Essay Questions

What exactly is the function of the trees in "Some Trees"?

The narrator and his companion are gazing upon some trees and contemplating. These trees are the catalysts that stimulate their realizations throughout the poem. For example, the narrator begins by wondering, awestruck, at the trees' ability to effortlessly exist in close, serene community without the use of artifices such as speech. This state of friendship seems to be sending a message: just being here at the same time as another person means something, and that something is worth contemplating. The trees become the guides imparting wisdom to the narrator, who learns his lesson and practices this contentedness with his companion, both of whom discover the "silence filled with noises" that accompanies this zen-like state.

Compare the poem's substance with its structure.

This is, admittedly, quite a confusing poem. Its intricacies are difficult to decipher, and Ashbery's motivations behind writing it are nebulous at best. Its structure, however, is a sharp contrast to the loose ambiguity of the meaning: it is a strictly defined five-stanza poem that consists of rhyming couplets and makes extensive use of parallelism. There are many instances of enjambment, even bridging the stanzas, which makes the meaning somewhat less clear, but the structure becomes more gratifying to understand. Some of the rhymes are questionable (bordering upon slant rhyme), but in all, it is a very strictly defined, easily understood poetic structure. It seems like Ashbery is making up for his ambiguity of meaning by serving it to his reader in an easily digestible form, although this is purely speculation.