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Our Casuarina Tree Summary
Toru Dutt
Summary and Analysis
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“Our Casuarina Tree,” a poem written in English by the Indian writer Toru Dutt, celebrates a huge tree that the speaker (resembling Dutt herself) associates with the happiness of her childhood in India. Yet the speaker also associates the tree with the memory of lost loved ones—people from her youth (probably based on Dutt’s dead siblings) with whom she, when a girl, played beneath the tree.
The fact that the tree is associated, in the speaker’s mind, with other persons is already foreshadowed in the poem’s title through the use of the word Our. The speaker’s perspective is immediately more than merely her own: the title already implies that she thinks of the tree as not simply hers but as belonging to others, too.
The opening image, which compares a large vine crawling around the tree to a “huge Python” (1), might at first seem dark and foreboding, but the image ultimately emphasizes the great strength of the tree itself. For some readers, the tree symbolizes the ancient and venerable culture of India, while the huge encircling vine symbolizes the potentially deadly influence of colonialism. Most immediately, though, the vine itself seems to add a kind of beauty to the tree; the vine, after all, is called a “scarf” (6), a word with fairly positive connotations.