From Blossoms

Lee wrote “From Blossoms” in unrhymed free verse, a style shared by one of his literary models, Walt Whitman. Unlike Whitman’s long, extended lines, though, Lee favors the more frequent line breaks of American modernists like William Carlos Williams. Each stanza of five or six lines is comprised of a single sentence. Rather than using regular iambics (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable), Lee relies on a more flowing, falling cadence whose effect depends largely on the frequent trochaic rhythms—a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable—of words like “blossoms,” “peaches,” “laden,” and “nectar.”

While metrically irregular, “From Blossoms” produces a sense of musical patterns through alliteration, or the repetition of consonants. Alliteration is particularly apparent in the opening stanza with its abundant plosive consonants like “p” and “b” in phrases like “brown paper bag of peaches” (Line 2) and “bought from the boy” (Line 3) and in the second stanza’s dental consonants such as “d” in phrases like “peaches we devour, dusty skin and all” (Line 9). Like the alliterative, repetitive phrasing in final lines like “joy to joy” (Line 20) and “from blossom to blossom” (Line 21), such musical patterns convey a sense of linkage and connection.