Four Trees — upon a solitary Acre —

Four Trees — upon a solitary Acre —
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action —
Maintain —

The Sun — upon a Morning meets them —
The Wind —
No nearer Neighbor—have they —
But God —

The Acre gives them — Place —
They — Him — Attention of Passer by —
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply —
Or Boy —

What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature —
What Plan
They severally — retard — or further —
Unknown —

      -FR778, J742, Fascicle 37, 1863

Four Trees — upon a solitary Acre —

This image gets in your head immediately. Can’t you just imagine those four trees foregrounded on that solitary acre? The specificity of the number leads you to believe these trees were literal trees, rather than being a mere metaphor. It’s hard to know with Dickinson though. Perhaps there is a symbolic significance to the number four? For instance, there were four people living in Dickinson’s house when this poem was was written, after all, her sister and her parents. But, I like to imagine that Dickinson is musing here on four actual trees on an actual acre:

Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action —
Maintain —

Dickinson continues the meditation on “chance” that she explored in the previous poem, FR777, with the lines, “Life, and Death…Maintain—by Accident/ that they proclaim—”

You can see in both poems the word “Maintain” and in both cases the idea is connected to chance. In the former poem it is “ — by accident” that Life maintains and in this latter one it’s “Without Design/ Or Order, or Apparent Action —”  

Two years before Dickinson wrote this poem, Darwin’s seminal book, “On The Origin of Species,” was published. It’s possible that Dickinson, being part of a highly intellectual society of Amherst, would have read this book, but even if she hadn’t she would at least heard about the ideas which were sweeping through her circles. To look at nature "maintaining" by chance instead of "design" is part of the controversy surrounding Darwinism, and I think that is what Dickinson is thinking about here. To say that these trees are here “Without Design” is to see the world as random. This would seem to preclude a creator. And yet, surprisingly, it is not a Godless world presented in this poem. God, which appears here as the sun and wind, is a neighbor.

The Sun — upon a Morning meets them —
The Wind —
No nearer Neighbor—have they —
But God —

These trees may be random, but they still take sustenance from the elements, are part of an eco-system.

The idea of God as a neighboring wind hearkens back to the “shapeless friend” that visits the poet in FR773.

This relationship between the trees and the elements is followed up with the way the trees and the acre give each other a raison d’etre:

The Acre gives them — Place —
They — Him — Attention of Passer by —
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply —
Or Boy —

That “Him” could refer back to God, if you read the two stanzas as connected, like this, “But God — // the acre gives them,” or the “Him” could refer to the Acre. Either reading carries a radical idea. God gives the trees place, and they, in turn, give Him place. Or, if "Him" refers to the Acre, then the Acre gives the trees a place, and the trees give the Acre, in turn, the attention of Passer by. In both readings you get the sense that without the trees, there is nothing, no God and no Place. The beings, the life, make the place. The life gives place to the Acre because it is life that draws the “Attention of Passer by —/ Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply —/ Or Boy —”

The Passer by, squirrel, and boy, are easy enough to reckon, because they are all attracted to the trees for various reasons. But how about the surprise of “Shadow” there? What does it mean to get the attention of a shadow? A shadow is in opposition to the sun, so what might it mean, metaphorically, for a being to have a shadow side? And, moreover, what does it mean for that shadow to be attracted to life? That evocative idea is easy to miss here, but it adds a special relevance to this poem.

Squirrels have a wealth of meaning for Dickinson too. I’m not going to explore it here, but suffice to say, that unlike the actual trees, which are without “Design/ Or Order, or Apparent Action,” there is nothing random in a Dickinson poem.

I think the word “haply” is worth looking into. The word, which is rarely used anymore, means “by chance.” It’s another nod to the idea of randomness in this poem. The trees are in this field by chance, and the boy notices them, too, haply, by chance.

What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature —
What Plan
They severally — retard — or further —
Unknown —

What deed is theirs? It’s a funny question. What do the trees own? They don’t own anything. They just are. The implication is that we don’t own anything either.

And not only do they own nothing except to occupy the space of themselves, neither can we say they slow things down (retard) or take things further. What plan they forward or reverse, we don’t know. Dickinson provides an alternative line here for “severally — retard — or further — ,” which is “severally — promote — or hinder — “

Are these random trees getting in the way of the acre's potential, or are they adding to it? Is nature meant to be wild, or would it be better to cut down the trees and grow a field of wheat here? Who can truly say?

Four trees on an acre, and Dickinson turns this simple fact into a meditation on the purposive quality of nature herself, and the way we impose our ideas of order upon it.


    -/)dam Wade l)eGraff

Four Trees" by Egon Schiele

Notes:

1. The meter in this poem is all over the place. It goes from pentameter to dimeter to tetrameter back to dimeter in the first stanza, for instance. Why? Perhaps it is to underscore the idea of randomness.

1. The phrase “They severally — retard — or further —” has an odd power to it. I have a friend, Alex Cory, who used this phrase as a title for a poem. When I read Alex's poem, it was the first time I heard the phrase. I didn't know the title came from Dickinson until I read this poem for this blog, but it stuck in my head from the getgo. Why?

2. There is much more to say about this poem, But let me end here by saying I just got an e-mail from my friend Steve Nickson which included a poem by John Ashbery called “Some Trees.” I’ve loved Ashbery's  poem for years now, but would never have connected it with Dickinson’s poem if Steve hadn’t just happened to have sent it to me as I was thinking about it. Here’s Ashbery’s poem, which strikes me as a moving response to Dickinson’s poem,

Some Trees

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.