Butter

“Butter” takes a lyric swan dive into the buttery memories of the speaker’s childhood, in which every meal swam and glistened with the dairy-based fat. The poem proceeds in a single stanza of free verse in 25 lines, with no formal pattern of rhyme or meter. The speaker is first person, and the subject is memory, making “Butter” an example of a lyric poem, which typically involves a first-person speaker expressing feeling and emotion.

The poem starts off with the proclamation that the speaker’s mother “loves butter more than” (Line 1) she does, “more than anyone” (Line 2). Her mother consumes it straight from the stick, like a piece of candy, marveling at the science and magic of “cream spun around into butter” (Line 4). From this point, much of the poem involves litany, or a list of foods the speaker ate when she was a child, including “turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon / and butter” (Lines 5-6). Noodles sauced with “butter and cheese” (Line 6) seem ordinary fare for children, even if the pasta is “green” (Line 6). The next menu item casts the dinner table in an international light, as British “Yorkshire puddings” (Line 8) soak in “small pools” (Line 7) of butter.