onions come full circle: rather than allowing them to die in the ground, the speaker uses them to nourish his body. He celebrates the onions by cooking them with wholesome ingredients that titillate the senses. The speaker focuses on the food in front of him rather than dwell on the loneliness he feels. In fact, the speaker enjoys the solitude and admittingly wants nothing more.

Though experiencing the death of a loved one is painful, Lee transforms that pain into art. The loneliness of the speaker in the poem mirrors the loneliness of the hornet in the fruit. Both allow for imaginative interpretations about the meaning of solitude but do so while also displaying the mystical beauty of life. This recognition of beauty is achieved through the speaker’s transcendence of self which expands his consciousness beyond the awareness of his own suffering.