Contents: IntroductionPoem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Sources For Further Reading |
Criticism
Chris Semansky
Semansky’s most recent collection of poems, Blindsided, has been published by 26 Books of Portland, Oregon and nominated for an Oregon book award. In the following essay, Semansky examines Kunitz’s “The War Against the Trees,” paying close attention to the complexity of the poet’s word choice.
“The War Against the Trees” appears in several popular classroom anthologies of poetry, yet little about the poem exists in the biographical literature about Kunitz, or in the substantial criticism focused on his Selected Poems (1958), the volume in which “The War Against the Trees” appears. Perhaps this is because the poem seems self-evident. Or, from a different angle, so fragile that vigorous investigation would “break” it. While these arguments are not without their virtues (as is true for many poems), “The War Against the Trees” is neither so simple that deeper analysis cannot reveal its complexity, nor so fragile it cannot be shaken up without shattering its message. A close reading of the poem, with special attention paid to Kunitz’s word choice, will help to unpack its complexity.
In the first line of “The War Against the Trees,” “standard oil,” a proper noun, is not capitalized. The effect is to diminish the company’s real value, the poet, careful to avoid showing respect for a company bulldozing a parcel of land home to trees, flowers, and a vibrant underground ecology. The man who has sold the corner property is, Kunitz writes, “joking” with others watching the “show.” “Laughed” is not employed because the word would seem a direct response to the “show,” and would connote direct joy in the destruction, a kind of sadism. “Joking,” however, indicates a response less evil, an unconcern about, or ignorance of, the fuller meanings of this destruction. To these neighbors (or at least the man who sold the property), it is as if these trees and flowers were inanimate objects or mere things. This is not bloodsport, but a celebration of action, of noise and movement of bulldozers, the crash of big trees. The tone of this “celebration” is underscored by the description of the bulldozers, which are “drunk with gasoline.” Drunkenness personifies these machines, possibly prompting readers to think of drunken males in cars on a destructive spree, and then to bring readers back to the watching neighbors — are they drunk as well? Whatever the case, these neighbors would likely have been just as satisfied having attended a demolition derby or monster truck rally. This is a scene no one except the poet understands as a killing field. Instead, this seems a harmless arena to an audience as oblivious to the killing as are the bulldozers.
In “The War Against the Trees,” personification works both ways — to vilify and dignify. In the second stanza, personification is employed not only to vilify bulldozers, but to dignify plants. Kunitz casts the plants as under attack by the bulldozersas-tanks. Unfortunately, the metaphor begins to backfire if taking tall trees seems like taking an enemy bunker of big guns or missile launchers. But Kunitz prevents such thoughts from proceeding when he calls the trees “great-grandfathers,” “lopped and maimed.” This directs the comparison away from trees as enemies to trees as human-like victims, especially through the attribute of having severed limbs. Bulldozers represented as cars full of drunk males or tanks, and trees characterized as old men with severed limbs not only portrays this happening as an unfair fight, but as a destruction of the past (grandfathers) by the present (youth), a theme revisited in the poem’s fourth stanza.
The third stanza’s “hireling engines,” might conjure up an image of mercenaries (a further personification of bulldozers) hired by Standard Oil to “pacify” the site, eradicate from this corner lot any obstacles to development making it “safe” for business. “Hacking” is a verb describing a repulsive act, building empathy for the trees by casting them as living victims. Kunitz’s sensitivity extends not only to plants, but to what are usually disliked and unconsidered ground-dwellers, moles and grubs. Kunitz, however, dignifies the moles as human, as possessors of homes with “halls” under attack from humans and their machines. Grubs are exalted by having “dominions” making it not just grub homes suffering an attack, but grub communities and lands. From the ground’s smallest and most hidden creatures, Kunitz fast cuts to the largest and sometimes most visible, the “giants” of the sky: trees. These giant grandfathers, king-or queen-like with their crowns, are now humbled, forced to their “knees” in submission to the new, self-crowned kings of the wood, humans. This exaltation of plants and “lower” animals is the kind of sensibility describable as biophilia, care for all that lives. Kunitz, however, goes further by dignifying plants and animals, and, at the same time, vilifying humans. Or more precisely, vilifying a specified set of human actions.
If personification is Kunitz’s tool to enliven and vilify machines, and, in addition, extra-enliven and dignify nature, a rather opposite technique is employed on people, one depicting them as not fully alive. If, in the first stanza, the neighbors can be said to be “dead” to the import of the events in front of them, the fourth stanza is inhabited by the “ghosts of children.” The word “shade” enhances the real and figurative deaths in this scene. Shade describes not only the shade of trees but, in a long literary tradition, the state of a person after death, as in the phrase describing the afterworld, “land of the shades.” Children playing in the shade of trees, “racing beyond their childhood,” says Kunitz, disappear into “grievous old age,” die and become shades. Kunitz seems to say that an absence of tree-shade — which describes many a sparsely-arbored, fifties suburb — hastens people into the “suburbs” of human old age, and finally, the “suburbs” of death (life as urban), a final move to the land of shades. Such a claim might be explained this way:
“If personification is Kunitz’s tool to enliven and vilify machines, and, in addition, extra-enliven and dignify nature, a rather opposite technique is employed on people, one depicting them as not fully alive.”
eradication of trees and plants helps kill off memories of what was, pushes humans increasingly into hope for an unknown and suspect future, hastens time and therefore, the approach of death. Nostalgia and cognizance, on the other hand, work to slow time, to make aging less grievous, less, if you will, suburban. “Suburbs,” then, not only describes a place outside the “urb(an),” but a purgatory on the edge of life, an anteroom to the land of the shades.
In stanza four, “the green world,” or nature, is again personified — nature turns the page of an old book, its own biography. Nature has a long tradition of comparison to a book, one that with the Book of God comprised the two-volume set of the Book of Life. Nature turning the pages of its own book is a kind of objectification (nature as book), personification, and deification (nature as a kind of god or demiurge) rolled into one. The particular page nature turns is “death-foxed,” not just yellowed or brown with age, but possibly inhabited by images of nature’s losses like a page of deceased relatives in a family photo album. If the picture conjured up from Kunitz’s description is of nature sadly turning the pages of its own history, mourning its losses at the hand of its own children (humanity), the reader’s response might be one similar to Christ crucified: empathy for a god under attack from its own, from those who know not what they do.
As one might expect from the title, “The War Against the Trees,” the poem’s last stanza brings readers back to those victims of “war,” those “great-grandfathers of the town / So freshly lopped and maimed,” those “giants” brought “to their knees” in a “seizure” of death. In this last stanza, the trees are toppled, their roots exposed. The craters left behind are “too big for hearts,” these giants being larger in size and in sensitivity than the humans killing them. Kunitz calls the exposed roots, “club-roots” which is also the name for a plant disease caused by a slime mold. Symptoms of the disease include large malformed roots. Because this definition does not fit well with these toppled, healthy elms, club-root is probably a play on club foot, defined as “a congenitally deformed or distorted foot.” Add this personification of tree roots to the word, “amputated,” that follows, and readers are not only presented with murdered bodies, but deformed corpses. The image of club-roots radically morphs with the word, “gorgons,” female monsters with snakes for hair who turn those looking at them to stone. “Gorgons” is a somewhat imperfect attribution because the word might provoke a conflation of trees with monsters rather than tree corpses as monstrous. Apart from this quibble, “gorgons” is effective because the exposure, the sight, of “club-roots” indicates that the once-green earth is being desertified into a treeless, stony moonscape. These gorgons, however, are different from the blindness-causing gorgons of myth since the club-roots do not cause blindness, but are blind, another injury to these sympathy-provoking trees already “maimed,” “lopped,” “amputated,” and brought “to their knees.”
In the last stanza’s fourth line, the blindness metaphor is mixed with an aural component when the gorgon roots cry “Moon,” a kind of synesthesia where a sight (and site) is so offensive it “cries out” to be heard. Yet Kunitz seems doubtful anyone else hears the trees crying out, even if “caught / in the rear-view mirrors of passing cars.” More likely it is that upon seeing the site, drivers will not view it as a slaughter, like the poet. Or, if they do, Kunitz thinks they will be too busy to give it much thought. And if a driver should stop her car and ask Mr. Kunitz (is he not one of the witnesses?) who it is that’s bulldozing the land, he just might answer, “All of us.”
Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001.
Jonathan N. Barron
Barron is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has co-edited Jewish American Poetry (University Press of New England) and Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost (University of Missouri Press), as well as a forthcoming collection of essays on the poetic movement, New Formalism. Beginning in 2001, hewill be the editor-in-chief of The Robert Frost Review. In the following essay he examines the structure of Kunitz’s “The War Against The Trees.”
In “The War Against the Trees,” Kunitz weaves together two ancient poetic forms using metrical lines that depend in every stanza on at least one set of rhymes. First, he engages the ancient pastoral tradition that depends on the opposition between mechanized civilization and the agrarian life of farms, and pastures. Second, he sets his pastoral poem into a prophetic context: he uses his poem as an occasion to charge his readers with moral, even theologically based fervor about a grave injustice, a terrible transgression.
The pastoral element of the poem is the most readily noticed. Generally speaking, a pastoral poem is any poem that takes nature as its occasion. In fact, however, the genre of pastoral poetry is a bit more complex and nuanced. Recently, a scholar of pastoral poetry, Paul Alpers, declared that people, not nature, make a poem pastoral. While the poem must contain nature, it must do more than merely describe the flora and fauna. According to Alpers, ever since the ancient Greeks first set pastoral verse to parchment it has been the case that “we will have a far truer idea of pastoral if we take its representative anecdote to be herdsmen and their lives, rather than landscape or idealized nature.” To Alpers, this means that pastoral poetry always concerns and explores a relationship between people and nature, not just nature all by itself. Further, as a poetic type, pastoral poetry defines itself by asking what the nature of that human relationship to nature might be. Because it does this, he says, pastoral poetry inevitably contains social and ethical themes. According to Alpers, one can recognize a pastoral poem by its formal structure. That structure, he says, depends on the following plot: a person in nature addresses some natural object which, in turn, raises serious questions about both the relation between individuals and nature, and individuals and social institutions.
Meanwhile, not too far from ancient Greece, the Hebrews developed a literary form which is now part of the Hebrew Bible, the various books of the Prophets. Eventually, prophecy, as a literary form, took root in America during the seventeenth century when the Puritans, who envisioned themselves to be the new Israelites creating a New Jerusalem in a new England, saw it as their mission to write a new Bible for a new Canaan. In the works of their new bible the Puritans developed a literary form, the jeremiad, modeled on the Book
“What makes the poem, ‘The War Against the Trees, ’ so exciting, unusual and interesting, then, is the way it blends the pastoral tradition of the classical age with the jeremiad, the New England version of the Hebrew Prophets.”
of Jeremiah from the Hebrew Bible. As the literary scholar Sargent Bush explains “the jeremiad” is “a sermon form that served both to admonish and to encourage.”
Of the many poets of his generation born in the first decades of the twentieth century, Kunitz was in an ideal position to blend the Hebrew, Puritan jeremiad with the classical Greek and Roman pastoral. Born into a Jewish family in New England, he grew up with the Hebrew Bible and the Prophets as well as with the Puritan inflected literature of New England. Born and educated in Massachusetts, and a student of literature both undergraduate and graduate at Harvard, he expected to teach at Harvard as well. But after achieving his master’s degree in 1927, he was told, in his words, “that Anglo-Saxons would resent being taught English by a Jew, even a Jew with a summa cum laude.” Despite this setback, he went on to edit at least seventeen reference books on literature that were standard material on the subject throughout the 1930s and early 1940s. In effect, he was as knowledgeable about the western pastoral and classical tradition as any poet of his generation.
What makes the poem, “The War Against the Trees,” so exciting, unusual and interesting, then, is the way it blends the pastoral tradition of the classical age with the jeremiad, the New England version of the Hebrew Prophets. This blending of poetic types produces a work of unusual and striking force. Part of this force is due to the variations on these forms that Kunitz makes. For example, rather than taking place among shepherds in a pasture, the poem occurs in a settled town. But the pastoral structure is retained because the poem is an address to nature, in this case a group of elm trees that are so ancient they literally have witnessed the events of a century. The ethical, social aspect of Kunitz’s modern pastoral is that these modern shepherds, neighbors in a small town, must consider the consequences and meaning of ripping these trees out of the soil. To destroy something so old, is it not a kind of betrayal of one’s own roots? One’s own past?
To ask that question, however, is to engage not only a pastoral convention but also a convention far more common to the Puritan jeremiad. When Kunitz laments the “war against the trees” he does not just set a series of questions about the proper relationship to nature in motion, he also begins an angry, admonishing, even scolding jeremiad of his own. The pastoral scene becomes, in effect, a platform for Kunitz’s own prophecy of a hopeless, even catastrophic future.
What is that future? What is the transgression Kunitz means to have us notice? It is the new rise of suburbs. The post-World War II phenomenon of the suburb made possible by a new automobile culture was quite literally changing the very idea of the landscape all over America. In his poem, Kunitz renders this transformation into the language of a visionary war of biblical proportions. In this prophecy, the evil ones are not philistines but suburbanites and the evil god is not Moloch but oil. By contrast, the heroes are the mighty elms, the “giants” who wear “crowns.” The suburb, in other words, is more than just an idea about the proper relationship between people and nature. It is, says Kunitz’s poem, a profoundly unethical, potentially immoral attitude towards nature itself because it sees nature only as decoration, a mere appendage to commercial life. By contrast, the century old elms give the lie to such a shallow relationship. Ultimately, the poem, in good jeremiad fashion, urges a return to a more symbiotic relationship with nature. It condemns the suburban transformation as an unholy model of dominance where nature is merely so much land to develop for cash.
Kunitz’s attack on the suburb implies that the small town is a kind of American pastoral. This idea asserts itself most strongly at the poem’s conclusion when he connects the elms to the town’s own historical sense of itself. To destroy the elms in the name of suburbanization, he says, is to destroy one’s own history. The jeremiad is meant to be a warning to the town: Kunitz all but says that to sell its land to an oil company is to sell its soul, its past, its roots. This warning has an angry edge to it because, as the poem indicates, this very attack itself will likely have no power or influence in modern American life. Kunitz is aware that nothing will stop suburbanization and it is this pessimism, this anger, that defines the poem’s tone. Kunitz’s angry critique of a society that has given up any respect or interest in the integrity of nature becomes the ethical, and social heart and soul of the poem.
Turning now to the poem itself, one discovers that it depends on a strict sense of form. In five, six line, metrical stanzas it develops its story through the use of symbolism, metaphor, complex imagery, and literary allusion. Every stanza also contains at least one pair of rhymes. It is as if Kunitz, by appealing to form in this way, were saying, through the use this formal style, that some traditions must not be lost, must be preserved. Although his subject is modern, the selling of land and the bulldozing of trees, the structure is ancient (pastoral and jeremiad), and the form (meter and rhyme) is, if not ancient, at least several centuries old. Both the forms and structure of this poem make it traditional, dependent on the past, and as ancient and noble as the very trees it means to defend and champion! By contrasting these old forms and styles to a modern subject, in other words, Kunitz highlights his own position; he becomes a man in tune with nature and, as such, he opposes nature’s dominance in the name of the modern suburbs.
The first stanza establishes the anecdote, the scene that will drive what follows. Note that in this stanza the war depicted is between machine and nature: people are, in this instance, mere commentators even though they are responsible for the event itself. Ultimately, though, the larger economic system, suburbanization, is the real culprit here: “The man who sold his lawn to standard oil / Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show.” Here, the man sells his bit of earth to an oil company. But why shouldn’t he? No doubt he made a great deal of money off the sale and can enjoy his new profit by trading a few jokes with his neighbors. Presumably, the scene is a small town somewhere in the United States. But what is “the show”? It is “bulldozers, drunk with gasoline” who “test the virtue of the soil.” Here, the gendered imagery makes the case against such a sale plain. The bulldozers become drunken male warriors who test the female virtue of what one famous scholar of American culture called the Virgin Land (Henry Nash Smith). Innocent, female earth, in other words, will be raped by the machines of suburbanization.
The next stanza makes even more plain that the culprit is neither the man who sold the land nor necessarily even the bulldozers. Rather, it shows that suburbanization, the transformation of America from a place of cities, farms, and towns, to a place where the majority of citizens will live in suburbs has begun. This point is made in the opening lines of the second stanza:
Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raidsWere but the preliminaries to a war
Against the great-grandfathers of the town
In these lines, Kunitz explains that the bulldozers are, in the fact, the last battle, in a much older war against nature. For not only has the earth been raped but even the plants have been transformed as more and more decorative flowers replace the grandfathers, the trees, the real indigenous ecosystem. The typical yard even of the town was but the first “foray” and “raid” against nature that would be concluded when the great-grandfather trees are felled. Kunitz here says that no one ought to be surprised for he, like a prophet, could have predicted upon first seeing the silly hydrangea and forsythia that soon bulldozers would “lop” and “maim” these trees. To emphasize his view that the bulldozers merely conclude a centuries long “war against the trees,” the poem’s second stanza ends by declaring that, as each elm tree falls, “a century went down.”
As he begins his third stanza the poem that began as a pastoral enters into high jeremiad gear. The stanza asks just how important a tree is? What is its value? Mere cash to be cashed in? Or is its value to be measured in terms of its history? Kunitz gives us nature’s view of this calamity by turning his gaze to the moles underground who are the panicked first witnesses to this final battle of the war. In so doing, Kunitz suggests that the trees are fundamental to this place, to its ecosystem, to its very identity as a place. They can be said to embody history. This has profound implications for people since it assumes that insofar as one belongs to a particular place the flora and fauna of that place are, as it were, one’s relatives. To kill off the trees, then, is to kill off one’s own history, a part not only of the town but of one’s self as well.
The third stanza’s powerful description of the felling of the elms, Kunitz gives us the perspective of the mole “rampaging” through “his halls” as the trees are uprooted. In effect, this third stanza transforms the landscape into a kind of epic battle. The trees, understood as giants, are “forced to their knees,” and their citizens, like this mole, flee in terror. That Kunitz sets the poem underground in this stanza indicates, through the metaphor, “underground,” just how fundamental these elms are to this place. Words such as “deep” and “roots” are often used as metaphors to indicate a connection to a place. In this poem, real roots actually do run deep and they are with great labor and with mighty machines eradicated nonetheless. In other words, by going underground Kunitz emphasizes the metaphorical, even symbolic meaning of the trees suggesting through the metaphor that they are the very definition of this place’s history. To attack them is to attack one’s own past.
The reading explains why the next stanza returns to the human realm as a lost place of mere ghosts. It begins, “I saw the ghosts of children at their games / Racing beyond their childhood in the shade.” Here, Kunitz connects the trees to the children of this town. He connects the trees to the children’s experience and, in so doing, he links the trees both to the town’s past (the children) and to its future, since these same children will grow up to run the town itself. The prophetic admonition here is Kunitz’s implication that, by cutting the trees, the town is effectively cutting off its own roots, its own childhood, its own history. The stanza concludes:
And while the green world turned its death-foxedpage
And a red wagon wheeled,
I watched them disappear
Into the suburbs of their grievous age.
These lines only increase the prophetic anger of the poem’s theme. “The green world” is a traditional poetic figure, a trope, for the pastoral ideal of a bucolic natural pasture of shepherds at home with their flocks. Imagining the passage of time as a book turning its pages, Kunitz tells us that the next page, our present commercial civilization, is “death-foxed.” The new postwar suburban age belongs to a “grievous” time when the kings, the elms, will lose their crowns to drunken machines and laughing neighbors. The trees, and the children who knew them, will be nothing but ghosts, forgotten to history.
One could argue that this stanza implies that the suburbs made the bulldozers necessary. The suburbs, we are told, create a mentality, a “grievous age,” that disconnects the human from the natural by removing people ever more completely from the great-grandfathers of their past. The poem’s concluding stanza, therefore, angrily blasts
“The children, who played in the past, enter a future which is the present for the narrator. The bulldozers, which work in the present, move into an unknown future. The narrator stands in the present, examining the past as it moves into the future — a paradox of the past, present and future all occurring at once.”
the world of automobiles. The suburb as a place entirely dependent on cars becomes, in this poem, a final human victory over the great-grandfathers, and over the last gasp of the pastoral ideal, the lost American town. In the first three lines of the last stanza, Kunitz returns to the classical age, specifically to Greek myth, when he says that the trees, with their roots sticking up in the air, look like gorgons, those fantastically ugly women with snakes for hair: one look at a gorgon and one would turn to stone. In Greek mythology Perseus kills Medusa, one of the three gorgon sisters, but, in Kunitz’s poem, Perseus is no hero and the Medusa is no monster. Indeed, just as Perseus could only look at the gorgon he was to kill through the mirror of the shield Athena gave him, so the unnamed victor of these gorgons, can only look at them in mirrors as well. Ironically, even sarcastically, the mirror this present day Perseus uses is not a shield granted to the conquering hero by a goddess but rather it is merely “the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars.” All those who drive, in other words, are, in part, responsible for the death of these great-grandfathers. The poem, as is true for jeremiads generally, implicates its readers. It says that we, in our blindness and our greed, have transformed our heritage, our history, our own past into modern day gorgons. In the final stanza of this poem, then, Kunitz offers us a portrait of the automobile age: a time of disconnection, loss, the end of the pastoral ideal.
That Kunitz’s poem has the force of a prophecy must have struck readers of the book in which it appeared, his third. For it won the Pulitzer Prize for the best book of poetry in 1958. Whatever politicians might have us believe, poets, at any rate, as well as their readers welcome such civilized calls to account for our transgressions.
Source: Jonathan N. Barron, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001.
Carl Mowery
Mowery holds a Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, in Rhetoric and Composition and American Literature. He has written numerous essays for the Gale Group. In the following, Mowery examines the theme of life and death and Kunitz’s special use of language.
Kunitz was born in the industrial town of Worchester, Massachusetts in 1905. He was raised by his mother; his father had died before his birth. He was subjected to anti-Semitism as a youth. (Worchester is built on seven hills, each of which was inhabited by a different ethnic group. At that time these groups remained apart and oftentimes were antagonistic to the others.) In an interview with Leslie Kelen he said, “I was curious about the world of possibilities beyond those other alien hills (in Worchester).” Later in another interview he said, “In my youth, as might be expected, I had little knowledge of the world to draw on. But I had fallen in love with language and was excited by ideas.” To Leslie Kelen he also remarked, “I’m not a nature poet, but I am a poet of the natural world.” Kunitz’s five stanza poem reveals his love of nature and shows his fascination with special forms of language in order to present his ideas. The poem takes a look at the modern world’s relentless quest for oil at the expense of the environment. In it, the narrator stands to the side and watches and comments on the changes occurring before him.
In Touch Melt, published in 1995 in The Later Poems: New and Selected, the question is asked, “What makes the engine go?” The answer is: “Desire, desire, desire.” It is “desire” for oil-consuming machines that pushes the oil company to seek more sources of oil. A new and “grievous age” makes unquenchable and immediate demands for more oil. The consequence of this desire is that the future has become dependent on oil, just as the past has been. And so to satisfy the future, the present now destroys the past.
Kunitz once said, “I know that I am living and dying at once.” This acceptance of life and death simultaneously is a major theme in his poetry. In this poem the theme of death in life is reintroduced as the theme of past and future. The future informs the past, just as the past determines the future. In Kunitz’s poem the future will destroy the past upon which it will be built. As the bulldozers and other machines test “the virtue of the soil” and remove the greenery, they leave a cratered moon-like world. The forsythia, hydrangeas, and privet hedge all fall to the power of the machines, as one part of the natural world is uprooted and destroyed in order to find another. With the felling of each “great-grandfather” the link between the past and the future is reduced. The ancient trees, representatives of the past, yield to the machines that now bring them “to their knees.”
Ironically, this attack on trees is also an attack on the primal origin of oil itself: the prehistoric accumulation of forest material which under pressure and over time is turned into oil. These trees would not be turned into oil, but they are descendants of those trees from ages past. The oil is used by the past-driven machine to destroy the present-day trees to gain access to more prehistoric oil deposits that will be needed to fuel future machines in their quest for more oil! And the cycle continues without end. In this search for oil the needs of the future destroy two pasts: the oil itself and the memories of the past. The cycle brings to mind the ancient imagery of a snake eating its own tail until nothing exists except the memory of the snake. But in this poem, even the memory disappears.
In the headlong quest for new sources, the oil-seeking Standard Oil Company attacks the landscape, laying low everything in its path. This is the environmental equivalent to General Sherman’s march to the sea during the American Civil War and it is reported using warlike imagery and phrases. The attack on the “lawn” and the neighborhood soil is as frantic as the children’s games. This event brings to mind the phrase often repeated during the Vietnam war: We had to destroy the village, in order to save it. In this poem, the neighborhood is destroyed in order to provide it with the oil it will need in order to survive in the oil-dependant future. The image left on that “corner lot” is one fleeting rear-view mirror glimpse, the “witness-moment” of the cratered moonscape (a bombed landscape image) disappearing into the distance.
The ghostly images of playing children soon disappear because those memories depend on the existence of the old trees under which they played their games “in the shade.” The children’s frantic play, as they go “racing beyond their childhood” into a future of their own, is replaced by the frantic destruction of the gasoline-drunken machines as they charge into their own future. But each enters a different future. The children, who played in the past, enter a future which is the present for the narrator. The bulldozers, which work in the present, move into an unknown future. The narrator stands in the present, examining the past as it moves into the future — a paradox of the past, present and future all occurring at once.
An important poetic construction comes into play in the poem: the use of hyphenated words. In each stanza Kunitz uses a specially crafted word to create new meanings. “Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids” in stanza two create new images of plants and flowers with the war being waged on them by the machines. These new words combine the tender innocence of flowering shrubs with the brutality of war. The word “witness-moment” combines the instant of glancing into a rear-view mirror with the intensity of witnessing an event. It is more than just a casual seeing of the event because to witness carries a stronger involvement with it. It means to attest or to affirm an event to be true.
In the fourth stanza, “death-foxed” is Kunitz’s manufactured word that combines several meanings into one. An old meaning for “foxed” is intoxicated. Another correlation with the word death-foxed is the old word death-bird, a carrion eater. The combination of these meanings at this point creates a new meaning: being intoxicated with the death of the “green world” in the recently devoured neighborhood.
The passing moment of defoliation is also witnessed by others. Some see it through the rear-view mirrors of their gasoline consuming cars. In the fleeting “witness-moment” the driver sees the past, literally the scenery behind him, but continues on the road to the future. In so doing the driver fulfills his part in the course of events according to Picard as the road ahead, his future, soon becomes the road in the mirror, his past.
The red wagon, a non-oil-dependent vehicle, is important to the narrator, because it combines the images of cheerful child’s play and the non-oil-dependant children (as in Kunitz’s youth). But these are soon replaced by the oil-powered machines that eat at the greenery of the neighborhood and the automobiles that carry witnesses past it.
The machines wage their impersonal war and bring the tree “giants to their knees.” There are no people are involved in the attacks. Only machines attack the trees and only the trees suffer from the attack. The implication that the machines have taken over the world in an insatiable attempt to quench their thirst for oil products is conveyed by the narrator’s inaction. The humans (the narrator and the watching neighbors) are passive observers. The drivers of passing cars are also detached as they witness the events as a reflected image in a rear-view mirror.
The boldly stated environmental concern addressed in this poem is especially poignant because it was published in 1958 (in Selected Poems, 1928 – 1958), when environmentalism was a little-known concept. The result of his far-reaching vision is this well-crafted little poem. The “intellectual courage that insists on the truth” as he saw it allowed him to raise the issues in his poem. “If I hadn’t had an urgent impulse, if the poem didn’t seem to me terribly important,” Kunitz said, “I never wanted to write it and didn’t.” Kunitz grappled with images that have become all too commonplace. But many trees and landscapes have been sacrificed since this poem first appeared. He once revealed in the New York Times: “The deepest thing I know is that I am living and dying at once, and my conviction is to report that dialogue. It is a rather terrifying thought that is at the root of much of my poetry.” That combination of life and death, as present and past, is at the heart of this poem.
Source: Carl Mowery, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001.
What Do I Read Next?
- Arguably the most important book of the modern environmental movement, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), won eight awards from conservation and women’s groups and became a national bestseller.
- Bill McKibben, in The End of Nature (1989), wrote about air and weather as Rachel Carson had about soil, plants, and insects in Silent Spring, both warning of irreversible damage if humanity keeps up the increasing pace of production and consumption.
- Nature is one of the more complex words in the English language. To tackle the history of the transformation of ideas of nature from early Greeks to modern Americans, Clarence Glacken’s Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century(1967) is an indispensable resource.
- What Clarence Glacken did for the concept of nature in 1967, Max Oelschlaeger did for the concept of wilderness in his The Idea of Wilderness (1991). Oelschlaeger’s scope extends from prehistory to the age of ecology.
- Derek Wall’s anthology, Green History (1994), covers environmental writings by philosophers, writers, and scientists, including authors from Plato to D. H. Lawrence, Sappho to Leo Tolstoy.
