To Return To The Trees

The poem’s title raises several questions: Who returns to these trees, and who might the original visitor or visitors have been? Is the journey hypothetical or actual, mental or physical? For Derek Walcott, it’s often both. Many of Walcott’s poems address his personal homecoming to the Caribbean, a kind of continuous and inevitable return. In this poem, the speaker returns to a physical place, but they also return to images used by poets and philosophers for generations. The narrative unfolds on these two levels: one in which the speaker envisions his own aging with wonder and anticipation, and the other, more universal one in which the poet connects with mythic traditions across time. The poet also seeks a language innovative and expansive enough to speak for nature itself as a witness to human effort, though likely a disinterested witness; this nature provides a source of metaphor and example, remaining neither benevolent nor punitive.

“To Return to the Trees” features a speaker with a sweeping understanding of Western historical, literary, and philosophical context. The speaker explores the way Western thought uses nature as a frame or mirror for aging and immortality, ultimately concluding that the vastness of nature outlasts art and thought itself—this conclusion is at the heart of the poem. This conclusion, however, is ironic: The practice of using nature as a metaphor in art and philosophy becomes a possibly naïve practice, as art can never approach the power and durability of the natural world. The poem seems to suggest that nature plays a more critical role in human consciousness than humanity plays in the timeline of the natural world. Despite this irony, the poem upholds a return to nature—a return to the trees—as something natural and unavoidable, and the poem upholds this truth by exploring history, literature, and philosophy.

In much of his work, Walcott grapples with finding language to approximate the voice of nature. In “To Return to the Trees,” Walcott’s specific vocabulary aspires to represent the separate kind of language through which elements of the natural world might express a perspective understandable to a human audience. While many poets attempt to characterize the way in which humans interpret and respond to nature, Walcott endeavors to imagine how nature might conceive of humanity in all its conflict and despair. Nature’s imagined language, conjured through Walcott’s speaker, reaches the reader in fragments and in at times poor translation, the same way classical narratives reach a modern reader. But the poem demonstrates the yearning to understand and to be a part of that eternal communication.

The poem begins by interacting with nature through defining terms. The speaker reclaims terms of all kinds here and throughout the poem: antiquated usages, proper names, homophones, names of plants and other natural phenomena. The first line introduces and defines “senex,” a Latin word typically used to describe an archetypal wise old man (as described by Carl Jung). The speaker of “To Return to the Trees” begins by clarifying “senex” in Line 1 as “an oak.” Line 2 repeats and refines that identification, changing “an oak” to “this old sea-almond.” Sea almond trees resemble oaks in that they are deciduous and can grow to great heights. They grow at a faster rate, but more importantly, they inhabit a different global region. In these two opening lines, then, Walcott relates trees to the wise old man archetype. He combines nature (trees) and philosophical inquiry (Jung and archetypes) to better understand aging, purpose, and death.

The oak and the sea almond also signify the European and West Indian traditions on which Walcott draws in his work, both of which weave throughout the poem. Walcott therefore adds a cultural lens to his investigation of aging and purpose. The “geriatric grove” (Line 4) contains the “unwincing” (Line 3) old sea almond, further anthropomorphizing the tree. Though old, the sea almond is “unwincing” (Line 3),” meaning that it still stands, unbent. This alludes to the poem’s later turn, when the speaker begins drawing strength from the thought of aging and dying.

In the third strophe, the speaker envisions aging like a fearless tree, a wise old figure, invoking poet Ben Jonson as a “burly oak” (Line 8), playing on multiple meanings of “burly,” its connotation of strength and substance, as well as the whorls seen in wood cut from oak outgrowths. For Ben Jonson particularly, “burly” evokes “Burley-on-the-Hill,” the country house belonging to Jonson’s patron, the Duke of Buckingham. The house saw the production of one of Jonson’s plays. Walcott’s poem harks to Ben Jonson’s “The Noble Nature,” in which Jonson asserts that human life excels for small intervals only, achieving perfection in abbreviated form. Jonson points to the lily as a better metaphor for a virtuous life than the oak. While the oak lives longer, its “bulk” (“The Noble Nature,” Line 2) gives it no greater value. Walcott’s speaker challenges the premise of “Boanerges Ben Jonson” (Line 9), mocking the older poet with a blustery Biblical epithet.

In Line 10, the speaker turns inward, questioning himself in yet another moment of wordplay; his question “Or am I lying” may cast doubt on his self-awareness, but it also refers to the “felled almond” (Line 11) lying in the speaker’s path and the reader’s view.

Walcott’s speaker in “To Return to the Trees” ultimately addresses a question posed by poets for centuries: the question of the noblest way to accept aging and death. Walcott looks to nature and to the figures of myth and poetry to interpret his intuitive, chthonic sense of being. Though the poem can appear dense or hard to translate, one interpretation boils down to this: How does one age and die with dignity? The speaker envisions himself as “a gnarled poet / bearded with the whirlwind” (Lines 13-15). This older version of the speaker, the poet as senex, as an extension of nature, composes “meters like thunder” (Line 15), communicating with nature in its own language. For the speaker, looking to voices of the past, to nature, and to mythical figures helps better understand aging and death.

In Line 16, the speaker expands his context, turning from one natural metaphor to another. Leaving the sea metaphor, he begins to “read” (Line 18) the same message in the land; watching the “ashen end” (Line 20) of sunrise, the speaker identifies the color grey in the landscape as the grey that “has grown strong to me” (Line 21). For the next seven strophes, the speaker redefines grey as a color of strength and endurance, rather than “the dirty flag / of courage going under” (Lines 23-24). This grey embodies nuance and multiplicity, “speckled with hues” (Line 25) and “various” (Line 27).

The speaker associates grey with powerful natural examples, “quartz” (Line 26) and “diamond” (Line 29). Its fluid identity defines its strength; grey manifests as “haze” (Line 29) and “stone-dusted” (Line 30), but its lack of corporeal certainty makes it “tougher than the warrior” (Line 32) because it “bestrides factions” (Line 33). Not limited by allegiance or classification, the mediating grey encompasses rather than dividing. This grey moment, the speaker says, aligns with the pillars at “rest on Samson’s palms” (Line 36), not dropping, but sustaining a moment of balance. The speaker is now coming to terms with aging and death, seeing strength where there was once weakness.

Balance, Walcott reminds us through the speaker, remains “the toil” (Line 43) of existence. He embodies the world balanced on “the trembling shoulders” (Line 41) of the mythic past, personified in Atlas. In Line 18, the speaker can easily “read” the mornings on Morne Coco Mountain; in Line 46, he can read Seneca “only in fragments.” His labor in reading Seneca represents the toil of balance, the work of reaching into the past to receive its wisdom and hold it in a contemporary—and thus alien—context. The wise men, the “senex” of the past, dissolve while we read them, as the “senex,” the sea-almond tree, disappears under the sand. As readers of the world, we gather the “broken bark” (Line 47) of the past, balancing it in our own palms, holding everything up as long as we can. We will eventually return to the trees as well, so the question then becomes one of how: How will we age and die? Will we draw strength from nature, the past, and cultural markers, or will we fear the unknown and become apathetic toward our natural end?