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Not one. Poor fool, you are divided at the heart,
Lost in its maze of chambers, blood, and love,
A heart that will one day beat you to death. 30Poem Summary
“Monologue for an Onion” is written in tristichs
(three-line stanzas). The structure gives the poem
a sense of order, although each stanza does not
always contain a complete or self-contained
thought. The lines often extend from one tristich
to another. As “Monologue for an Onion” opens,
the speaker is established to be an onion. It speaks
in the first person to someone who is busily cut-
ting it up. The onion tells the person, “I don’t
mean to make you cry.” The onion then adds that
it means the person no harm, and yet the person
continues to peel its skin away. The onion cannot
help but notice that this process of peeling away
the skin and cutting up the onion’s “flesh” brings
tears to the person’s eyes.
The onion says, “Poor deluded human: you
seek my heart” (line 6). The onion believes that
the person’s act of peeling and cutting is a search
for its heart, apparently not realizing that this is
simply how people prepare onions for cooking or
eating. The onion then tells the person to keep
looking and peeling, but the person will find only
more of the same layers as are on the outside. It
says, “I am pure onion—pure union / Of outside
and in, surface and secret core” (lines 8–9). This
means that the onion knows that it is the same
all the way to the center. It is not wearing a
false exterior of any kind, and it is not keeping
any secrets.
In the fourth stanza, the onion begins to ex-
press hostility and judgment toward the person. Be-
cause chopping the onion makes the person cry, the
onion deems the person an idiot for continuing.
Then the onion generalizes the person’s behavior,
wondering if the person goes through life using his
or her mind as a knife that never stops cutting as
it looks for a “fantasy of truth” (line 12) that it will
never find. The onion says that this approach to life
is destructive, leaving only ruin and tears as “signs
/ Of progress” (lines 14–15).
The onion suggests that the person stop the
useless cutting and searching, telling the person
that “the world is glimpsed / Through veils” (lines
16–17). Kim uses the onion as a voice of wisdom,
revealing truths about the world. The onion notes
that seeing the world is possible only through
veils, even if they are the veils of the eye and the
perceiver.
The seventh and eighth stanzas acknowledge
that the person who is cutting the onion is a seeker,
“hungry to know where meaning / Lies.” But the
onion suggests that the person survey what she has
done; it tells the person to taste the onion juice on
her hands and look at the onion peels and pieces.
Then the onion says, “You are the one / In pieces”
(lines 22–23). The onion tells the person that an in-
sistence on seeking truth that was not there has
changed the person. According to the onion, it is
the person whose soul has been cut by relentless
desire, surrounded by abandoned remnants of the
effort to quench the desire.
For all the person’s efforts to get to the essence
of the onion (or of anything), the person has no
core. The person’s own heart is a divided organ
without a center, and, metaphorically, the heart will
beat the person to death by continuing to create de-
sire that cannot be fulfilled.Themes
Elusiveness of Truth
According to the onion, the person is peeling
and cutting it in an attempt to get past the layers to
understand what is at the heart of the onion. The
onion states, “Poor deluded human: you seek my
heart.” Although the onion insists that it is hiding
nothing and that it is simply an onion through and
through (“Beneath each skin of mine / Lies another
skin: I am pure onion—pure union / Of outside and
in, surface and secret core”), the person keeps chop-
ping. From the onion’s perspective, truth is very
elusive to the person, because she refuses to ac-
knowledge the actual truth in favor of finding the
desired truth. The onion accuses the person of be-
ing obstinate: “Is this the way you go through life,
your mind / A stopless knife, driven by your fan-
tasy of truth.” Because the person lives in denial
and seeks a fabricated truth, truth will continue to
be elusive.
The onion also articulates a related theme of
appearances and veils. While the person may ap-
pear to be one way but actually be another way, the
onion insists that it is pure onion from the outside
to the inside. The onion wears its essence for all to
see, but it understands that people are not like that.
Because the person peeling and cutting the onion
is a perpetrator of misleading appearances (“you
are not who you are”), she perceives that the restMonologue for an Onion