The Connectedness of Things

What Lee’s poem stresses, from the very outset, is the sense of connectedness inherent in the life cycles of nature, and the way one thing leads to another through transmutations in form. The repetition of the preposition “from” in the title and throughout the poem bespeaks the speaker’s investment in imagining the sources of things, before they take their current form. Since the poem begins by highlighting the fact that the peaches come “From blossoms” (1), it is always already backward-looking, oriented towards cycles of nature. The way that the poem begins and ends further bears this out. Beginning in blossoms, the poem concludes, too, “from blossom to blossom to / impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom” (21-2). In contrast to the plural “blossoms” (1) in the first line, the speaker at the end chooses to highlight each blossom in their singularity, using the...