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Milk and Honey
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Symbols & Motifs
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).
Art and Music
Several symbolic metaphors depict the speaker being unappreciated by a lover by comparing her to art forms that he cannot appreciate.
Angry at her lover’s shallow desire for her body and his unwillingness to study her inner depths, the speaker calls herself “a museum full of art” (92) to which her lover has his “eyes shut” (92). The symbolism is straightforward: Within the speaker there are galleries of beauty, skill, and intellectual challenge—just as there would be in an art museum. Instead of partaking, her lover refuses to even glance at the contents.
Later, the speaker compares herself to “music” (107). Again, the lover refuses to participate. This time, he has “[his] ears cut off” (107). The lover willfully chooses not to explore the vastness of the speaker’s personality, history, and knowledge. He also does not respond to her creativity—an essential part of her makeup. This lack of appreciation limits their connection.
In “The Healing,” the speaker recognizes that her body is a biographical repository—“a museum / of natural disasters” (165). However, rather than waiting to be recognized by another, she herself describes it as “stunning” (165). She has grown from wanting the insensate lover to value her, she creates her own self-validation.
Liquids
Kaur’s speaker fears that she might grow hard or bitter due to childhood trauma. Images of milk and water offer an alternative, symbolizing the softness that she hopes to embody instead.
In the Foreword, Kaur praises women who have come before her for remaining “smooth as milk and as thick as honey” (xv) even after surviving brutality and misfortune. She aims to cultivate a similar “smoothness” despite her own scarring experiences.
When she first falls in love, she feels the “forest fire” (57) of her negative emotions give way; she becomes “so soft / i turn into running water” (57). The image is one of flexibility, but not necessarily vulnerability. As water, she is “soft enough / to offer life” (129) but also “tough enough / to drown it away” (129). This dichotomy shows that while her lover seemingly quenched her “fire,” her power comes from any element she embodies. The transformation is complete when she asserts in “The Healing” that “to be / soft / is / to be / powerful” (158).
Flowers
milk and honey features multiple allusions to flowers, usually symbolizing the transformation of pain into self-respect and the strength of womanhood.
The first mention of flowers occurs when the speaker notes that she was “a rose / in the hands of those / who had no intention / of keeping her” (10). This lack of care makes her wilt, just as poor “keeping” would be harmful to a rose. The flower represents a delicate and dependent person who must rely on people around her to protect her and make her thrive.
However, in “The Healing,” the speaker has learned to stop relying on “the hands” of others, and instead can tend to herself. She urges readers to learn from her example of using her negative experiences to propel productive introspection and personal development: “stay strong through your pain / grow flowers from it” so that “however you need / just bloom” (150). Here, flowers are no longer vulnerable and unstable; instead, they are the result of hard emotional cultivation.
Finally, flowers symbolize women uniting to help one another in community. The speaker aches for “women helping women / like flowers ache for spring” (179). Like flowers, women need to experience seasons of growth, renewal, and potential.
Kaur explores this motif more extensively in her second volume, the sun and her flowers (2017).
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