Four trees – upon a solitary Acre –
Without Design
Or Order, or Apparent Action –
Maintain –
The Sun – upon a Morning meets them –
The Wind –
No nearer Neighbor – have they –
But God –
The Acre gives them – Place –
They – Him – Attention of Passer by –
Of Shadow, or of Squirrel, haply –
Or Boy –
What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature –
What Plan
They severally – retard – or further –
Unknown –
– Emily Dickinson
A casual glance takes in an unexceptional sight – an empty lot with a few trees on it – but it soon produces musing contemplation. The acre is solitary, but it must be surrounded by something; whatever that something is (farmland? houses? forest?) it seems separate from the acre, which appears to be uncultivated, mostly bare, even lonely in its non-human solitude. & on the acre, there are four trees, close together, or apart, we don't really know, but they do register as some sort of unit, a group of four. It's a strange number of trees to see: not a forest, not an orchard, just a small number of random trees. One tree would be striking & individual, alone, even majestic, upon an otherwise empty acre; more would be perhaps less noticeable, as we'd see them as a unit – a forest, or a farm – & we probably wouldn't even notice the Acre they were standing on. It's a peculiar & in-between number of trees, & it accentuates the otherwise emptiness of the Acre. The type of tree is not specified; they register not as fruit trees or shade trees or potential lumber but as just . . . trees, an archetypal category of object. They appear to be products of Nature, not ordered or planned or planted by humans, & if there is some design there it is not visible, & possibly non-existent; Dickinson is already entering metaphysical territory with the trees on their solitary acre: what is "Nature" here, & is there any sort of plan to it, divine or happenstance? What do the trees produce, or do? The answer, insofar as there is one, is in a word emphasized by the line break that puts it on its own in the last line of the stanza: they maintain.
The Emily Dickinson Lexicon (EDL) is an excellent on-line resource (maintained by Brigham Young University) for exploring the nuance & ambiguity of her language. Here is what it gives us for maintain: "Keep; continue; hold; preserve." So even more than simply being there, the word suggests that the trees somehow mark something, if only their own existence, & their being exists in time (the word might mean they continue), though the quantity of time is unknown. We don't know how long the trees have been there (long enough to be trees rather than saplings) or how long they will go on being there (will humans cut them down? will they succumb to time & die a natural death?). Like the human observing them, they are given existence as fellow living-things subjected to an unknown timeline, which gives them an odd sort of parity with the human observer. There is a certain dignity in the trees maintaining, rather than just being there, as they take their temporal trip to an unknown terminus. They would exist without the poet's observation, but her observation is making her wonder about the mystery & separateness of their existence: in an essential poetic act, she is remarking them.
The second stanza vividly reinforces the isolated & peculiar circumstances of the trees. There is emphasis & restatement, but the poet keeps circling around the unknown & unknowable meaning or meanings of a sight that has created a suddenly memorable moment. She invokes grand natural forces: the Sun, the Wind. Their existence seems to be separate from that of the trees, instead of part of some web of Nature. The Sun meets them in the morning; it doesn't greet or sustain or warm them, it just comes across them on its diurnal rounds. The Wind, too, sweeps by them, but seems to have its own separate existence from both Sun & the Trees. What we lump together as "Nature" is dissolving here; the large (the Sun, the Wind) seems equal to the small (four random trees) – or is it rather that the small is equal to the large? – & they seem disconnected, though tracking together.. Our four trees, not very significant on a larger scale, here rank with such mighty forces as the Sun & the Wind (Dickinson's use of capitals for such nouns helps embody them, not just as archetypes but also individual entities). The usual scale of value in "Nature" has been destabilized.
In the third stanza, the poet takes a closer look at the Acre. It too is a strangely separate entity, but the trees are rooted in it & the four trees & the solitary acre, though they have a separate existence, also act upon each other. Would the acre register as solitary unless there were these trees on it, making the poet realize how empty or isolated the rest of it is? Would we even notice the acre? Probably not; as the poet tells us, the trees give him (a peculiar & even slightly comic personification of the Acre as male – a lonely male; the earth is usually embodied as female) the Attention of Passer by. The Acre is noticed because the trees are on it, the trees are noticed because there's nothing else on the Acre. The attention is being paid by someone passing through; no one heads to the Acre or the Trees as a destination. This is not some picturesque beauty spot, but a random bit of the world that sparked the poet's attention.
& again our usual hierarchies of value are upended: the first possible passerby mentioned is Shadow. Shadows don't exist without an object that produces them by obstructing light, but whatever that object is here (a bird flying overhead? a cloud? something closer to earth?) it appears only in its insubstantial shadow form. & as the EDL reminds us, a shadow can also be a warning sign, a sign of approaching darkness, a phantom, or the ghost of a dead person. It is an ominous & evocative word, & a foreboding one to mention as a passerby. (Are there spirits unseen by us passing through the moment with us?) We go from this nonembodied & fairly magnificent entity to . . . a squirrel, a small swift little nibbling visitor. & only then we get a mention of a human: a singular in number but general in effect Boy. As the haply reminds us, it is chance that leads someone by this sight (or site), & these three very different visitors – shadow, squirrel, Boy – are equivalent in relation to the Acre & the Trees.
The Boy is presumably one old enough to wander by himself (he too is solitary) but young enough not to be working. Also presumably the passerby is made a boy because in nineteenth-century Amherst boys could wander more freely & with less supervision than girls, but depending on where exactly this Acre is, it is something a girl could come across without violating too many of her contemporary gender norms. & of course a woman – Dickinson herself – did in fact see the Acre & the Trees. (She could certainly have made the whole thing up, but it does seem like the sort of specific world-detail that would set her mind speculating). Specifying a boy is an interesting choice for a woman poet (who has earlier also defined the Acre as male). Perhaps it's meant to evoke the archetypal youth wandering aimlessly through whatever passes for wilderness in his area. Perhaps Dickinson is deliberately making the poem something (allegedly) non-personal & outside of her experience, another alienation device in a poem filled with overturned hierarchies of meaning & existence.
The final stanza essentially recaps the first, as the poet gives another statement of the mystery behind what might seem an ordinary & even insignificant occurrence – I'd say a final statement, but there's nothing final here. We have a summation but not a conclusion, as this sight, four trees randomly on an otherwise empty lot, a sight which clearly made a deep impression on the poet, yields nothing but mystery, no matter how long the image dwells in her mind, or ours. Are the trees part of some plan, Divine or Natural, & if so, do they advance it? or do they slow it down? Here's what the EDL gives us for severally: "Separately; individually; successively; collectively; in turn": we don't know if the trees "act" or "mean" in some larger way outside of their just being there, & we can't even know if they are to be taken as singular or as a group (in the long & large sweep of history, where is the border between us as individuals & us as a city, state, or generation?). The final word, one highlighted, as with maintain in the first stanza, by the line break & by being on its own line, is an emphatic Unknown, & instead of a conventional & final stop shown by a period, the poet concludes with one of her characteristic dashes. The syntax & the potential meanings are as unstable as everything else in the poem; they could go on into eternal ramifications or just drop off the metaphorical cliff. As so often in Dickinson, objects shimmer in a strange unsettled space between the everyday, even the mundane, & the cosmically significant.
This is Poem #742 in the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H Johnson.
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