To Return To The Trees

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1974

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Themes

Aging and Wisdom

“To Return to the Trees” runs on multiple dual narratives; the poem’s core message invites readers to see the world in terms of simultaneity rather than contradiction. In one narrative about aging, the speaker contemplates his own old age, seeming to long for the peace and wisdom he will acquire once he can “decline like this tree” (Line 7), embracing a time when “grey has grown strong in me” (Line 21). The speaker aligns himself with Ben Jonson; trees personify each poet in their age, the oak for Jonson in Line 8 and the sea-almond for the speaker in Line 11. Beyond the aging of particular poets, whether past or present, the speaker also addresses the aging of language, ideas, and the earth itself. Beyond the wisdom of men, even beyond the word “senex” itself (Line 50), all our efforts at connection and emotion fall “under the sand” (Line 54) bit by bit, effaced “by sand grains, by centuries” (Line 56). Meaning and connection balance between impulse and loss, as the speaker struggles with Seneca and his “gnarled, laborious Latin” (Line 45). But his struggle with these “fragments” (Line 46) represents our struggle to connect and to find meaning, even in the “broken bark” (Line 47) of voices from the distant past. Through reading the past and reading the present, as the speaker reads “the changes on Morne Coco Mountain” (Line 18) in his Caribbean home alongside Seneca and Ben Jonson, the speaker eventually constitutes a new space of his own, one that merges disparate influences into a moment of balance.

Recurrence and Simultaneity

Through repetition in sound and image, Walcott reinforces the theme of recurrence in “To Return to the Trees.” Beginning with the title itself, the poem offers a sequence of recurrences: words repeat like refrains (senex, tree, almond, grey), images of rocks and wind, figures from the literary and mythic past, and even the behavior of the speaker all repeat in cycles. On “windy, green mornings” (Line 17)—not just one morning—the speaker studies the sunrise on Morne Coco Mountain, at once a specific moment, but at one specific moment that regenerates with each day. As the reader reads “To Return to the Trees,” the poem’s speaker reads Ben Jonson and Seneca; through the speaker’s eyes, the reader experiences these author’s as well, but only in the fragments the speaker offers, creating the circumstances of incomplete memory but also underscoring recurrence.

In addition to recurrence, the speaker creates a simultaneous past, present, and future when he asks “…am I lying / like this felled almond / when I write I look forward to age” (Lines 10-12). These lines, which invoke a simultaneous experience, also encapsulate recurrence: The poet Walcott wrote a line in which the speaker, like the characters on Keats’s Grecian Urn, will always be writing a line where they look forward to aging, because each time a reader experiences the line in the present, the line is still being written. Though Walcott aged and became part of history just as Jonson and Seneca, the Walcott who wrote these lines will always be looking to the future. Though the poem at times questions art and whether nature is superior to art, these lines highlight the power of art to transcend time.

Language, Words, and Expression

“To Return to the Trees” speculates about the uses and durability of language and art. Like others before him and those who will come after, the speaker sees himself as a link in a conversation across time. In any culture, the human impulse pushes us to connect meaningfully with others; language’s very existence proves this tendency. The speaker looks forward to acquiring wisdom to be “a gnarled poet” (Line 13), fused with natural phenomena enough to speak its language in “meters like thunder” (Line 15). He studies the trees, the sunrise, the grey of rocks and crystals in order to find that deep language of nature. He also communicates through written language, reading Ben Jonson and Seneca, bringing the voices of the past into the present, however fragmentary his experience might be.

The speaker also makes a pun of “burly” (Line 8), as in a knotty oak, but also referring to Jonson’s patron’s country estate, Burley. Here, Walcott demonstrates the flexibility and instability of language in these associations that emerge in the poem only as glimpses of the past. Further back chronologically, Seneca’s Latin proves even more remote and broken but still alive, connected again to the tree of wisdom through Walcott’s wordplay with “bore” (Line 44) and “bark” (Line 47). Seneca’s heroes see across time, making eye contact with the reader through the word “senex” itself, “with its two eyes” (Line 50), though they are actually two “e”s. No matter how intricate the language may be, the “lyrical utterance” (Line 52)—the poem—will slip away under the sands “with this language” (Line 55) as the centuries elapse. The impulse to connect will remain, and the reader becomes the next link in the conversation.