If I had to narrow down Li-Young Lee’s poetry to a simple description, I would say it is discerning. This quality of Lee’s poetry is especially present in his poem “Visions and Interpretations,” found in his first poetry book, Rose, released in 1986. “Visions and Interpretations” is about Lee’s father, a topic that much of Lee’s poetry centers on. In “Visions and Interpretations,” specifically, the poem’s speaker is walking up a hill to visit his father’s grave.
In the second stanza of the poem, Lee captures the subtle moment while resting by a tree halfway up the hill, “It was here, between the anticipation/of exhaustion, and exhaustion” and in this moment, “my father came down to me” (ll. 5-6,8). The parallels of being in the middle of walking up the hill and being in the middle of the way to exhaustion are moments of being ‘in between,’ and it is in this ‘in between’ that the ghost of his father comes down to the speaker. The speaker and his father walk up the rest of the hill together but do not acknowledge the grave.
The next stanza takes us to another moment when the speaker sits by the same tree, reading a book. The lines “…I sat down/to read an old book. When I looked up/from the noon-lit page, I saw a vision/of a world about to come, and a world about to go” is another instance of an ‘in between’. While taking a break from reading, an ‘in between’ itself, the speaker sees the in between of a beginning and an end(ll. 13-16). Again we get two ‘in betweens’ nested within each other, just as in the previous stanza, with the addition of the line “to read an old book. When I looked up” being broken by a period, giving a visual of an ‘in between’(l. 14).
Following this, the next stanza starts with the two words “Truth is” signaling a shift, and the speaker goes on to say, “I’ve not seen my father/since he died…If I carry flowers to them, I do so without their help”(ll. 17-18,20). After this, a new stanza begins, and “Truth is” is repeated and followed by “I came here with my son one day,/and I fell asleep, and dreamed/a dream which…Neither of us understood”(ll. 23-27). Here, the speaker acknowledges in an almost direct address to the reader that the previous stanzas were daydreams of sorts and uses these stanzas that begin with “Truth is” to detail objective reality. The fantasy present in the first part of the poem is lost, the ‘in between’ dissolves as the facts of the matter must be dealt with, and yet “neither of us understood”(l. 27). The happenings of life do not make much sense on their own, and with this sentiment felt, the poem shifts again.
The ninth stanza of the poem is where I feel the true turn takes place when the speaker says, “Even this is not accurate./Let me begin again://Between two griefs, a tree. (ll.29-31). Here, the speaker speaks figuratively, seemingly calling himself and his son “two griefs” (l. 31). Through personifying himself as grief, emotion is brought to the forefront and the poem ends with the four lines “and all of my visions and interpretations/depend on what I see,//and between my eyes is always/the rain, the migrant rain.” (ll. 38-41). Bringing emotion and fantasy back, the speaker tells us what is not accurate about objective reality. It lacks emotion and, thus, meaning. The filter of rain between the speaker’s eyes, or what can be read as tears, will always affect how the speaker sees reality. Here it can be interpreted that interpretation itself is an ‘in between’ and it is in the ‘in between’ that muddled understanding happens.