“The Cleaving” Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee

I like poetry. I think I would have appreciated being required to study more poetry in my high school English classes, because I remember much of the poetry that I read from that time, as opposed to the short stories of which I cannot name a single one. Even though I enjoy poetry, it is not something I seek out, and I don’t think I know a broad range of poetry. I found “The Cleaving” more complex and thought provoking than most of the poetry I have read before, and I didn’t know how to approach it at first. I don’t know if the analysis I did of it was legitimate, but I chose a rather analytical way to look at the poem, and I think that method helped me get more out of the poem.

The poets I remember from high school are classic such as Frost, Kipling, Cummings and Williams, and I own books of poetry by each of these authors, as well as other collections. I find “The Cleaving” to be different than most poetry I am familiar with. I don’t know the terminology for the structure of poems, but I found “The Cleaving” to be less structured than, say, the poetry of Kipling which followed certain patterns of syllables for each line and patterns for rhyming. The work of Cummings, on the other hand, did not rely on rhymes, but on the structure of the words on the page, and “The Cleaving” did not use the “shape” of the poem to express the meaning as Cummings would. I like the works of both of these authors, Kipling almost always evoking the rhythms of British-rule in India or of the infantry, and Cummings painting a picture, literally, with the words on the page supplementing the meaning of the words. I couldn’t decide if Lee’s choice of line breaks were intended to add meaning to the words. In the recorded version of the poem, the narrator used the line breaks to a certain extent for pauses, but I still do not know if there is a purpose for the breaks. In fact, I began to wonder why this work was not written as prose instead.

I have always been drawn to poetry when it was made available to me, even though I don’t seek it out. As children, my sister and I used to recite poetry together. One of our favorite childhood poems was “The Earl King” which we learned from a recording of poetry that our grandmother gave us for Christmas. I can still recite that poem and other poems I learned in school. I assume that there are two reasons why I remember the poetry from high school and not the short fiction; that is, the imagery of the poetry was more powerful than that of the short fiction, and it often takes longer to understand a poem than it takes to understand a short story. Both of these differences, a stronger visual and repetition, increase retention. When I enjoy a specific poem, I am likely to read it or recite it many times. Actually, my favorite poem is not in English but in Spanish, “Balada de los dos abuelos” (“Ballad of the two grandfathers”). There are patterns of sounds from Spanish words that you don’t get from English. “África de selvas húmedas/y de gordo gongos sordos [Gill 130].” (Africa of humid jungles and of fat, deaf drums.) I also like the poem because of the images it paints about two very different grandparents who the narrator believes meet in heaven and make a life together that they never would have in living. I enjoy this poem so much I once read it aloud to myself 20 or so times in a single evening just to hear the rhythm of the words.

“The Cleaving” is different from most of the poetry I like simply because of the complexity of the imagery. I found the reading of “The Cleaving” enjoyable and easy, the understanding a different thing altogether. I admit that most poetry that I like have simple, well understood meanings. I probably have avoided, or simply not been required to read, more complex poetry. I don’t think “The Cleaving” is very difficult, and I got meaning out of bits of it, but it is more complex than the story of “The Earl King” or, the impossibilities of another favorite of mine, “If” by Kipling.

After a first reading of “The Cleaving”, I wanted to break it down into more digestible bits. So, I used a technique that I developed for scoring student writing for conceptual content. I noticed various themes that were repeated throughout the poem, and highlighted the words associated with each theme with a different color. Then I stepped back from the poem to see if any patterns were apparent. The themes I chose were brotherhood/family, eating, death and flesh.

One of my favorite parts of the poem is where Lee says that the butcher could be his brother. At the beginning of the poem, he writes

Such a sorrowful Chinese face,
nomad, Gobi, Northern
in its boniness
clear from the high
warlike forehead
to the sheer edge of the jaw.
He could be my brother, but finer (Lee),

Lee says that he thinks this man is from northern China, but later he says that the man’s calligraphy makes him seem to be from a southern province. I think this is setting up for the lines in the last stanza where he says that he, this man, and everyone are the same:

scripts in the unhealed air, the sorrow of his Shang
dynasty face,
African face with slit eyes. He is
my sister, this
beautiful Bedouin, this Shulamite,
keeper of Sabbaths, diviner
of holy texts, this dark
dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one
with the Cambodian face, Vietnamese face, this Chinese
I daily face,
this immigrant,
this man with my own face (Lee).

There are many references to family in the poem, wife, sister, mother and grandfather, and one of my favorite lines of the poem is where he writes, “Brothers and sisters by blood and design (Lee).” I think the bookending of the poem with references to how we are all, in some way, the same and sprinkling references to family throughout is telling us that this poem is not about Lee but about us.

The images of eating, death and flesh, mostly animal flesh, intertwine throughout the rest of the poem. I have yet to reconcile the use of these images as a whole. They are clearly related to each other pairwise–we eat animal flesh, in dying our flesh is dying and we must maintain our flesh by eating–but how does Lee want us to think about these images? I think that he wants us to consider that each meal is a foreshadowing of our own death: “What is my eating,/ rapt as it is,/ but another/ shape of going,/ my immaculate expiration (Lee)?” Or possibly, he is saying that we are flesh and being flesh ties us, not only to the rest of humanity, but to the animal world as well: “I take it gingerly between my fingers/ and suck it down./ I eat my man (Lee).”

Written on 23 January 2009.