"A Winter Day" by Li-Young Lee

Dear Mr. Lee,

            I would like to ask you about your poem “A Winter Day” as published in your book Behind My Eyes.  I greatly enjoy this poem and the rest of your work, but I am slightly confused as to the greater meaning behind the piece.  The literal narrative that takes place is that on a winter day, the speaker is sitting in some “sunlight room”, reading and writing.  The day ends, and the speaker turns on a lamp to see all the objects in the room.  The poem begins with a lot of assonance, especially of soft sounds like a long “u” and “ah”.  This brings the reader into the idea of a quiet winter day and the solitary peacefulness of the subject as he immerses himself in his activity.  This changes in the third stanza, which lists the objects around him without any outstanding repeating sounds, demonstrating a change in what the poem is trying to convey.  In the fourth stanza, the writer compares his surroundings to “wreckage from a ship spoiled by storm,” intensifying the change in tone from that of a lulling one in the opening, to a dark discontent.  In the final stanza, the speaker speaks of emotion with phrases like “the heart’s sphere” and “the mind’s love”.  This is a drastic difference from the previous idea of “rising dark” and shipwreck.  The reader is easily able to follow the changes in tone and emotion, but I remain confused as to the overall meaning.  There is the literal story and the emotional roadmap, but I have trouble connecting the two to form an overall idea.  The moment of harshness is directed at something having to do with the objects in the room, but whether it is the amount of objects, the objects themselves, or the speaker’s original neglect of them, I am unsure.  The items themselves suggest clutter, using words like “scattered”, “unmade”, “piles”, and “crumbs”.  This supports that the poem is disdainful of the neglect, but it could easily be argued that it is the objects themselves that are offensive, and that the speaker is not at fault.  This second idea is supported by the soft tone taken towards the speaker’s work in the final stanza.  Is the poem encouraging writing, but warning against neglect of worldly things? Is the poem disdainful of the worldly things that dare interrupt writing?  Or is the poem a neutral observer of the experience?

                                                                                                With Regards,

                                                                                                            Lyssa Hoganson