on the gift

There is something about Li-Young Lee's simple manner of writing in The gift that adds to it's beauty, because I felt Lee was saying how much something so small can transform you and you don't realize it immediately, like his poem itself. In the last stanza the speaker talks about how the gift was just a gift - it had meaning to him as a child only because of the act of receiving and not any personal view he applied to it at the time. Through looking back he realizes in treating his wife how much more it means to him now, and he realizes that the real gift wasn't the iron sliver - but a tenderness his father planted on him through experience. It's a very personal poem and judging from what others have wrote from it it seems everyone can relate to it in some way. It inspired me to read a little on Li-young Lee's family history and I must say it is very interesting. http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Lee.html