From Blossoms

Both the title and opening phrase, “from blossoms comes” (Line 1), present the relationship between origin and fruition in a manner that challenges initial assumptions. On the one hand, the genitive preposition “from” suggests a prior state out of which some other state comes into being, as in a sprout growing from a seed. “Blossoms,” though, typically signals the end of a plant’s life cycle, as the plant yields its seeds to the wind and soil. In other words, “from seeds” would be a more logical pairing of terms. Right at the outset, the poem is presenting beginnings and endings as fused in complicated ways.

A similar principle of living and non-living things joined together informs the pairing of organic and inorganic images throughout the stanza, such as the “brown paper bag” (Line 2) containing the peaches, or the “sign painted Peaches” (Line 5), where the speaker and reader both encounter the “Peaches” in the form of a written word. Taken as a written word, the peaches are a representation rather than a material object, something removed from its immediate source, not unlike a memory. The stanza also introduces another central theme that serves to unify its opposed senses of loss and joie de vivre or celebration of life: the theme of travel, transit, or movement, visible here in the “bend in the road where we turned toward / signs” (Lines 4-5). This theme introduces and frames the poem’s repetition of the word “from” and its counterpart: the locative preposition “to,” which recurs frequently in the final stanzas.

Stanza 2 widens the scope to include the peaches’ background history, presenting the “boughs” (Line 6) on which they grew and the “bins” (Line 7) in which they travelled en route to the roadside fruit stand. As in the previous stanza, where the side of the road provides the place for the speaker’s encounter with the peach seller, here too spaces of transition provide meeting places. The “hands” (Line 7) pluck the peaches from their boughs before placing them in in the shipping “bins” (Line 7) in piles of “sweet fellowship” (Line 7). The next line then transforms peaches’ sweet fellowship with one another, during their journey from tree to vendor, into the speaker’s own consumption of their “nectar” (Line 8). In both instances, transitions bring people and things together.

At just this moment of consummation, as the speaker bites into the peach, he also consumes the “dust” (Line 10) of the roadside. In a subtle allusion to Christian scripture such as Genesis 2:7, Genesis 3:19, and the Book of Common Prayer, a liturgy read at Christian funerals (See Contextual Analysis), we learn that the speaker’s object of desire and enjoyment, the peaches, are marked with a sign of decay. As the speaker “eat[s]” (Line 10) the peaches, “dusty skin and all” (Line 9), he consumes this sign of decay along with their nectar. This dust is “familiar” (Line 10) in several senses: it is redolent of previous memories of “summer,” it echoes the proverbial wisdom of scripture through Lee’s allusion, and, like the peaches’ “sweet fellowship” of passage, it binds together in a common fate all mortal beings.

The last two stanzas shift from a descriptive to a reflective orientation, no longer presenting the reader with a narrated scene but instead commenting upon its significance. Lee slyly uses the preposition “to” not to indicate direction or location (as he does in the poem’s final stanza). Rather, through an infinitive grammatical construction, like Hamlet’s “to be or not to be,” the speaker implies both a sense of purpose and events removed from any context. Through this more elevated grammatical form, the third stanza rhapsodizes over the complex layering of our experience. Using the quintessentially lyric “O,” used to address or invoke another person or being, also known as a vocative, the lines seem to invite the reader directly to identify with the “us” being described. This appeal to the reader to identify with the speaker resonates with the stanza’s general emphasis on inclusivity. “Tak[ing] what we love inside” (Line 11), we consume “not only” (Line 13) the peaches but also the orchard in which they grew, we taste not only the “skin” (Line 9) but the “shade” (Line 13) that the tree provided. Similarly, the peaches’ “sugar” (Line 14) is inseparable from their “days” (Line 14) of growth and maturation. The sentiment resembles the Buddhist concept of interdependence, the idea that all things depend on other things for their existence.

The rather sorrowful irony coloring the final stanza’s more celebratory tone depends on the phrase “as if” (Line 18). “As if” indicates something that might be the case, but probably is not. The preceding lines of the poem have shown that “death” (Line 18), not only in the sense of physical expiration but in the broader sense of change and mutability, is always in the “background” (Line 19) as the speaker enjoys the peaches. The reader therefore knows that the “days we live” (Line 17) without awareness of death are wishful thinking. Such days of continual endless movement “from joy / to joy to joy” (Line 20) are “impossible” (Line 22). And yet, as the repetitions of “to” shift the preposition back from the previous stanza’s infinitives to now indicating movement and passage, the final lines seem to relish this mere movement of transient things, like the flapping “wing(s)” (Line 20) that keep a bird temporarily suspended in midair.

The overall tone of “From Blossoms” is bittersweet, too exuberant to be melancholy and too tempered by an awareness of inevitable loss to be purely celebratory. Not resting in comfortable nostalgia, the poem joyfully affirms the joys of the present. But it does so while betraying an uneasy awareness of the ways those joys are compromised by the encroachments of time and change. While its concluding repetitive phrases display what the poet Wallace Stevens called “the pleasures of merely circulating” (Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. Knopf. 149), there remains a sorrowful undercurrent whose added poignancy enhances rather than diminishes the joys of each “sweet impossible blossom” (Line 22).