Snapping Beans by Lisa Parker Essay

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Q1. How does the grandmother’s world differ from the speaker's at school? What details especially reveal those differences?



The poem “Snapping Beans” by Lisa Parker draws a distinct contrast between the world of the speaker’s grandmother and her life in school. The poem focuses on a very physical image, that of the speaker helping her grandmother snap beans into a silver bowl after she has come home to her southern, childhood home after going to school in the North. Her grandmother’s world is focused on faith and a very uncritical form of Christianity, as can be seen in her grandmother’s humming “What A Friend We Have In Jesus.”



In contrast, the speaker when she is going to school, lives in a very cerebral world of books where everything is questioned, including religion. Her fellow students, sporting nose rings, are said to write poems about Buddhism, sex, and alcohol. Presumably the last two are forbidden by the grandmother’s faith, and Buddhism is entirely foreign to the grandmother. The speaker also notes that she has read, “revelations by book and lecture/as real as any shout of faith, / potent as a swig of strychnine.” The poet’s choice of language with religious resonance is very deliberate here, given that the speaker’s insights into the human condition are ultimately secular in nature. There is also the sense that knowledge about one’s faith, versus pure belief, has a killing, chilling effect much like poison.

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That is why when the speaker’s grandmother asks, “How’s school a-goin?” using dialect that is clearly designed to show her class and her geographic location, the speaker cannot respond. Still, despite the fact that the speaker and her grandmother are now very distant from one another in a manner that they were not years ago, the grandmother is capable of showing tenderness, cupping the speaker’s chin and the act of snapping beans together shows that the speaker is eager to recreate childhood rituals that have no apparent intellectual significance. At the poem’s end, the hickory leaf which blows loose in a funny way is clearly a metaphor for the speaker who has blown free and left the comforting confines of her childhood world. Even though she is on the porch at the beginning of the poem, the reader is certain that unlike her grandmother, her future will lead her very far afield



The speaker says that she did cry into the homemade quilt her grandmother made out of homesickness, even though she also clearly is fascinated by the fact “the evening star was a planet” (the moon). She feels self-conscious about speaking with a southern accent in class but still has friends….....

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