Question

summary of the poem Trees by Andrienne Rich...

Answer 1

The “I,” the voice of the speaker of Adrienne Rich’s poem, “The Trees,” is a voice with a body engaged in activities and sensing intrusions that are not organic to the conventions of a nature poem.  This is, in fact, an (un)natural poem that narrates the struggle of a population of trees to escape the confines of a greenhouse.  In evoking the trees’ “strain,” the poem demonstrates the unsuitability of language itself as a greenhouse or container of nature.  The speaker is a witness to the trees’ exodus, but distances herself from participating in the making of something out of the spectacle. She “sit[s]” and “writ[es]” but not poems, “long letters,” in which she “scarcely mention[s] the departure / of the forest.”  Even though the speaker addresses an audience, her own “head is full of whispers”—she’s an audience as well.  We, however, the audience to the poem, are compelled by the command: “Listen.”  The speaker reaches across the barrier between poem and audience, a transaction that occurs on a page, and says: Listen, you.
Adrienne Rich articulates her consciousness of the many levels of inner and outer and the blurring of the boundaries between them.  The trees, “long-cramped… under the roof” are trying to get out while the speaker remains in the space the trees long to escape.  An open door makes the “night” and the “whole moon” and the “sky” available to the speaker; at the same time, through this door “the smell of leaves… / still reaches” back in.  The speaker’s “head” is another interior, implicitly entered by “whispers.”

Answer 2

The poem “Trees” by Andrienne Rich is a symbolic poem which tells about the plants who want to escape the walls of the house and want to move in the forest. The trees are the symbolic representation of being women who want to move out of the enclosed walls of the society and escape in the world of freedom. The poet objectively describes the escape of the plant to its new environment.