John Ashbery: Some Trees

June 27, 2024

Tom Thompson, The Jack Pine (1916)

Background

John Ashbery’s poem Some Trees was part of a collection selected by W. H. Auden that won the 1956 Yale Younger Poets Prize. Ashbery (1927-2017) later won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Some Trees

John Ashbery (1956)

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.

Tom Thomson, Autumn Foliage (1915)

Comment

Some Trees was published in 1956, but it reads like a poem from a farther future that somehow fell into the 20th century. You will recognize some of its themes if you have read Richard Powers’ Overstory.

[The trees] are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.

Do trees speak? There are trees that, when they are attacked by insects, will alert their neighbours. The neighbouring trees, forewarned, understand the message and secrete noxious chemicals to deter the insects. Trees aren’t conscious, but whether they have awareness or minds will depend on how you define those terms. This seems impossible: trees are immobile and too inanimate to speak. Ashbery picks up on the seeming paradox: it is “as though speech were a still performance.”

Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it...

In my reading of Some Trees, the “we” is a couple, and they are likely lovers. But perhaps Ashbery was thinking of a larger humanity embedded in a global forest. This implied couple seems ambivalent. But about what? Their status in the world? About their feelings for each other?

Then, a message from the trees breaks through to them, saying that

...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.

The trees have been trying to tell the couple that they do not need to struggle, just as trees do not struggle. Lives have meaning by “merely being there”; present and, like a tree, standing upright. This meaning grounds the couple as they “touch, love, explain.”

Lawren Harris, Winter Sunrise (1913)

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.

This “comeliness” is grace. Grace is always a gift from the outside; it is not something we “have invented” or anyone could invent. The trees’ transformative message connects the couple to a surrounding “chorus of smiles,” smiles that are silent yet “already filled with noises” of joy.