To Find God is to Find Hope
the city in which i love you is a journey where Li-Young Lee explores the physical journey of immigration and the relational journey between the speaker and the cast of characters. Throughout the collection, there is a search for God. God is neither a singular entity. Lee refers to a “father” figure, when depending on the context of the poem, doubles as God the Father and the speaker’s biological father; and when the speaker in Lee’s poems speaks to this God, or Lord, Lee is using God as synonym to hope. Every question, statement, and outcry directed at God is instead a plea toward hope.
The poem “Furious Versions” sets the stage by highlighting the overall themes for the book. In this journey, the characters, from the speaker, the wife, father, and brother, all are embarking on this perilous journey, paralleling their interpersonal relationships and navigating their lives in a new country, towards hope with a foundation of love. The hope stemming from the father figure in this book is established as a character of love, being associated with the “Song of Songs which is Solomon’s,” which is a collection of love songs. Originally, the Song of Songs are love songs between two people in a romantic relationship. But Lee adjusts its meaning to argue that the depth of love is not confined to those in romantic partnership.
The hope the speaker receives from the father is not always a pleasant one, as hope does not always incite pleasant feelings. In “This Hour and What is Dead,” there is a direct parallel between the speaker’s father being a father in biology and The Father, as in God from the Abrahamic religions. In Joshua 1:9, God supposedly stated: “Do not be afraid. Do not lose hope. I am the Lord your God. I will be with you everywhere you go.” In this poem, the speaker’s father embodies this steady presence. The poem opens with a death, and what one can assume is a young boy’s rumination of what will become of his brother now: “what could he possible need there in heaven?” and “does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?” In the depth of his anguish, the speaker is caught off guard by his father’s calm. While calm, his love is not perfect but rather described as: “his love for me is much like sewing: / various colors and too much thread, / the stitching uneven.” Regardless, much like the Abrahamic God, he, too, will be with the speaker everywhere he goes. This unwavering presence is stifling for the speaker: “his love for me feels like fire, / feels like doves, / feels like river-water.” With this imagery, Lee further cements the connection of Godliness to the father, with doves symbolizing peace, spirituality, hope and love, and river-water which directly ties with baptism. Additionally, river-water is especially symbolic of baptism, as Jesus was baptized by his cousin, John the Baptist, in the River Jordan. The speaker of the poem asks his father “to leave me alone. / I’ve had enough of his love / that feels like burning and flight and running away.” This all-presence continues in “Arise, Go Down,” where Lee likens what he believes would feel like the “bright hems of the Lord’s skirts” to the light touch of a wasp perched on his cheek. Of all that the wasp could have been compared to, Lee chose the Lord. Lee does not differentiate exactly in the beginning of the poem which father he is referring to with the line, “I grow more fatherless each day.” He stands among his father’s roses, and it could still be either: his humanly or heavenly father’s roses, if interpreting the world as God’s garden. The line between human and heavenly is made towards the end of the poem where Lee’s human father states, “I didn’t make the world I leave you with.” Hope lives in the center of this poem, where the speaker wonders how he gets through “most days unscathed.” It can be inferred that this is thanks to God, as this line affirms his presence despite others not having seen God as he has.
The duality of God as human or heavenly father continues in “My Father, in Heaven, Is Reading Out Loud”. This poem is less about hope and more about the relationship between the speaker and his father. The imagery in the first stanza is written in a way that one can interpret the father being either or. This father is in heaven, which can be the case whether Abrahamic entity or human father. Both fathers, if in heaven, can listen to the sound of children from above, and either have the power to “go on reading” or “run to save a child’s day from grief.” This highlights the attributes of the father, describing “as it is in heaven, so it was on earth.” The stanzas following seem to alternate between Abrahamic God the Father and his father, where his human father is more likely to have taught the speaker to recite a book a month and God the father would be disappointed in his inability to stay to the end of days. A particularly interesting choice that Lee makes is making the use of god in this poem with a lowercase letter: “my father [...] / who packed his books once [...] / then sat down to await instruction / from his god.” In previous poems, God is written with it capitalized. This choice can argue that the father to whom Lee is referring is God the Father, and there may be a god that he answers to beyond himself.
God pivots as the father and takes a different shape in “This Room and Everything in It.” Still rooted in a foundation of love, the sun is God in that Lee associates the sun with hope. There is a stillness in this poem, with the opening “lie still now.” The careful, small stanzas hone in on the pace of the poem. This can be interpreted as the moment after intimacy, “I’ll let your love-cries, / those spacious notes / of a moment ago, / stand for distance.” And in this clarity, that the speaker has the foresight to hold this hope, this happiness for “certain hard days ahead.” As the speaker sits with these thoughts, the sun hitting his face is God. And this time, God is capitalized, as Lee means for the reader to know that this is the Abrahamic God. The speaker, still in the throes of joy following intimacy, repeats that the sun is god.
The final poem of the collection, “The Cleaving” features a final instance of God. Additionally, God is only mentioned once in this poem. “The Cleaving” is an observation of another person whose path could be similar to that of the speaker’s. The speaker makes an argument that this person, who he does not know, shares the intimate relationship of similarity in that they both have experienced the journey of immigration. Also, the speaker infers that this stranger, like him, in addition to journeying the land is also journeying his relationships with his loved ones and spirituality. Leading up to the mention of God are the lines: “The soul too / is a debasement / of a text, but thus, it / acquires salience, although a / human salience, but / inimitable, and hence, memorable. God is the text.” In the same way that each of the characters in this collection’s cast embodies God and is an iteration of God, so is everyone else. Everyone is god, and therefore, everyone is capable of being and carrying hope.
In the city in which i love you, Li-Young Lee shares with readers the foundational love the speaker feels for each of the cast of characters. In his gratitude for this love, his search for God leads him to these people. All of the characters present, wife, brother, and father, all have a turn as an expression of God for Lee. All of his calls for God bring him a step toward hope. As the speaker continues on this journey, every step made with his loved ones is a step made with God.