Poetry for Students

Volume 24 127

trying to survive by fighting back with truth. Op-
pressive governments almost universally sacrifice
their own people on the altar of their ideology. The
people become the means to an elusive end, and
they suffer greatly as a result. There are many in-
cidents in history in which the cutting and slashing
has been literal, and there have been many in which
it has been figurative. The “onion-juice” on the per-
son’s hands in line 21 represents the blood on the
hands of dictators and murderous regimes. As with
the person cutting the onion, the governments gen-
erally find themselves destroyed in the end.

In the poem, the person desperately pursues a
core, a center of stability. But the onion reveals to
the person that even her own heart, her own core,
is divided and unstable. The same can be said of
unjust regimes; lacking truth and goodness at their
core, they are doomed to instability, division in the
ranks of the power-hungry, and an eventual loss of
focus. Within this context, Kim suggests that true
wisdom is readily available among the people, who
long to guide and correct their rulers. The violence
and hostility of “Monologue for an Onion” is a
chilling reminder of the lengths to which rulers
have gone to oppress their own people. And the
people, for all their anger and hostility, have the
ability to respond with wisdom and insight. They
possess the ability to understand just power, and
their suffering does not have to be meaningless.

Source:Jennifer Bussey, Critical Essay on “Monologue for
an Onion,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Neil Heims
Neil Heims is a writer and teacher living in
Paris. In this essay, he argues that the poet repre-
sents her feelings by comparing herself to an onion.

Because onions do not talk, it is reasonable to
deduce that “Monologue for an Onion,” which fea-
tures a talking onion, is using the onion as an imag-
inative substitute for a person, who can talk.
Consequently, there is a central utterance that, de-
spite the title, has been left unsaid. It is implicit and
essential: “You make me feel like an onion when
it is being peeled.” The poet is saying, using the
metaphor of an onion, “I feel as if you are tearing
me apart.” The feelings that the onion being peeled
and the speaker comparing herself to an onion be-
ing peeled experience are rage and contempt for the
person doing the peeling and tearing.

Although the poem is a monologue, it is a two-
character poem. There is the speaker, and there is
the person to whom she is speaking, the “you,”
silent throughout the poem, who is the cause of the

monologue. This “you” has, presumably, just fin-

ished speaking, and the poem is a response. The

reader must reconstruct his previous words and his

behavior from what the speaker says. The speaker’s

monologue, indeed, reveals as much about her in-

terlocutor as it does about her.

“I don’t mean to make you cry,” undoubtedly

is uttered in response to the other person’s tears.

As with an onion, his tears come not from what she

is doing to him but from what he is doing to her:

tearing her apart. Tears, although they often gen-

uinely express grief and sadness, often also can be,

even when genuine, used in an attempt to manipu-

late. Tears can express the demand that someone

else capitulate to us, give in to our wish. They can

express frustration and anger as well as grief. Tears

can be aggressive, even if sincere. The silent cry-

ing person in “Monologue for an Onion” is de-

manding from the speaker, by those tears, that she

yield herself to him, that she be as he wants her to

be. But the speaker is like an onion with regard to

her suitor. She has nothing to show him but the sur-

face he is tearing at as he tries to find something

solid and deeper. She is not, at bottom, his idea of

her. She is only herself. He finds only layer under

layer of the same thing as he tries to penetrate to

her depths. Her defiant assertion is that there is no

depth. She is what she seems to be, not what he

wishes to find in her.

“I mean nothing,” she says, backing away from

an undesired involvement. “But this has not kept

you / From peeling away my body, layer by layer,”

she reminds him. You are looking, she says, for

something in me that is not there, something you

want to get from me that I do not wish, that I do

not have, to give. The “lasting union” he desires

she calls a “fantasy.” When he cannot find what he

wants in her, he keeps “slashing away skin after

skin,” tearing at her, deluded by the belief that if

Monologue for an Onion

The sentences of the

poem are like a winding

layer turning around upon

itself. Each successive word

seems to be a peeling torn

from previous words.”