Li-Young Lee, the author of “The Gift,” is a Chinese-American poet. “The Gift,” one of Lee’s most anthologized poems, comes from his first poetry collection, Rose, published in 1986. This narrative poem focuses on a memory of Lee’s father triggered when the speaker removes a splinter from his wife’s thumbnail. Central to the poem are themes that recur often in Lee’s other work: the connection between the present and past, memory, and storytelling. Just as the father told the son a story to distract him while removing a metal splinter from his palm, so the son, now an adult, offers the poem as a gift to his wife to distract her from his ministrations. The poem demonstrates Lee’s close attention to detail, meditative tone, and ability to move freely between the past and present.

Poet Biography

Li-Young Lee was born into a prestigious family in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1957. His great-grandfather was the first president of the Republic of China, while his father was personal physician to Mao Zedong. Lee’s father moved the family to Indonesia shortly after his birth, but they left Indonesia in 1959 due to that country’s virulent anti-Chinese attitude, which Lee has discussed in many interviews. After living in Hong Kong, Macau, and Japan, the family ended up in Pennsylvania in 1964, where Lee’s father was ordained as a Presbyterian minister.

Lee’s first poetry collection, Rose, came out in 1986 and won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Prize. In his introduction to the collection, fellow poet Gerald Stern compared Lee to renowned poets John Keats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Theodore Roethke. Lee’s second collection, The City in Which I Love You, was the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection. Lee next wrote the memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, which was published in 1995 and received the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Lee has published several more books of poetry in the years since then, including Book of My Nights, Behind My Eyes, and The Undressing.

Lee has received numerous other awards, including fellowships from the American Academy of Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation, a Lannan Literary Award, a Whiting Award, and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award. He received an honorary doctorate from SUNY-Brockport in 1998 and lives in Chicago with his family.

Poem Text

Lee, Li-Young. “The Gift.” 1986. Academy of American Poets.

Summary

“The Gift” is an autobiographical poem that opens in past tense, with the speaker relaying the moment when his father removed a “metal splinter” (Line 1) from his hand. To distract the child, the father told him a story that kept him so transfixed that he did not look at the knife the father used and forgot to worry about the shard of metal that at first seemed to the young boy to be fatal. At the beginning of the second stanza, the speaker admits that he “can’t remember the tale, / but hear his voice still” (Lines 6-7). The father’s actions matter more to the speaker than the contents of that story, for he can “recall his hands, / two measures of tenderness / he laid against my face” (Lines 9-11).

The third stanza shifts into the subjunctive, as the speaker imagines the reader watching the scene: “Had you entered that afternoon / you would have thought you saw a man / planting something in a boy’s palm” (Lines 14-16). This stanza creates a shift from the direct reporting of the moment between the father and son to a conscious awareness of the greater world. Lee makes room for the reader to enter the poem in second person and introduces his wife, whose splinter occasions the poem: “Had you followed that boy / you would have arrived here, / where I bend over my wife’s right hand” (Lines 18-20).

The final and longest stanza begins with another shift, from the subjunctive to the imperative, as Lee instructs the reader: “Look how I shave her thumbnail down / so carefully she feels no pain” (Lines 21-22). Next, the reader must “Watch as I lift the splinter out” (Line 23). This stanza begins in the present but moves back to the past quickly, as Lee explains how he learned to be so gentle: “I was seven when my father / took my hand like this” (Lines 24-25).

The ten lines of the poem’s conclusion remain in the past. In those ten lines, Lee again imagines a counterfactual reality—thoughts he could have had but did not:

and I did not hold that shard

between my fingers and think,

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin,

Ore Going Deep for My Heart.

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,

Death Visited here! (Lines 26-32)

The child was prone to hyperbolic and overly dramatic thought processes, but in that moment, his father’s ability to painlessly remove the splinter allowed him to refrain from this kind of catastrophizing. Instead, he “did what a child does / when he’s given something to keep. / I kissed my father” (Lines 33-35). “The Gift” of the title was his father’s “two measures of tenderness” (Line 10)—something the speaker now shares with his wife as well.