SOURCE: Engles, Tim. “Lee's ‘Persimmons’.” Explicator 54, no. 3 (spring 1996): 191-92.

In the following essay, Engles explains the thematic significance of the words “persimmon” and “precision” in “Persimmons.”

Li-Young Lee's “Persimmons” [in Rose] presents a second-generation Asian American's quiet analysis of his own experience between two cultures. The adult speaker returns, with gentle persistence throughout, to two words, “persimmon” and “precision,” and by poem's end, these two words resonate with representative significance for a son who has managed to recover specific values from his fading heritage.

The speaker begins with the painful memory of being “slapped” by his sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Walker, and told to stand in the corner “for not knowing the difference / between persimmon and precision.” But the reader understands that the sixth grader's misperception has as much to do with pronunciation as denotation; the boy can handle the difference in meaning between these two words quite nimbly...