Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources For Further Reading

Criticism

What Do I Read Next?

• Lee’s collection Rose, published in 1986, includes “The Weight of Sweetness.” These poems, many of which explore the poet’s relationship to his father, are full of nostalgia and tenderness. Of particular interest are the poems “Eating Alone,” “Persimmons,” and “Always a Rose.”
• In his interview with Tod Marshall in the Kenyon Review’s Winter 2000 issue, Lee discusses his family background and the challenges he faced learning English.

“See,” meaning to imagine the look on the face of a boy who is scurrying, unsuccessfully, to catch up to his father. We can imagine the look of awe and reverence on the boy’s face as his father recedes into the distance. In this case the father is moving into the future, towards death, as the boy is weighed down by all he has been given by his father.

In the foreword to Rose, Gerald Stern argues that what makes Lee’s father work as a mythical figure in his poems is that he is also a flesh-and-blood human being. “If the father does become mythical,” Stern says, “it is partly because of his dramatic, even tragic, life, and it is partly because Lee touches powerful emotional psychic layers in his search.” But Lee himself admits to an impulse towards the mythic when he composes. In an interview with Tod Marshall, Lee says this about poetry: “Poetry comes out of a need to somehow — in language — connect with universe mind, and somehow when I read poetry — and maybe all poetry is quest, a poetry of longing — when I read poetry, I feel I’m in the presence of universe mind; that is, a mind I would describe as a 360-degree seeing; it is manifold in consciousness, so that a line of poetry says one thing, but it also says many other things. That manifold quality of intention and consciousness: that feels to me like universe. So that’s why I read poetry, and that’s why I write it, to hear that voice, which is the voice of the universe.”

This “voice of the universe,” then, as heard in “The Weight of Sweetness,” is a voice which urges readers to experience loss not merely as the diminution of their own world but as a phenomenon that expands their world as well, in the song that comes from celebrating the dead, the wisdom that comes from knowing how to sing that song, and the sadness that comes when the song ends, which it always does. Lee’s poem about his father is universal because everyone has experienced loss and everyone has memories of that loss. Indeed loss, for Lee, is at the center of the universe. In an interview with Tod Marshall, Lee says, asserting that the invisible should be more important to poets than the visible: “I can’t help but live with this constant feeling, this knowledge, that everything we’re seeing is fading away. So where is ground? What is materiality? I can’t assume the material world.” Readers can “see” the fading image of the father walking ahead of the son in “The Weight of Sweetness” in these words. Lee considers the mind the ground upon which all humans walk. And for Lee, whose poems are laced with images of feet and walking, walking implies time. But it is an Eastern concept of time for Lee, one which turns the past and the future on their respective heads. About time, Lee states in the interview: “in the West we usually think of the future as lying ahead of us and we walk forward into it, leaving the past behind. But it’s probably the other way around for an eastern mind. The Chinese word for the day after tomorrow is hou, meaning behind, and the word denoting the day before yesterday is actually chien, meaning in front of. So, you see that to a Chinese mind, tomorrow, the future, is behind me, while the past lies in front of me. Therefore, we go backing up into the future, into the unknown, the what’s-about-to-be, and everything that lies before our eyes is past, over already.” The final image of “The Weight of Sweetness” illustrates this idea. For the speaker, the future is also behind him, in the image of his father, whom he runs toward, even as his father moves ahead into death.

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

Sharon Kraus

Kraus’s book of poems, Generation, was published by Alice James Books in 1997; individual poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Tri-Quarterly, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing, literature, and other courses at Queens College, CUNY (Flushing, NY). In this essay, Kraus suggests that “The Weight of Sweetness” relies on a tone of restraint and unusual narrative development to render emotional complexity.

“The Weight of Sweetness” is from Lee’s Rose, an elegaic book largely about an Asian-American son’s relationship with his father and loss of that father. The power of “The Weight of Sweetness” lies in its formal grace: the poem’s control of pacing and careful development allow its delicate treatment of a father-son relationship to emerge fully and without sentimentality. The poet structures this poem, surprisingly, by moving from the abstract to the concrete — “surprisingly” because so many contemporary poems move the way a fable does, from the concrete narrative or image to the abstract meaning that can be extracted from it.

“No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness,” is an unexpected and provocative thought, because we tend to think of things in dichotomies, such as pleasure / pain or joy / sadness. Sweetness, surely, is relief from the bitter pains of life. It should surely be light to carry; it should be one of the rewards of the great American Dream. But, in “The Weight of Sweetness,” Lee invites us into complexity and to see from an unexpected perspective where even the sweetness of life is a weight that must be carried. Sweetness here has its own gravitas, and as an active ingredient in the well-lived life, it conveys a solemnity we more commonly associate with the archetypal themes of poets — love, death, pain, renewal, or lack of renewal. Oddly enough, we can more easily accept that pain should have a role in life’s fullness, since pain is a challenge we have to rise to, is the shock that can sometimes create wisdom or effect change. And the “sweetness” of the poem is a weighty burden — a peach, a sack of peaches, a fallen leaf that must be “lift[ed]” as though it were massive, a tender gesture that might seem fleeting but accrues great significance for the poet. Once Lee says that sweetness too, is heavy, ponderous, and a burden to carry, it seems obvious, and we believe we knew it all along.

Lee’s poem is powerful in part because it knits these philosophical considerations with personal narrative. The first turn of the poem is simple and direct: from the abstraction, sweetness, comes the illustration, the peach. Indeed, throughout Rose, Lee likes to illustrate his thoughts with simple objects of conventional beauty — the persimmon, blossoms, irises, hair. His twist is to show the conventional image of beauty revealing an unconventional thought process. The peach, replete with sweetness, snaps the stem, causing fracture, separation, pain, bruising: “Hold / death so round and snug / in your palm.” How, Lee suggests, could sweetness be any less than the other mysteries of

“Lee’s poem is powerful in part because it knits these philosophical considerations with personal narrative. The first turn of the poem is simple and direct: from the abstraction, sweetness, comes the illustration, the peach.”

life, double-edged, as destructive and dangerous as it is pleasurable?

Indeed, when the poem then turns from peaches in general (“See a peach bend”) to a specific memory involving peaches (the poet-speaker and his father) we see that sweetness and pain are inextricable and require each other. Some biographical information about the poet and his father may help illuminate the relationship that the poem allows us to glimpse. Lee’s father was, for a time, personal physician to Mao Tse-tung; when in Indonesia, where Lee was born, he taught medicine, Shakespeare, and philosophy at the university level until jailed by then-President Sukarno for his “Western leanings.” The poet views his father as “a man of huge intellectual and artistic talents.” He was, as the poet reports, a kind man and a gentle one, but perhaps someone hard to emulate, someone so kind the need to please him was so much stronger. He also was strict and stern, and demanded that his children succeed by the terms he set for them: that they learn seven languages, for example. Li-Young Lee has said, in an interview with the journalist Bill Moyers, he feels that “Nothing I do is going to be good enough for him.” And yet, the poet confesses, he still finds himself trying to please the father.

Thus, the gesture that the father in the poem makes, of taking the errant peach leaf from the son’s cheek, is tender and protective, yet has an under-side that the poem’s last stanza explores. Notice that Lee does not have the father or the son speak, nor does he describe a facial expression, and it is by this, perhaps, that he maintains a personal yet impersonal touch. As the poem prepares for the final turn, the boy is “the good boy”: the article “the” implies that someone (possibly the father, possibly the wistful speaker) has referred to him this way. And we are given the poem’s key word: “entrusted.” The son in the poem holds the weight of the peaches that the father has entrusted to him — the legacy a child holds which will one day be all that exists of the parent. The pain of the sweetness of the relationship, like the pain of the peach severed from the branch, is that the father will inevitably recede from this son, do what the son will. Thus the poem points to mortality. It also may be pointing to an individual relationship where the son feels he will never live up to the father’s high expectations of him: “his own steps / flag, and his arms grow weak.” Does the father recede because he is more capable (in the poem, he carries twice the burden of peaches that the speaker carries) — characterized by Lee as having “huge talents” and therefore admired by the poet? Or does he recede because time pulls him away, as it simultaneously holds fast to the son, dragging at his feet and keeping him, emotionally, fixed in this scene?

The poem leaves these questions unresolved; perhaps they are not resolvable for the poet, as they are not resolvable for many of us. We are now invited to “See the look on the boy’s face,” but of course the invitation is really to invent the disappointment, despair, longing, whatever that look will be for us, and so the poet cleverly invites us in to the place of the son, deprived of the thing most longed for, lost, and at the same time still possessed.

Without resorting to clichés, Lee places sweet-ness — perhaps he means human joy — in the cycle of life. If the peach is to come into existence and be sweet, it must also fall from the bough and create rupture and pain. The very act of loving parents means accepting the inevitable pain of their loss when they die. The act of loving a parent may also entail acknowledging one’s own differences from that parent, and setting them aside. The poet-critic Roger Mitchell has said that Lee’s poems in Rose are characterized by their “commit[ment] to tenderness”; Mitchell suggests that the poems are narrowed in scope by the poet’s will to be tender. However, a close reading of “The Weight of Sweetness” suggests, rather, the largeness of Lee’s scope. Here is a poet who deftly and delicately shows us how fleeting and even provisional tenderness is. America has given us many descriptions of the dysfunctional family, as is only right as we work to examine, assess, and heal our wounds. Lee reminds us that sweet relationships deserve as close attention.

Source: Sharon Kraus, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

Katrinka Moore

Moore teaches writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York, and is a poet whose work appears in anthologies and literary journals. In this essay, she examines Lee’s use of imagery and narrative as he explores memory in “The Weight of Sweetness.”

“The Weight of Sweetness” is a poem about a son and his father. It is a poem about a particular memory, and also the idea of memory. The principal words are sent out and then return, bringing new meaning with them — sweetness, weight, peaches, father and son. The peaches symbolize sweetness — the taste of the fruit and the semi-sweet memory the speaker has of picking peaches with his father. Weight is seriousness, gravity, a force of attraction. There is the weight of memory itself, the specific memory of the father, and the weight of the father himself — all seen in a peach:

Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
and death so round and snug
in your palm.

It seems that the speaker, as a grown man, picks a peach and holds it in his hand, which reminds him of an outing he took with his father when he was a child. Holding the peach, he remembers that day, but he also feels the weight of the peach on his palm, as if he is weighing the fruit to see how heavy it is. To weigh also means to evaluate, to consider, to measure. He may be weighing the memory along with the peach. Is it good? Is it bad? It is more complicated than either good or bad: “No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.”

What is sweetness, according to Lee in this poem? Choose three from this list: “Song, wisdom, sadness, joy.” These are the elements that make memory sweet, but it is not an unalloyed sweetness. There is sadness in each grouping, whether with song, wisdom, or joy. Take away sadness and there is still wisdom, which must include sadness in this context. What wisdom does the speaker have? He knows that the peach represents not only something sweet, but death. He has, after all, just pulled the peach from its stem.

The speaker pulls the peach from its stem, and knows that he has grown up and left his father. But what he remembers is his father leaving him behind. They are picking peaches, and the father gives the son a bag of peaches to carry home. The “father has entrusted” the bag to the boy; it seems a sacred trust to be allowed to carry the sweet fruit. The father, being powerful, “carries a bagful in each arm.” Even with only one bag, the boy is unable to keep up. He gets tired, “his arms grow weak,” and he cannot live up to his father’s expectations. Meanwhile, the father, without looking back, “moves / faster and farther ahead.” When the speaker says that the child “labors / under the weight / of peaches,” he refers not only to the heaviness of the bag but to the weight of wanting to please his father, who is both loving and demanding.

The speaker pulls the peach from its stem, and remembers a tender moment with his father. They are picking peaches together, and they “shiver with delight” in the wind, the tree leaves shaking rain drops onto them. Father and son love each other; the “father lifts from his son’s cheek / one green leaf / fallen like a kiss.” They are together, just the two of them, fulfilling a task for the family.

The speaker pulls a peach from its stem and holds it, weighing its meaning. His father has died and left him behind. The memories are sweet, containing both sadness and joy, wisdom and song.

Lee directs the image of peaches to lead to both the memory and its meaning. As the critic Zhou Xiaojing writes in Melus Review, the poet often uses a technique in which he “relies on a central image as the organizing principle for both the subject matter and structure of the poem.” In “The Weight of Sweetness,” this central image is the peach, which guides the speaker to not only remember the event but to consider its meaning. Xiaojing goes on to discuss Lee’s strategy of incorporating “narrative as the material for meditation and the shifting point of departure for transition or development within the poem.” Thus, the peach inspires the narrative of the childhood memory, which inspires the speaker’s meditation on his father and on the idea of memory, with its measure of sweetness and sadness. The images and the narrative are woven together throughout the poem, though the poet does not bring the reader to a conclusion or solution. The remembered story has no definite ending; it is primarily a memory of a feeling.

Lee is certainly an American poet. The discussion of self and family and the free verse structure are common in contemporary American poetry. However, like many Americans, Lee possesses a bi-cultural view of living in the world. He gained knowledge of his Chinese heritage from his family, though he has lived most of his life in the United States. His father, who was a doctor and a scholar, taught him Chinese classical poems and

“He thinks of his father, and he thinks of the act of memory. Both thoughts carry the burden of sadness as well as the pleasure of remembering something happy.”

read to him from the Bible. It would be a mistake to identify Lee with only one side of his background, as Xiaojing explains, since it is a “misconception that a pure and fixed Chinese culture has been inherited and maintained by Chinese immigrants and their descendants in America.” However, as poet and teacher Gerald Stern writes in the foreword to Rose, in which “Weight of Sweetness” appears, Lee’s poetry is characterized by “a pursuit of certain Chinese ideas, or Chinese memories, without any self-conscious ethnocentricity.”

Lee draws on his Chinese lineage in “Weight of Sweetness,” whether deliberately or not. For example, his images are often complementary, showing two sides of the same characteristic, rather than the traditional Western oppositional approach. In his description of the peach — “sweetness / and death so round and snug / in your palm” — he could be explaining the nature of Yin and Yang, a Chinese philosophical idea. The term Yin originally meant the northern, or shaded, slope of a mountain; Yang referred to the sunny southern slope. Yin and Yang correspond to soft and hard, negative and positive, passive and active, but they are considered complementary parts of a whole, not opposites. Thus, when Lee views the peach as both “sweetness and death,” he is not being contradictory but expressing a view of the balance of nature that comes from ancient Chinese thought.

This view extends throughout the poem. The memory brings both joy and sadness; the poem is both song, indicating lightheartedness, and something of gravity, or seriousness. Likewise, the relationship of the father and son is neither purely amicable nor adversarial. It has given the son both delight and sorrow, which are complementary aspects of love. In the Yin and Yang of the speaker’s memory of his father, both happiness and sadness exist in harmony.

In the introduction of Li Po and Tu Fu, a collection of poems by two eighth-century Chinese poets, Arthur Cooper discusses aspects of Yin and Yang as they relate to poetry. Any healthy living being (and this includes rocks, earth, and sky as well as living things) “is made up of both elements harmoniously balanced, even though one of them may in some way be in the lead.” It does not follow, therefore, that the Yin and Yang must be of equal amounts to create harmony in a person or thing. Some poets are more identified with Yin; these tend to write more intuitively, less directly. Yang-identified poets, on the other hand, are considered more pro-active and intellectual. While these divisions are speculative only, Lee seems likely to be classified with the Yin poets, because of his indirect way of expressing his purpose. Naturally, though, even a Yin poet contains Yang as well.

Stephen Mitchell, in his translation of the Tao te Ching, a fifth-century B.C. book of Chinese philosophy, explains that the contradictions that appear in the uniting of Yin and Yang are “paradoxical on the surface only.” A follower of the philosophy of Tao te Ching, or Tao, would see the power in “non-doing” as opposed to doing something. That is, he or she would not feel the necessity of reconciling the surface differences of what may appear to be a contradictory situation. Thus Lee, in writing about his memory of his father, accepts both the “delight” and the regret that remembering entails.

Lee weaves his imagery and narrative together with his intuitive understanding based on Chinese thought. His approach makes it possible for him to tell a story without an ending, and to meditate on the subject and object of memory at the same time. He thinks of his father, and he thinks of the act of memory. Both thoughts carry the burden of sadness as well as the pleasure of remembering something happy. In Lee’s world view, these contrasting images are not impossible to reconcile, but are the complex, essential — and beautiful — elements of existence.

Source: Katrinka Moore, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001.

“Sweetness, for Lee, is an emotionally complex and powerful idea, as it contains a range of ingredients we don’t normally think about when we think about sweetness.”