Literary Analysis Of Persimmons

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A bildungsroman is a story showing the evolution of a character from an innocent childhood to a greater understanding of life that comes with adulthood. In Li-Young Lee’s poem, Persimmons, he tells the story of the speaker in an episodic manner to convey how the chapters of life are intertwined and the impact they all have on one another. This is a free verse poem and lends itself to the assumption of being autobiographical. It begins with the speaker in sixth grade being lectured by his teacher for not knowing the difference between “persimmon” and “precision.” It sharply transitions into discussing the art of eating a persimmon. The poem then flashes forward to a more mature memory where we are introduced to a euphemistic portrayal of…show more content…
This is clear in that a disproportionate amount of his poems from the Rose collection as well as The Winged Seed: A Remembrance collection drew from these two categories of his life.
While it is uncertain when exactly Li-Young Lee wrote this poem, it can be deducted that it was written sometime in the early eighties or late seventies. The exact date cannot be confirmed since it was published along with many of his other works in Rose, which was published in 1986. This year was full of tragedy with the Challenger explosion on live TV and the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant explosion. The years leading up to 1986 and following it were full of rising political tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States. Amidst all this darkness, Lee takes the time to reflect upon his own life and the simple pleasures within it, focusing on the individual human experience as opposed to societies faults. The initial analysis of the poem begins with investigation of the title, Persimmons. The poem gives an informational description about how to eat a persimmon in second half of the first stanza, so from this it is inferred that a persimmon is a fruit that is delicate and has savory meat on the inside. Also the speaker tells the story of when he was a kid in class and his teacher brought in a persimmon and he refused to
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