18 pages • 36 minutes read
To Return To The Trees
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
“To Return to the Trees” adopts a structure seen in many Walcott poems, the three-line stanza, or tercet. These stanzas effect a steady urgency and agility, at times conversational and often oracular. The speaker may address the reader with a sense of intimacy, as in Lines 10-12: “Or am I lying / like this felled almond / when I write I look forward to age.” In other instances, like the opening three lines, the speaker proclaims with an omniscient voice that might be coming from the earth itself: “Senex, an oak. / Senex, this old sea-almond / unwincing in spray” (Lines 1-3). No formal metrical structure governs the poem; its pace comes instead from consistently short line lengths of two or three accented syllables. Internal rhyme and alliteration, rather than end rhymes, create the poem’s acoustic features.
Besides its useful blend of formal structure and modern austerity, the three-line stanza harks back to terza rima, the more formal, rhyming three-line structure used by Dante for The Divine Comedy. Walcott’s streamlined three-line stanza embodies his intersecting influences, classical and modern. He went on to use the tercet model for his book length epic Omeros, a retelling of Homer. Even without the interlocking end rhyme of terza rima, Walcott’s three-line stanzas maintain a tidal movement, ebbing and flowing with repeating sounds and images. In “To Return to the Trees,” the structure thus particularly echoes the theme of returning and recurrence in nature and in art.
Alliteration, Assonance, and Consonance
Internal echoes, rather than end rhyme, give “To Return to the Trees” an effect of consistent sound patterns. Walcott uses alliteration, internal rhyme, and repetition throughout the poem, underscoring the recurrence theme and defining the movement of the three-line stanzas. Denser stanzas form around one or two repeated sounds, while interwoven sound patterns between stanzas create space and momentum between other sections of the poem. For instance, the third stanza contains the thick o and b sounds in “the burly oak / of Boanerges Ben Jonson” (Lines 8-9), as well as the cross alliteration between the b, soft g/j, and n sounds between “Boanerges” and “Ben Jonson.” In the 12th stanza, Lines 34-36 feature repeated p sounds: “it is the great pause / when the pillars of the temple / reset on Samson’s palms.” Across Stanzas 15 and 16, Lines 43-47 continue similar sounds, bookending g and l sounds with b sounds: “…that is balance. / Seneca, that fabled bore, / and his gnarled, laborious Latin” (Lines 43-45) before the stanza break, then “I can read only in fragments / of broken bark” (Lines 46-47) after the break. The sounds not only unify here; they continue the wordplay between tree bark and the bark of Seneca’s “gnarled” (Line 45) Latin by making “broken” more literal, the stanza break interrupting the alliterative pattern.
Walcott uses certain repeated words almost as short refrains: “Senex” in Lines 1, 2, and 50; “sea-almond” or “almond” in Lines 2, 11, and 53; “grey” in Lines 21, 28, and 31, and then echoed in “great” in Line 34. Assonance and consonance make near rhymes in the end words of lines adjacent or close to one another: “almond” in Line 11 comes around in the consonance of the “nd” in Line 14’s “whirlwind.” Stanzas 8 and 9 mirror each other with assonance and consonance: “neutral/flag/under” followed by “hues/as/boredom.” The faint rhyme in the unaccented syllables in the final words of Lines 55 and 56—“slowly” and “centuries”—end the poem by demonstrating the final image, the slow erosion of language over time.
Synesthesia
“To Return to the Trees” provides many examples of wordplay and dual meanings. The poem also harks back to historic and classical contexts while posing the supremacy of nature over human history. Since synesthesia presents a sensory image by using language associated with a different, unexpected sense, this tool gives the poem yet another moment of simultaneous meaning. In Line 17, the speaker describes the “windy, green mornings” he experiences, inviting the reader to interpret “green” as metaphoric or intuitive rather than literal. Synesthesia here underscores Walcott’s premise that forces that might seem to contradict or oppose each other can exist in the same space; it is the poet’s work, as he points out in “To Return to the Trees” and in many other poems, to reconcile and harmonize, to see the world as whole.
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