First Flight Poem ch08 The Trees - CBSE Revision Notesb

CBSE Class 10 English Language and Literature
Revision Notes
Chapter 8
The tree (poem)

The poet wants to show that everything has deep desire to acquire freedom.
It is necessary for our growth and well –being.
We must confirm to the natural laws.
Can there be a forest without trees?
Where are the trees in this poem?
And where do they go !
The “I,” the voice of the speaker of Adrienne Rich’s poem, “The Trees,” is a voice with a body engaged in activities and sensing intrusions that are not organic to the conventions of a nature poem.
This is, in fact, an (un)natural poem that narrates the struggle of a population of trees to escape the confines of a greenhouse. In evoking the trees’ “strain,” the poem demonstrates the unsuitability of language itself as a greenhouse or container of nature.
The speaker is a witness to the trees’ exodus, but distances herself from participating in the making of something out of the spectacle. She “sit[s]” and “writ[es]” but not poems, “long letters,” in which she “scarcely mention[s] the departure / of the forest.” Even though the speaker addresses an audience, her own “head is full of whispers”—she’s an audience as well.
We, however, the audience to the poem, are compelled by the command: “Listen.” The speaker reaches across the barrier between poem and audience, a transaction that occurs on a page, and says: Listen, you.