From blossoms comes / this brown paper bag of peaches”
-- Speaker (Lines 1 – 2)

Importance: These lines open the poem, and they also lend the poem its title. From the outset, we see how the speaker places an emphasis on his imaginative process of thinking about the origins of the peaches that he eats. Rather than starting with the incident itself that catalysed this imagination, he begins directly with the image of the “blossoms” (1) before moving into “this brown paper bag of peaches” (2), bespeaking a concern with the connectedness of things and the transmutations in their physical forms in the natural world. The use of the demonstrative pronoun “this” also importantly grounds the poem in the present moment, in all its specificity: it is not any other bag of peaches, but “this” one.

From laden boughs, from hands, / from sweet fellowship in the bins, / comes nectar at the roadside”
-- Speaker (Lines 6 – 8)

Importance: These lines begin the second stanza, and...