Eating Alone

“Eating Alone” is a short lyric poem composed of four stanzas. A lyric is a type of poem that is not focused on describing a narrative (or telling a story) but expresses the personal feelings or thoughts of the speaker. For example, “Eating Alone” does not follow a linear series of events or focus on how his father died. Rather, it is told through the perspective of the speaker and highlights his memories and thoughts. A stanza is a break in the lineation of a poem’s organizational structure. Stanza breaks often occur when the subject, idea, or thought of the previous stanza concludes. They are similar to paragraph breaks in prose. In “Eating Alone,” the garden is the subject of the first stanza. The second stanza moves from the garden to a memory, so Lee utilizes a stanza break to signify a shift in subject.

The poem is written in the free verse style and has no regular meter or rhyme scheme. Therefore, line breaks occur by natural