Milk and Honey

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content.

The collection uses the sweet, viscous substance as a multifaceted symbol. 

In some poems, Kaur uses honey to represent tenderness, desire, and sexual pleasure. The speaker notes that a toxic man can nevertheless be beguiling “soft / honey” (91)—a desert that belies his real nature. Later, she regrets seeing this kind of man as the “rawest form of honey [assuming] everything else would be refined and synthetic” (100). Here, honey stands for the core being of a person, which has not yet been fully processed into an edible product. Mistakenly, she assumes that the man’s shortcomings are the result of “rawness” rather than artificiality. When the relationship is failing, sex is no longer satisfying: The speaker’s orgasm is “honey that / would not come” (93). 

Honey also symbolizes resilience. In her Foreword, Kaur explains that the collection’s title refers to women survivors of traumatic events, who are “smooth as milk and as thick as honey” (xv). The phrase is biblical: In Exodus, God promises the Israelites escaping enslavement an eventual refuge in the Promised Land, a good land with plentiful milk and honey, substances that symbolize abundance and fertility. At the end of the book, the speaker hopes to use her own abundance to uplift others: “I need to be successful to gain / enough milk and honey / to help those around / me succeed” (191).