My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1998

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Repetition

Throughout “My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop,” Nye repeats key phrases about language and communication, cleverly altering their meaning as she recasts them over the course of the poem. Most notably, the phrase “I cannot tell you” appears four separate times, in both the uncle’s voice and the speaker’s. At the beginning, the stakes are low: The uncle describes the coffee shop, saying “I cannot tell you—how I love this place” (Line 9). The speaker mentions he uses this phrase all the time, but always follows it with an attempt to “tell” what he wants to say (Line 13). In the fourth stanza, Nye heightens the stakes. The uncle says, “I cannot tell you—how my heart has settled at last” (Line 33). She adds another layer of characterization to the uncle, showing his rich, emotional interior life. Using the repeated phrase builds a sense of tension for the reader, as each use complicates the figure of the uncle and adds to the reader’s emotional investment in him.

The final repetition, in the speaker’s voice, occurs as the solitary line for the fifth stanza. Setting it apart, Nye prepares the reader for the horror and sadness of the final stanza, and the uncle’s death. The repeated phrase offers a through-line in the poem, allowing the reader to track the uncle’s experience, and understand the complexity and difficulty of conveying it.

Assonance and Consonance

Nye uses both consonance (repeated consonant sounds) and assonance (repeated vowels sounds) to profound effect in “My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop,” creating a rich audial texture that engages the reader from the first lines of the poem. She describes the “serum of steam rising” (Line 1) from the coffee cup, and the repeated “s” sounds round out the image, allowing the reader to hear the hiss of the espresso machine and sense the warm, steamy comfort of the shop. She describes Barbara: “[H]er perfect pouring hand and starched ascot” (Line 3), creating a rhythm with echoing “p” and “s” sounds that give the reader a sense of the woman’s reliability and uniformity

In other moments, the sound texture creates a richer, fuller image for the reader to consider. When Nye describes her uncle draining his “water glass, noisily clinking his ice” (Line 10), the repeated “s” sounds mimic the sound of the clinking ice, adding an auditory component to the image. Later, the “couples at other booths/ their loose banter and casual clothes” (Lines 25-26) has a slower rhythm that relies on soft “oo,” “l,” and “b” sounds, enacting a kind of easy, casual chatter.

Tone

Nye utilizes casual, everyday diction throughout “My Uncle’s Favorite Coffee Shop,” creating a straightforward, easily accessible tone in support of her ideas about language and communication. Her deliberate simplicity of language belies the complex interior life of the uncle figure, suggesting that simple language can convey richness. Like the uncle who thinks he “cannot tell you,” but often does so with emotional resonance and beauty, the poem relies on seemingly simple language, sentence structure, and imagery to echo the uncle’s experience with language.

The lines in the poem often have a simple structure, and Nye’s voice is steady throughout, giving the reader the sense of reading a narrative story or receiving information one piece at a time in a given order. By maintaining this effortless, straightforward tone throughout, Nye delivers an emotionally resonant ending—one that is not melodramatic or extreme, but simple, and thus even more relatable and crushing in its sadness.

Related Titles

By Naomi Shihab Nye