Imagery and Lamentation in "The Trees Are Down" Anonymous 12th Grade

The Trees are Down by Charlotte Mew is an empathic lament dedicated to the trees and the importance that the poetess attaches to them. Her ecocentric perspective on the felling of the trees allows her to create a poem that is dramatically powerful in its creation of compassion for her loss. Through this poem, Mew creates a powerful image of her love and respect for the trees, and nature as a whole, impressing a powerful sense of loss and guilt upon her reader.

Mew's epigraph for the poem is a few lines from Revelation, highlighting Mew’s reverence for the trees and the importance she attaches to their existence. These two lines immediately highlight the themes the poem will deal with, the significance of nature, and humanity’s destruction of it for their own benefit. The first line, in conjunction with the epigraph, are manipulated by the poetess to highlight her personal connection with an issue that she recognises is far bigger than her. The repetition of the word common in the first paragraph serves to highlight just how ordinary events like these appear to people, and Mew’s belief that they should be given far more importance. While the imagery of the first stanza is largely auditory, the imagery of the second stanza is...