The Speaker
The speaker should never be equated entirely with the poet, but as Rupi Kaur wrote milk and honey based on her own experiences, the speakers in these poems therefore reflect particular moments and feelings in Kaur's life. The collection overall tells the story of a young woman learning about the complexities of relationships both with herself and others. She references interactions with others, such as family members and a significant other, as they relate to her own journey toward healing and self-love. In accordance with the names of the book's sections ("the hurting," "the loving," "the breaking," "the healing"), the young woman persona in milk and honey experiences an array of feelings, from pain and heartbreak to self-celebration and connection.
The Mother
The speaker has a complicated relationship with her mother, who is mostly referred to in this collection within the context of the entire family unit. For example, in "-the art of being empty," the speaker states that her first act of disappearance was being born because she had to learn to "shrink for a family / who likes their daughters invisible." In a homage to poet Warsan Shire, Kaur writes about a speaker who resembles her mother in terms of her tenderness and exhaustion. Overall, the character of the mother in milk and honey seems to suffer because of conservative, traditional cultural norms relating to gender. The mother does not hold power in her marriage. This is seen in a poem where the mother attempts to speak at the dinner table, but her husband silences her. This represents the way that women are taught not to express themselves, which is something that the speaker often challenges.
The troubled aspects of the speaker's relationship with her mother are mostly outlined in "the hurting" (the first chapter in the collection). However, in "the loving," there is a poem in which the mother encourages the speaker to marry the type of man she would want to raise her son to be. Even if the mother suffers from the way that men treat her, she clearly wants something different for her daughter. In "the breaking," the mother tells the speaker that she deserves better than a man who does not treat her with love and respect.
The Father
Particularly in "the hurting," the speaker addresses the character of the father with a mixture of longing and pain. The speaker often alludes to the father's absence—both physical and emotional. For example, the speaker in "-father" searches for her father everywhere because he was meant to be the first male love of her life. His absence and anger (when present) impacted the speaker for years to come. This is seen in "-to fathers with daughters" when the speaker explains that women who grew up with fathers that yell will seek out men who hurt them. This is because they seek out what is familiar, and yelling at someone out of love teaches them to confuse anger with kindness. In other poems, the speaker grapples with having inherited her father's anger and hurt, and she makes the effort to bridge the distance between them.
However, Kaur presents the father in a different light in the first poem of "the loving." The father refers to the speaker's pregnant mother as "the closest thing to god on this earth." This perspective impacted the speaker's view of women in general and her mother in particular.
The Significant Other
Often addressed as a general "you," the character of the significant other is never specifically outlined, but the speaker does spend the majority of "the loving" and "the breaking" discussing the ups and downs of their relationship. At first, the relationship appears to be loving and healthy. Not only is the speaker falling in love with someone, but she is further developing her capacity for self-love. Through loving herself, a speaker in one poem says that she is learning to love her boyfriend. This boy is the type to ask her what she does (for a living) but rather wants to know what drives the speaker's passions. He engages with the speaker in an intimate way, wanting to get to know her emotionally and physically.
However, as the book progresses, the relationship between the speaker and her significant other begins to deteriorate. This starts to occur in the last two prose poems in "the loving," where the speaker states that she and her boyfriend have been arguing more than they ought to in order to avoid having difficult and necessary conversations. In "the breaking," the character of the significant other is outlined by his absence, now that he and the speaker have broken up.
Sexual Predators
In "the hurting," the first section of the book, the speaker recounts experiencing sexual abuse at the hands of various male figures. There are the uncles who sexually abused girls (including the speaker) in one poem, and an unidentified perpetrator of rape in another poem. These figures cast a dark shadow over the psyche of the speaker in this collection.
