On Robert Frost’s “Tree at My Window”
Jack Kang
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Robert Frost is American’s leading pastoral poet with lots of famous poems such as “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening”, “The road not taken ”, “The span of life” and “Mending wall”. He demonstrated in his verse that nature is man’s most revealing mirror and the clearest window into human personality. That conviction led him to explore the darkest force of both nature and humanity. Here we’d like to talk about one of his poems “Tree At My Window”. In order to fully understand his poetry, the idea of pastoral proves useful. Not all the nature poetry is considered as pastorals in any strict sense, actually the two kinds of poetry differ. In pastorals the subject is a special society, or more, generally a way of life, and nature is merely the setting within which we see the subject. The pastoralist does not write about nature while he uses nature as his scene, and it is important only in that it defines the swain’s point of view. Frost’s nature poetry is closely related to his pastoralism.
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Tree at My Window
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on,
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
The poet in this poem appears to be speaking to the "tree at my window"; then, repeating the phrase in reverse order, he calls it the "window tree," as if to emphasize the location and nearness of the tree. Calling the tree a "window tree," might also suggest that this tree is something he sees through, perhaps to some higher truth,...