A Hymn To Childhood By Li-Young Lee

Poetry is a way to describe events that take place in history. This is exactly what Li-Young Lee did in his poem, A Hymn to Childhood. Lee’s poem focused on the view of a young child that was living amongst the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The narrator, who could be debated to be the child or Lee, starts the poem off by describing a typical childhood fears that most adults may think is childish such as being afraid of the ladder in the attic. However, by the second stanza, the narrator gets into a more terrifying situation and it is described through the eye of the child. It is a reference to the soldiers reinforcing the new laws. The narrator describes the fear that the child went through, beyond the harsh pain of a typical child would go

His description of the young child is one of his techniques that helped the audience have a better understanding of the events in the poem and the overall era of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Also, the poem was answering the beginning question in the first line in the first stanza, “Childhood? Which childhood?” This is another technique that gives a different, more thinking process and a different sounds when reading the poem. The amount of literary elements is well known in Lee’s writing techniques. For example, in line nine, Lee uses a personification, “While loudspeakers declared a new era.” Lee might have added this personification in the poem to paint a picture in the audiences mind. This image of how the child might have interpret the soldiers, that were marching down the streets shouting out the laws of communism to the Chinese people. Not only is it a personification, but a emotional imagery of chaos that was taken place. Another example of literary elements is “Death from childhood, and both of them from dreaming.” This is a metaphor but it does not mean that the child died from dreaming, but in a sense from the situation that the child was in and what they saw. This ended up causing him to become mature quicker and had to stop being a child. In reality the effect of the Chinese Cultural Revolution on the child was that the innocence and faith was gone. Lee’s literary terms were helpful in the poem and gave it strength in a emotion sense and as an overall