Analysis

Last Updated on October 26, 2018, by eNotes Editorial. Word Count: 346

Style

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milk and honey is written in the style of "confessional poetry," with the first-person speaker relating her own thoughts and experiences. Kaur doesn't capitalize the first words of her lines or sentences, and she uses punctuation sparingly, often foregoing commas and periods entirely. When Kaur does use punctuation, it generally means that she's playing with the form of the poem, writing it as a long prose poem or, in one case, a list. In place of punctuation, Kaur uses line breaks to indicate where a reader should pause during their reading.

Drawings

Kaur is also a talented visual artist, and her sketches accompany almost half the poems in the book. These sketches are hand-drawn in ink and complement the poems, visually representing the themes, characters, and situations described in the text. In some cases, the poems are written around or even within the sketches, forcing the reader to examine the interplay between text and image. One perfect example of this is found on page 13, where Kaur situates the poem between a woman's open legs.

Motifs

Kaur repeatedly uses images of fire and water in her poetry. One of the best examples of this can be found in the second chapter, The Loving, when Kaur writes,

"how do you turn
a forest fire like me
so soft i turn into
running water"

This "forest fire" represents many things: love, passion, energy, rage, determination. Throughout the book, fire stands in for the speaker's complex, sometimes volatile emotions as she faces her past and wrestles with the psychological damage it caused. Water, then, has a kind of cooling effect, allowing the speaker to dampen that fire, however briefly, and become vulnerable.

Symbols

Kaur introduces the symbol of the rose early in the first chapter, The Hurting. She writes,

"she was a rose
in the hands of those
who had no intention
of keeping her"

The rose reappears in the third chapter, The Breaking, not as text but as an image. Kaur draws a rose underneath her poem, visually alluding to that old adage, "Every rose has its thorns."