The Trees · Class 10 English · First Flight Poetry: 60 flashcards

Adrienne Rich, born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1929. She wrote nearly twenty books of poems and has been described as both a feminist and a radical.

Free verse — three stanzas of very unequal length, with no rhyme and no regular metre.

Whether there can be a forest without trees, where the trees in this poem are, and where they go.

Indoors. They are houseplants, with roots in the cracks of a veranda floor, a roof above them and glass in front of them.

No bird could sit there, no insect could hide there, and no sun could bury its feet in shadow.

A bird needs a branch, which is the simplest loss; an insect needs cover, which is a matter of life and death; and the sun needs shade, which sounds like nonsense until you look at it.

The lowest of its rays — the part of the sunlight that comes all the way down and touches the ground.

In a real forest those low rays fall among trunks and disappear into the shade. 'Buried' makes shadow into something soft and deep that the light can sink into, the way feet sink into sand.

There is nowhere for the light to go. It lies flat and exposed on open ground with nothing to sink into — the poet gives the sun a body and then removes the place where it could rest.

Twice — empty all these days and empty all these nights — before promising that it will be full of trees by morning.

Working all night to disengage themselves from the cracks in the veranda floor. 'To disengage themselves' is glossed as to separate themselves.

It is cold and mechanical — the sort of word used of machinery being uncoupled. Roots grip, and the poem refuses to make getting free look easy.

Straining towards the glass. 'Strain' is glossed as make efforts to move, and the poem turns the ordinary fact that houseplants lean towards a window into an intention.

The small twigs are stiff with exertion; the long-cramped boughs are shuffling under the roof. 'Bough' is glossed as branch and 'shuffling' as moving repeatedly from one position to another.

Newly discharged patients — half-dazed, moving to the clinic doors.

It does three things at once: it explains the movement as unsteady and not quite controlled; it says these plants have been ill, and that being indoors was the illness; and it makes the escape a recovery rather than a rebellion.

A quiet one. Nobody in the poem is angry. The trees are simply leaving, the way people leave a hospital after a long stay.

There is none. Roots work, leaves strain, twigs stiffen and boughs shuffle, all in complete silence. The only noise in the poem comes at the very end, and it is a shock because of this.

They are compared to patients. The difference matters, because a prisoner escapes and a patient recovers, and the poem chooses the gentler of the two.

Explain the lowest rays first and the shade second, then say what the image does — gives the sun a body, and takes away the place where it could rest.

In the third stanza. The word 'I' does not occur anywhere in the first two, which contain only the forest and the labouring plants.

Sitting inside with the doors open to the veranda, writing long letters.

Because she could have shut them and does not. She is neither helping the trees nor preventing them, and the poem never suggests that she wants to stop the departure.

The departure of the forest from the house. She scarcely mentions it — the most extraordinary thing ever to happen in that building is missing from her correspondence.

That we are often silent about important happenings which are so unexpected that they embarrass us.

That some things are felt rather than reported — 'the plants are leaving tonight' would look absurd on paper — and that describing a thing tidies it and hands it over, so she may be keeping this one.

The night is fresh, the whole moon shines, and the sky is still open — open because nothing is standing in it, since the trees are still indoors.

It appears twice in a few lines — a sky still open, the smell still reaching the rooms — and it means both unchanged and not yet. The poem is holding the moment just before everything alters.

Crusty patches or bushy growth on tree trunks and bare ground, formed by a fungus and an alga living together. It is part of what the speaker can still smell from the rooms.

Because a voice comes from somewhere else and asks for attention. The smell is the trees still communicating with the house, and it is the last of them that will get in.

That her head is full of them, and that tomorrow they will be silent.

The poem does not say, and both readings work: the sound of leaves still in the house, which she will never hear again, or her own crowded, unspoken thoughts, which will settle once it is over. The line is better for not choosing.

It stands alone as a single word, and it is the poem's first sound, its only imperative and its only direct address to the reader — arriving after two and a half stanzas of complete silence.

The glass is breaking, in the present continuous, as we watch. The barrier the leaves have been straining against all night finally gives way.

They stumble forward into the night — still unsteady, like the discharged patients of the second stanza — and the winds rush to meet them.

Because the outside world does not hold back; it comes towards them. After a whole poem of gripping and straining, something is at last easy.

Broken like a mirror, with its pieces flashing in the crown of the tallest oak.

Nothing happens to the moon. The trees are now outside, standing between the speaker and the sky, and moonlight seen through branches arrives in fragments. The change is a change of view.

It loses everything it had. The glass is broken, the cracks in the veranda floor have nothing growing in them, the smell of leaves and lichen will not reach the rooms again, and the whispers will be silent tomorrow.

No. It is left emptier and the poem's last image is of moonlight flashing in a treetop. Whatever sympathy the poem has, it does not lie with the building.

It stops asking what the poem says and asks what it might mean, offers two suggestions, states plainly that they are only suggestions, and invites students to think of others.

That plants and trees used for interior decoration in cities, while forests are cut down, are imprisoned and need to break out — a conflict between human beings and nature.

The forest is empty and the house is full, neither of which is natural. The plants are held behind glass, under a roof, with roots wedged into the cracks of a veranda floor, and getting free takes a whole night and ends in breaking glass.

Nobody is described cutting a forest or buying a plant, and the only person in the poem sits with the doors open doing nothing. The accusation lies in the arrangement of the facts, not in any sentence.

A Tiger in the Zoo by Leslie Norris.

Both set a captive living thing beside the place where it ought to be — a concrete cell against long grass by a water hole, a veranda and a roof against a forest waiting to be filled — and both refuse to name a villain.

At the ending. The tiger never gets out; he stalks his cage, ignores the visitors and stares at the stars from behind bars. Rich's trees do get out, and her poem ends outdoors.

Because one poem is about endurance and the other about release. Both end by looking at the night sky, but only one of them is looking at it from outside.

That Adrienne Rich has often made trees stand for human beings, and that she returns to the image again and again in her work.

That she has been called a feminist and a radical poet. The poem is most often read on this view as being about women kept indoors and now leaving.

Long ties — habit, family, a life built in one place, and all of them hard to get out of.

Longing for a world that can be seen and not reached. Glass is the perfect barrier for that, because you can watch the future through it.

Years of confinement. The word 'long-cramped' does the work: this has been going on for a very long time.

Because it gives people just out of a long illness, half-dazed, making their way to the door — and the illness was being kept in. Nobody who leaves after years leaves confidently.

The one who stays — inside, writing letters, mentioning nothing, with the doors open. Sympathetic, watchful, and not going.

On Killing a Tree by Gieve Patel, met in Class 9.

Both take a tree seriously as a living thing with a will of its own, and both locate its real life in its roots.

In purpose. Patel's roots are torn out so that the tree will die; Rich's roots free themselves so that the trees can live. Patel's tone is coldly instructional; Rich's is quiet and on the tree's side.

The textbook offers both and invites more. A poem can mean more than one thing at once, and the best answers give both readings and show the details supporting each.

Literal reading with the captivity details; the comparison with A Tiger in the Zoo, finishing on the tiger staying and the trees going; then the metaphorical reading with Rich's own description; then three details carried across; and no choosing between them.