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Trees

The trees the speaker describes throughout the poem’s four middle stanzas collectively symbolize the wonder and beauty of God’s Creation. Curiously, the trees’ symbolic significance isn’t initially obvious. When the speaker opens the poem with a couplet declaring that no poem could be as lovely as a tree, it isn’t clear why they are making this comparison. Indeed, the comparison itself initially seems rather strange. Under what conditions does it make sense to compare a human-made artifact like a poem to an organic being like a tree? The answer to this question only becomes clear in the poem’s final couplet (lines 11–12):

     Poems are made by fools like me,
     But only God can make a tree.

If it makes sense to compare a poem and a tree, it’s because both poems and trees are created. However, whereas humans can make poems, “only God can make a tree.” With these lines, it at last becomes clear why no poem could be as lovely as a tree: namely, because no human creation could compare to God’s Creation. In this way, the tree comes to stand as a symbol for the divine splendor of the natural world.

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