I’d like to attempt analysis of a poem I really like but don’t understand. I think it will yield more than I expect. I also think it’s important to practice writing about what I don’t get, and to find the value in what is difficult by looking closely at it.
Here’s “Lullaby of the Onion”:
(Dedicated to his son, after receiving a letter from his wife in which she said she had nothing to eat but bread and onions)
The onion is frost
shut in and poor.
Frost of your days
and of my nights.
Hunger and onion,
black ice and frost
large and round.
My little boy
was in hunger’s cradle.
He was nursed
on onion blood.
But your blood
is frosted with sugar,
onion and hunger.
A dark woman
dissolved in moonlight
pours herself thread by thread
into the cradle.
Laugh, son,
you can swallow the moon
when you want to.
Lark of my house,
keep laughing.
The laughter in your eyes
is the light of the world.
Laugh so much
that my soul, hearing you,
will beat in space.
Your laughter frees me,
gives me wings.
It sweeps away my loneliness,
knocks down my cell.
Mouth that flies,
heart that turns
to lightning on your lips.
Your laughter is
the sharpest sword,
conqueror of flowers
and larks.
Rival of the sun.
Future of my bones
and of my love.
The flesh flutters,
sudden as an eyelid,
and the baby is rosier
than ever.
How many linnets
take off, wings fluttering,
from your body!
I woke up from childhood:
don’t you wake up.
I have to frown:
always laugh.
Keep to your cradle,
defending laughter
feather by feather.
Yours is a flight so high,
so wide,
that your body is a sky
newly born.
If only I could climb
to the origin
of your flight!
Eight months old you laugh
with five orange blossoms.
With five little
ferocities.
With five teeth
like five young
jasmine blossoms.
They will be the frontier
of tomorrow’s kisses
when you feel your teeth
as weapons,
when you feel a flame
running under your gums
driving toward the center.
Fly away, son, on the double
moon of the breast:
it is saddened by onion,
you are satisfied.
Don’t let go.
Don’t find out what’s happening,
or what goes on.
—Translated from the Spanish by Don Share
From The Paris Review issue no. 107 (Summer 1988)
This reminds me a lot of Cathy Song’s Picture Bride poems, which I first read in college and fell in love with for their tender images and short lines that bloomed like flowers. In particular, I remember one poem about the speaker’s baby brother:
You were born
in the year of the fish,
during the rainy month
when the pond brims over
and the trees in the gulch
grow leaves like spinach
and mold thickens
under the skin.
I was two
when from the broken water,
you came swimming,
slippery and smooth,
barely bigger than a tadpole.
You jumped
into father's surprised hands.
Mother wrestled to keep
your jellied body
cradled in her arm.
What a thirsty baby,
wanting seawater instead of milk,
you slipped happily in the crib
after your mushroom mouth
went slack, satisfied.
--excerpt from "My Brother" by Cathy Song
Comparing the two helps me to see their shared characteristics. Of course, what reminded me of “My Brother” was the subject matter (a baby) but visually, the stanzas also have similar shapes and the lines are brief. I’m noticing that the line breaks seem to happen in similar places — after phrases, generally, not in the middle of one. The effect is one of smoothness, fluidity: “Hunger and onion,/ black ice and frost/ large and round.”
There’s some repetition going on in “Lullaby of the Onion” that contributes to this flow, I think. “Onion” is repeated five times; “frost”, four times; “hunger” and “moon”, three times each. There is a lilting feel to the first couple of stanzas — frost and hunger and onions and moons — helped along by the low vowel sounds (oh, you, uh) created by the o’s and u’s.
But the next stanzas seem to rise, weightless. “Laugh(ter)” is repeated seven times and larks, flying, and wings are mentioned multiple times, as well. The vowels change, heighten in pitch: Muted o’s and u’s become colorful a’s (in “dark” and “laughter”) and i’s (in “light” and “rival”) and e’s (in “sweeps” and “beat”).
The sounds are telling a story, just as the meaning of the words are. The speaker starts somewhere low, hopeless (“shut in and poor”) as he thinks about his family without any food besides bread and onions. He himself seems to be stuck somewhere; he speaks of “loneliness” and being locked in “my cell”. But there is a turn. The little boy is nourished by the the things that should impoverish him: The white juice of the onion his mother eats is “frosted with sugar” when the child nurses, and as she “pours herself thread by thread/ into the cradle”, diminishing, he is able to laugh, able to “swallow the moon”.
The poem goes on, gaining energy and hope:
Lark of my house,
keep laughing.
The laughter in your eyes
is the light of the world.
Laugh so much
that my soul, hearing you,
will beat in space.
Your laughter frees me,
gives me wings.
It sweeps away my loneliness,
knocks down my cell.
The boy’s laughter has become a weapon (“the sharpest sword”), an airiness. I love the image in stanza 7 of “many linnets” as they “take off, wings fluttering,/ from your body!” It seems that the laughter has staved off starvation: “The flesh flutters,/ sudden as an eyelid,/ and the baby is rosier/ than ever.” The emptiness of hunger has become the lightness of freedom.
Then the poem transitions into a wish from the father that his baby will not wake from childhood, as the speaker himself has. The sadness from the early stanzas is back — not because of hunger, but because the father wishes he could escape his own fate (“I woke up”; “I have to frown”; “If only I could climb/ to the origin/ of your flight!”). He desires that the child will keep using his weapon of lightness, “defending laughter/ feather by feather”. In one of the most beautiful metaphors in the poem, he describes his son’s teeth as flowers:
Eight months old you laugh
with five orange blossoms.
With five little
ferocities.
With five teeth
like five young
jasmine blossoms.
He does not want his son to grow up to face the realities of the world; he urges him to find escape, to “Fly away, son, on the double/ moon of the breast” of his mother. “Don’t find out what’s happening, /or what goes on” is his last piece of advice, a somber ending to a beautiful piece of poetry.
But I’ve skipped over the most puzzling stanza of the whole thing, for me. It comes right before the end:
They will be the frontier
of tomorrow’s kisses
when you feel your teeth
as weapons,
when you feel a flame
running under your gums
driving toward the center.
I wonder if the father is anticipating his son’s coming of age here, a time when the weapon will no longer be laughter, but teeth. (The word “frontier” certainly seems to indicate a future of some kind.) Maybe the speaker was imprisoned for feeding the “flame” he mentions here, and that is why he tells his son not to “find out what’s happening”. Perhaps what “[runs] under your gums” and “driv[es] toward the center” is a fiery speech, a passionate protest against the unseen enemy in the poem. If the father fights with language instead of laughter, maybe he’s comparing his own experience to his son’s, contrasting their roles.
It brings me back to the Cathy Song poem. She does the same thing in the last lines of “For My Brother”:
We each have become our own animals.
I am like the sheep,
woolly and silent.
I plant my belly on the hillside,
count myself to sleep.
I sit in the sun,
patient as a boulder,
like any proper sister.
And I know that I move differently,
using the alphabet
to spring from me an ocean,
to propel me through night waters.
This is my way
of swimming with you.
Earlier, she compared her brother to a creature of the water, a tadpole or a fish. Her experience is different; as the older sister, she is solidly a land animal. But she finds a way to communicate her love to her baby brother “using the alphabet/…to propel me through night waters” so they can be together.
I think the father in “Lullaby of the Onion” is doing the same thing. He, too, sees the world through different eyes. He plays a different role. But like the speaker in “For My Brother,” he draws closer to the little boy he is separated from by using language. And the result is a rhythmic dedication to the son he loves, meant to lull him to sleep with dreams of moons and onions. I am spellbound.