Question

in the forest summary?

Answer 1

“The Forest” is the first poem in the collection The Forest (1995) by American poet Susan Stewart; it is her fourth book of poems. The premise of “The Forest” is that there are no longer any forests in the world, but the forest itself is also a metaphor (the use of one object or idea in place of another to suggest a likeness between the two) for the loss of the human connection to nature, which the speaker of the poem tries to recover by remembering what a forest is like.

Like much of Stewart’s poetry, “The Forest” presents a challenge to the reader. The poem is intricately structured, with a pattern of repeated lines, like recurring images in a dream. It travels back and forth between the conscious and the unconscious mind; it does not present a straightforward, linear narrative. Its meaning cannot be fully grasped at first reading but must be teased out through repeated encounters with the poem. Stewart writes for an active rather than a passive reader, a reader who must make the effort to delve deeply into the poem to discern the poet’s intent and meaning.

In her choice of a forest as her central metaphor, Stewart touches a deep vein in the Western cultural imagination, since forests have over the ages carried a range of associations in society and literature. The poem also has startling contemporary relevance, since, due to the ever-increasing demands of the global economy, the world’s forests are vanishing at an alarming rate.

Summary

Stanzas 1–4

In the first stanza of “The Forest,” the speaker addresses an unnamed interlocutor (“you”), advising him or her to lie down and remember the forest because it is disappearing. In line 3, that statement is amended. The forest has already gone, but whatever details the person can recall will help to bring at least some aspect of it back. However, this will only be “a kind of life,” not the life itself and not the kind of life for which the person had hoped. The speaker says in stanza 2, it might be called “‘in the forest,’” the quotation marks suggesting it is not an immediate experience but one reconstructed, so to speak, from something else, perhaps from memory and language. The speaker emphasizes again, this time in italics, that the forest is gone, that it no longer exists, and then goes on to suggest that the interlocutor start to remember the beginning, the edge, or the first layer of the forest, as if it were “firm” and “underfoot,” even though everything seems to be a blank (“blank in life, too”).

In stanza 4, forest imagery begins to creep in (“black humus there”) as the process of memory starts to work, although the parallel imagery of the sea seems to work against the formulation of any concrete, earthy images. In the last line of stanza 4, music imagery enters the poem (“like a light left hand descending, always on the same keys”), which suggests a pianist playing the same chord over and over again. This image of repetition implies that melody has been lost; no development is possible, which relates to the struggle to recall an experience now departed. Memory moves in the same repetitive grooves as the music, unable to get to the heart of the remembered experience of the forest.

Stanzas 5–8

The music image is continued in stanza 5, with birds singing in the forest, but it is a ghostly kind of singing. It does not take place in the present moment (“behind and before”); it is singing “without a music” that appears to be formless (“there cannot be an order”). It is a long way from hearing actual birds singing in a real forest. The forest imagery, begun in stanza 4, is taken up and strengthened in the final line of stanza 5 and in the first line of stanza 6: “wide swatches of light slice between gray trunks, // Where the air has a texture of drying moss.” The forest imagery continues in line 3 of stanza 6, switching from a visual to an olfactory image: “a musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds.” The repetition of two lines about the insubstantial, unmusical singing birds seems to undercut any progress made, an impression which is confirmed in the last line of stanza 6 and the first line of stanza 7: “though high in the dry leaves something does fall, / Nothing comes down to us here.”

In stanza 7, the effort of memory begins to produce fruit....