Summary Of This Room And Everything In It By Li Young Lee

Sex and Memories: Which will Prevail?
The poems “Leda” by Hilda Doolittle, or better known as H.D., and “This Room and Everything in It” by Li-Young Lee both examine sexual intercourse and desires in different viewpoints. For “Leda,” H.D. portrays the action of sex as an interaction between two willing parties through the story of Leda’s rape by Zeus. On the contrary, in “This Room and Everything in It,” Lee shows that simply the desire of sex will cloud one’s mind through the speaker’s inability to recall multiple memories. H.D.’s and Lee’s poem differs in how they utilize imagery and diction to portray the environment of the poem. Although both poems talk about how sexual desires makes one forget memories, H.D. approaches this through the

The environments in both of the poems differ tremendously since one is set in a sea and land setting, whereas, the other is set in a room. However, the poetic techniques that H.D. and Lee carry out are similar. In “Leda,” H.D. utilized imagery and diction to describe the environment. For example, she begins the poem with “Where the slow river/ meets the tide” (1-2). This contrast of a slow river against a fast tide foreshadows that there may be an entity that disrupts the equilibrium of the environment. As the poem continues, H.D. introduces “a red swan” (3) with “red wings” (3), “darker beak” (4), “purple down/ of his soft breast” (5-6), and “coral feet” (7). H.D.’s use of colors, such as red, purple, and coral, to describe the swan deviates from an ordinary swan. These exotic colors reveal that this is not an ordinary swan, but a creature higher than itself. In fact, the

The poem arrangement consists of four lines per stanza until after seven stanzas of which the arrangement varies from seven lines to thirteen lines to seven lines again. The first seven stanzas show the speaker’s clear thought process of how he wants to use items in the room to represent certain memories. He does so by making each stanza a single sentence. However by the end of stanza seven, readers can see that the speaker is slowly becoming distracted by a thought. Lee writes “the face,/ I can’t see, my soul,” (27-28) to show this distraction. In addition, this stanza does not end as a sentence which shows that the thought is not complete here. Moreover, each stanza after stanza seven does not end up as one sentence; some may have fragments or even multiple sentences. This illustrates that the speaker’s mind is running wild by desiring to recapture his sexual memories as well as his other memories with his significant other. By stanza ten, the speaker is completely torn between recalling memories with that person and recalling sexual ones. For example, Lee writes “useless, useless…/ your cries are song, my body’s not mine” (49-50). Then the speaker ends up forgetting both memories altogether and states that one of the memories “had something to do/ with