Working with a Dominant Symbol

“Native Trees” and “Touching the Tree” are two short lyrical poems early in W. S. Merwin’s The Rain in the Trees that establish the centrality of the dominant symbol for the volume. “Native Trees” opens with the assertion by the child that neither of his parents “knew the names of the trees.” This statement declares the independence of the child and links that child with the natural world that exists apart from the life of the parents as surely as the lack of punctuation the poet uses throughout the volume declares his independence from traditional form. Form follows function as the poet in poem after poem builds its subversive message around a single dominant image of the destruction of the natural world, the loss of culture.

In the first stanza of “Native Trees,” the parents respond to the child’s questions by acting as though they did not hear and did not look where he pointed. Their attention was drawn instead to the “surfaces of furniture” and the “walls they had forgotten.” The child narrator understands their reactions to argue for “no questions no voices and no shade.” In the second stanza the child, asks whether there were trees where the parents grew up. When they answer yes, the child knows that they have forgotten. He understands that trees had no meaning for them and thus they could not name them. The conversation of the poem bids for the same innocence that Whitman evokes with his child asking about the grass. But while Whitman’s image opens up the poem to man’s centrality in burgeoning life, Merwin’s poem figures man’s alienation from the natural world of his cultural tradition.

The boy is again positioned against the adult world in “Touching the Tree.” The boy hears the tree, talks with the tree, and walks with the tree as opposed to the adults passing by. Their world is figured by the streetcars that sing to themselves, the sound of “ferries chains whistles/ tires on the avenue wires humming among windows/ words flying out of rooms.” The “no” of the parents reverberates with the “no” of the black river beyond the buildings, a river presumably blackened with the refuse of industrialization.

The final figure of the poem is of the boy digging a cave at the foot of the tree for the lion when he comes. The boy instinctively knows that the lion, the representation of the natural world, will need someplace to escape from the urban world. The symbol of strength that is only a dream in the boy’s world is set against the assertion of “I am iron” that the urban world makes.

The black river appears again in “Shadow Passing” with its stagnant water “full/ of the dreams of presidents/ of coal companies.” The automatons that pass on the streets in “Touching the Tree” appear again in “Night above the Avenue,” distanced by the walls and street that separate birth and death, pain and hope, fear and happiness. The speaker who watches from his kitchen window notes that human life has been “transformed” by the traffic and its lights separating them one from another. In “Glasses,” Merwin’s Whitmanesque catalogue of the life of the automaton, they are reduced to glittering “under imported leaves,” so far are they removed from the trees that can be touched and known.

While building has been seen in more rural-oriented societies to be the extension of the natural world—the materials of building bringing honor to themselves in the edifice—building in the urban setting is antithetical to the world from which its materials come and is in effect profane. The futility of this building is seen in “Now Renting” where the final outcome is windows with no one “to see the motionless clouds.”

The Armageddon motif is framed best by two short poems later in the volume. In “Place” the speaker wishes that he could plant a tree on the last day of the world. He rejects the idea of a fruit tree in favor of that original tree, that first tree planted on earth. His vision is of the sun going down while the water from “the earth full of the dead” touches its roots and the “clouds passing/one by one/ over its leaves.” The elements are all here. Earth, air, fire, and water endure despite man’s destructive nature. In the companion poem, “Witness,” the narrator wants to tell what the forests were like before the end, but he “will have to speak in a forgotten language.” The parents that could not name the trees live on in the son whose language has been destroyed with the forests. The play on paper, the product of the destruction of trees, alluded to in “Paper,” the inability of the children to see the speaker in “Print Fallen Out of Somewhere,” and the parallel between the “whispered sighing” and the “wind in the pines” in “Utterance” underline the sense that there is a vital connection between naming and valuing, naming and preservation.

In “The Crust” the servant/speaker offers the definitive statement: “the earth fell from under/ because the tree was cut whose roots held it together.” The servant sees that “with the tree went all the lives in it.” This tree encompassed those who lived, ate, slept, met, and believed in it. And most importantly, it had evolved the only language/ it remembered everything.”

Rain is used to express the narrator’s belief in the ultimate sense of the trees. In “Waking to the Rain,” the narrator records ”a dream of harmony” that he has on his birthday. He hears a man that he later realizes is his father in the rain outside his window. He doesn’t know how long the man called but apparently the calling was equated in his mind with the harmony he felt. In his parents’ room, the only sound he hears is the rain. When this poem is linked with “Empty Water,” the sense of belief that is figured with rain becomes clearer. The speaker in the poem misses the toad who came repeatedly to sit under the Christmasberry tree. He calls for the toad to return, and the call becomes the narrator’s statement of faith or creed as well as the toad’s. The toad, thinks the narrator, is a believer in shade, silence and elegance, ferns, patience, and most importantly the rain. The toad is a kind of soul-mate for the speaker.

“Rain at Night” is a kind of testimony of the speaker in which he bears witness to what he has heard. The message combines wind, rain, and air and the story of what has happened to the trees. The middle stanza pits the acts of the dead against the acts of the living, the believers in rain. The dead wanting only money cut the “sacred ‘ohias then/ the sacred koas then/ the sandalwood and the halas” and then let the cattle in to the stumps. But the “trees have risen one more time,” presumably replanted by the living. The last stanza of the poem returns to the litany of wind, rain, and air and celebrates the fact that the “rain is falling on the last place.”