EXERCISES
Thinking About The Poem
Q1. (i) Find, in the first stanza, three things that cannot happen in a treeless forest.
(ii) What picture do these words create in your mind: “… sun bury its feet in shadow…”? What could the poet mean by the sun’s ‘feet’?
Answer:
(i) In a treeless forest, on bird can sit, on insect can hide, no sun can bury its feet or rays in shadow.
(ii) The world means that the sun is the time of dusk. The sun is not shinining at this time. The shawow start falling down.
Q2. (i) Where are the trees in the poem? What do their roots, their leaves, and their twigs do?
(ii) What does the poet compare their branches to?
Answer:
(i) The trees are in house in the poem. There roots separate themselves from the carcks in the veranda floor. There leaves make efforts to move towards the glass. There twigs get stiffwith exertion.
(ii) The poet campares there branches to the newly discharged patients who halfdazed are seen moving to the clinic doors.
Q3. (i) How does the poet describe the moon: (a) at the beginning of the third stanza, and (b) at its end? What causes this change?
(ii) What happens to the house when the trees move out of it?
(iii) Why do you think the poet does not mention “the departure of the forest from the house” in her letters? (Could it be that we are often silent about important happenings that are so unexpected that they embarrass us? Think about this again when you answer the next set of questions.)
Answer:
(i) The poet desceribes the Moon
(a) One can see the whole moon shining in the open sky.
(b) The moon is broken like a mirror and its pieces flesh now in the crown of the tallest oak.
(ii) When the trees move out of the house, the smell of leaves and crusty patches or bushy growth on tree frunks or bare ground still reaches like a voice into the rooms of the house.
(iii) The poet does not mention these words in her letter because she is silent about important happening that are so unexpected that they embarranse her. The tree are morning out of the gouse.
4. Now that you have read the poem in detail, we can begin to ask what the poem might mean. Here are two suggestions. can you think of others?
(i) Does the poem present ba conflict between man and nature? compare it with A Tiger in the zoo. Is the poet suggestions that plant and trees,used for interior decoration in cities while forest are cut down,are imprisoned and need to break out?
(ii) On the other hand, Adrienne Rich has been Known to use trees as a metaphor for human beings; this is a recurrent image in her poetry. What new meaning emerge from the poem if you take its trees to symbolic of this particular meaning?
Answer; (i) Do Yourself
(ii) Do Yourself
