“Persimmons” by Li-Young Lee: A Critical Analysis

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker

slapped the back of my head

and made me stand in the corner

for not knowing the difference

between persimmon and precision.

How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.

Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.

Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one

will be fragrant. How to eat:

put the knife away, lay down newspaper.

Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.

Chew the skin, suck it,

and swallow. Now, eat

the meat of the fruit,

so sweet,

all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.

In the yard, dewy and shivering

with crickets, we lie naked,

face-up, face-down.

I teach her Chinese.

Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.

Naked:   I’ve forgotten.

Ni, wo:   you and me.

I part her legs,

remember to tell her

she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words

that got me into trouble were

fight and fright, wren and yarn.

Fight was what I did when I was frightened,

Fright was what I felt when I was fighting.

Wrens are small, plain birds,

yarn is what one knits with.

Wrens are soft as yarn.

My mother made birds out of yarn.

I loved to watch her tie the stuff;

a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class

and cut it up

so everyone could taste

a Chinese apple. Knowing

it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat

but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun

inside, something golden, glowing,

warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,

forgotten and not yet ripe.

I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,

where each morning a cardinal

sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding

he was going blind,

my father sat up all one night

waiting for a song, a ghost.

I gave him the persimmons,

swelled, heavy as sadness,

and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting

of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking

for something I lost.

My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs,

black cane between his knees,

hand over hand, gripping the handle.

He’s so happy that I’ve come home.

I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.

All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.

Inside the box I find three scrolls.

I sit beside him and untie

three paintings by my father:

Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.

Two cats preening.

Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,

asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,

the strength, the tense

precision in the wrist.

I painted them hundreds of times

eyes closed. These I painted blind.

Some things never leave a person:

scent of the hair of one you love,

the texture of persimmons,

in your palm, the ripe weight.

🟠 Theme 1: Language, Identity, and Linguistic Shame
Persimmons by Li-Young Lee begins with a childhood scene where “persimmon” is confused with “precision,” and the teacher’s slap exposes how language can police belonging, because a minor phonetic slip becomes proof of failure and cultural otherness. Yet the poem refuses that verdict, since the speaker reclaims authority by redefining “precision” as lived knowledge—how to choose ripe fruit, how to peel it “tenderly,” how to teach words (“Ni, wo”), and how to keep meaning even when a translation disappears. By pairing schoolroom humiliation with the sensuous certainty of taste, touch, and naming, Lee shows that identity is not secured by perfect diction but by the ability to carry two vocabularies at once, one public and punitive, the other intimate and sustaining, and to insist that the so-called mistake contains its own truth. In that reversal, the poem makes mispronunciation a doorway into memory, tenderness, and cultural survival, rather than shame.

🟡 Theme 2: Sensory Memory and Embodied “Precision”
Persimmons by Li-Young Lee builds a poetics of the senses, arguing that the body is an archive whose evidence is more trustworthy than abstract correctness, and this claim unfolds through the step-by-step “how to” of choosing, sniffing, peeling, chewing, and swallowing. The fruit’s softness, fragrance, and “ripe weight” become a grammar of remembrance, so that what the speaker learns is not merely vocabulary but a method: attend closely, handle gently, and let sweetness arrive in its own time. When the mother says each persimmon has a “sun inside,” she names an inner radiance that can be felt as warmth even in a dark cellar, and the cardinal’s refrain, “The sun, the sun,” turns ordinary mornings into ritual confirmation. By the end, touch replaces sight for the blind father, and texture becomes meaning itself, suggesting that memory survives as sensation long after words blur or vanish and love is stored there.

🟣 Theme 3: Desire, Translation, and the Limits of Words
Persimmons by Li-Young Lee links language to intimacy, showing how words are learned, forgotten, and reinvented in the charged space between two bodies, where desire complicates the neat binaries of “right” and “wrong.” In the yard, amid dew and crickets, the speaker teaches Donna Chinese, but the lesson keeps slipping into silence—“Dew: I’ve forgotten. / Naked: I’ve forgotten”—so that forgetting becomes part of the erotic truth rather than a defect to be punished. The fragment “Ni, wo” condenses an ethics of relation, “you and me,” and when he tells her she is “beautiful as the moon,” the poem uses translation as a form of tenderness, not domination. This section also echoes the classroom’s confusion of near-sounding words (“fight” and “fright”), yet it recasts confusion as human vulnerability: the self trembles, desires, errs, and still reaches toward connection, speaking across gaps with care. What matters is the attempt to name love.

🔵 Theme 4: Family, Aging, Blindness, and Artistic Legacy
Persimmons by Li-Young Lee culminates in a family elegy where homecoming becomes reckoning, because the speaker returns to the “muddy lighting” of the cellar to search for what was lost, only to find that loss has also taken a human form in the father’s blindness. The father’s happiness at his son’s visit, and the son’s “stupid question” about his eyes, stage a tender awkwardness in which love must speak even when it cannot repair time. The gift of persimmons—“heavy as sadness, / and sweet as love”—turns the fruit into a sacrament of care, and the discovery of the father’s scrolls extends that care into art: hibiscus, cats, and two persimmons painted with “precision in the wrist.” When the father asks, “Which is this?” and the son answers, “This is persimmons,” the poem resolves language into touch, affirming that artistry, memory, and affection persist when sight, certainty, and youth are gone.

🟥 Q1. How does the poem expose “correct English” as a system of power rather than a neutral standard of learning?
“Persimmons” by Li-Young Lee shows how language becomes a tool of authority, so how does the poem critique “correctness” as social discipline? The sixth-grade episode turns a tiny phonetic distinction—“persimmon” versus “precision”—into a verdict on intelligence and belonging, and the slap makes clear that pronunciation is treated as obedience rather than learning. Lee then refuses to let institutional English own “precision,” because he redefines it as careful, sensory knowledge: smelling the fruit, peeling it tenderly, and tasting “to the heart.” When Mrs. Walker offers a “Chinese apple,” the label flattens difference into a classroom stereotype, yet the speaker’s refusal to eat quietly exposes the lesson’s falseness. Across the poem, naming becomes care—translation, not punishment—so “precision” finally means ethical attention to people, memory, and culture. In this way, the poem suggests that accents and mistakes carry migration’s history, and authority always confuses clarity with control, too.

🟧 Q2. Why does the poem insist on taste, touch, and smell, and how do the senses redefine “precision”?
“Persimmons” by Li-Young Lee asks what it means to know something truly, so how do taste, touch, and smell reshape the poem’s idea of “precision”? The instructional passages about choosing ripe fruit, laying down newspaper, and peeling “tenderly” insist that knowledge begins in the body, where attention is slow, intimate, and ethically careful. Because this precision is learned at home and through lived experience, it counters the classroom’s abstract standard that punishes error while ignoring understanding. The mother’s claim that each persimmon has “a sun / inside” turns sweetness into inner radiance, and the later “ripe weight” in the palm becomes a portable archive of identity. Even the repeated “sun” song on the windowsill stages ripening as a lesson in time: meaning cannot be forced by rules; it must be waited for, handled, and remembered. By privileging the senses, Lee suggests interpretation is not intellectual but also visceral, relational, and durable.

🟩 Q3. What is the critical purpose of the Donna episode, where intimacy and language-learning happen together?
“Persimmons” by Li-Young Lee entwines desire with language-learning, so how does the Donna episode complicate the poem’s themes of memory, shame, and belonging? In the yard, bodies lie “face-up, face-down,” and the speaker teaches Chinese words while admitting, twice, “I’ve forgotten,” which makes forgetting feel less like failure than like the ordinary cost of living between languages. The scene is intimate, yet its intimacy is also pedagogical: saying “Ni, wo” (“you and me”) turns grammar into a relationship, as if pronouns could repair the isolation produced by the classroom corner. At the same time, erotic confidence is fragile, because it depends on naming—crickets, dew, nakedness—so the gaps in vocabulary expose vulnerability even at the moment of closeness. When she is called “beautiful as the moon,” the simile offers tenderness, but it also shows how metaphor becomes a bridge when exact words slip away and the poem refuses divisions.

🟦 Q4. How does the father’s blindness transform the poem’s meanings of art, memory, and inheritance?
“Persimmons” by Li-Young Lee turns toward the father’s blindness, so how does the ending redefine art, legacy, and “precision” through disability and care? When the father answers “All gone,” vision is stripped to a fact, yet the poem refuses to treat loss as merely tragic, because it discovers another sensorium in touch, sound, and muscle-memory. The scrolls in the box—hibiscus, cats, and “two persimmons”—become proof that seeing can survive as craft, and the father’s question, “Which is this?” invites the son to become a translator of the world. The climactic claim, “These I painted blind,” is not a paradox meant to astonish; it is an argument that precision lives in the “tense / precision in the wrist,” where repetition trains the body to remember. The final list—hair’s scent, fruit’s texture, ripe weight—insists that love is stored as sensation, and transmitted as attention from one generation to another.