Lines 1-2

The first two lines of "For a New Citizen of These United States" are intriguing and somewhat ambivalent. In poetry, the "I" in a poem should not be confused with the poet him- or herself, and, therefore, critics and reviewers typically refer to the "I" as the "speaker" or "persona" when discussing the work. But because Lee's poetry is well documented as actual accounts of his past and of his personal feelings toward it, one is safe in presuming the speaker here is indeed Lee. Given that, he begins this poem by asking someone for forgiveness, but who that someone is, is not yet revealed. The real ambivalence, however, falls in the second line, in which he compares death to an "irregular postage stamp." It is possible, of course, that what the poet has in mind with this metaphor is just that—in his own mind...