The speaker of Li-Young Lee’s “Persimmons” is an immigrant who struggles with being an imperfect speaker of his first language—importantly, we never even learn which dialect of Chinese this is—and English, the language of his new homeland. This struggle leads to a sense that the speaker is isolated on his own linguistic island, although the poem ends on an optimistic note, suggesting that language is only one of the ways people can communicate with one another.

The poem contrasts five characters’ idiosyncratic relationships with language. The speaker’s engagement with words dominates the poem’s narrative; we also learn about the narrow perspective of Mrs. Walker, the metaphorically rich and allusive comparisons of the speaker’s mother, the sense memories of his father, and the flirtatious interest in foreign words of his love interest Donna. Throughout the poem, the speaker marks specific words in italics—always the words that sound most foreign to him at any given moment.

The poem opens with Mrs. Walker’s rigid, academic version English. In class, she aims for semantic and analytical accuracy, which the poem reveals to be a flaw: This teacher lacks empathy, holds other cultures at a remove, and doesn’t have the imaginative capacity for lateral thinking.