In his poem “Eating Alone” Li-Young Lee celebrates the simple joys in life while embracing death as an unavoidable reality. Death is a natural part of daily existence and the poem seeks to mourn the passing of the speaker’s father by recognizing the many small deaths that occur in the natural world. These natural cycles situate the speaker within a larger truth, helping him to transcend the ego and accept his own mortality by contrast. In interviews, Lee has likened this process to “the discovery of solitude,” a personal journey in which the speaker explores the meaning of life through sensations of loneliness.

Though the poem’s subject is the speaker’s grief, Lee avoids sentimental clichés and overwrought expressions of sadness. Instead, the tone of the poem is more austere, which permits the speaker clear and unaltered seeing. This austerity sets the mood of the poem: quiet and reflective. While the speaker encounters the natural world, he is able to thoughtfully detach from his sorrow and observe it through a lens of objectivity. Thus, the speaker’s consciousness effectively travels beyond the constraints of his own ego (or a fixed emotional self-identification) and is expanded by the vastness of the world around him.