Poem Analysis Of The Gift By Li-Young Lee

“The Gift” by Li-Young Lee highlights the various ways in which love and tenderness exists and can be experienced between people. One young son’s memory of his father and his gentle nature is described in this poem. When the son was just a boy of seven years old, his father removed a splinter that had pierced the palm of his hand. Both later in the poem and in life, the speaker contemplates this memory and realizes that his father’s gentle nature and love impacted him immensely. The speaker’s tone is one of admiration and reflection, for he has gained something precious, a gift, that he will forever hold on to and cherish. In the very first stanza, we, as the audience, are immediately eased into the relationship that exists between father …show more content…
5). Though he is overreacting, as children often do, the son relies on his father to extract the splinter. As the father performs this task, the son studies his father’s “lovely face” to distract himself from the pain (l. 3). In choosing to distract himself by admiring his father’s face, the son expresses his appreciation for his father. The son also calls his father’s voice back to mind using a metaphor: “I can’t remember the tale, / but hear his voice still, a well / of dark water, a prayer” (ll. 6-8). The son was so intent on the way his father’s voice sounded rather than the story he was telling, that he can no longer remember the story. By comparing his father’s voice to “dark water,” he implies that his father’s voice was low and deep, but soothing and almost mesmerizing like a prayer (ll. 7-8). The son …show more content…
This shift between tenses shows that the speaker, who was once a boy of seven, is now a man reflecting on that memory. To the reader, it would have appeared as if a man was “planting something in a boy’s palm, / a silver tear, a tiny flame” (ll. 16-17). The father was removing his son’s splinter, which to him looked like “a silver tear” and felt like “a tiny flame” (ll. 17). However, the father did plant something in the palms of his son’s hands. In that moment, his father demonstrated to his son what love meant, and served as a role model to his son. His father planted a “flame” in his son’s palms that would burn within him throughout life as he recalled both the memory and his father. If the reader would have followed that very boy to the present, they would have arrived at the moment in which he now removes a splinter from his wife’s right hand. Much like his father, the son carefully and skillfully removes the splinter: “Look how I shave her thumbnail down / so carefully she feels no pain” (ll. 21-22). The son remembers how his father had removed his splinter painlessly before the story he recited was even done, and in this way, the son has grown to become like his father. He nostalgically recalls how his father took his hand in the same way to lift the splinter out when he was seven. The son is now able to identify with his father. Pulling a splinter from his wife’s hand prompts the son to