In his poem collection Book Of My Nights, Li-Young Lee explores the concepts of death and the night. However, the images and recurring language that he uses keeps his tone just above melancholic in a state I will call hollowness. This hollowness is a sense of smallness in the world, and perhaps the universe, but also communicates a sense of emptiness and, to that extent, readiness to be filled. The sparse metaphors that Lee uses supports this tone by incorporating distance, endings, and the capacity for action. The concept of hollowness is important because not all of Lee's poems are dark, but the ones that are not still carry this tone with them. Recurring language is rampant within Lee's poems: hungry, honey, birds, flying, sky, dead (and many other words for death), and, most of all, night.…show more content… Different terms and images for distance are scattered through out his poems, constantly reinforcing this feeling of vast unending space. In the poem Night Mirror, Lee uses both, ''Hugely out from between/ a star and a star. All that space/ the nighthawk plunges through.'' (Lee 19) The nighthawk traversing space is an image so big that it is nearly impossible to visualize, but by incorporating the universe Lee communicates the beauty despite the emptiness of it all, keeping the tone lifted above melancholy. He tends to use birds to lift the tone of a poem; for example, One Heart is one of his lighter poems and it starts with, ''Look at the birds. Even flying/ is born/ out of nothing.'' (Lee 41) It is from the nothing that this freedom is born, so then, even though this message is uplifting, the hollowness is communicated by the very next lines, ''The first sky/ is inside you'' (Lee 41) This use of distance and vastness makes one feel insignificant, but neither does it draw too close to melancholy or happiness. Instead, the tone drops into an openness, a