Some Trees Analysis

This poem is tricky enough as it is, Shmoopers, so let's keep it simple, shall we?First, we go from enjambment between lines and between stanzas to instances where stanzas and lines seem to stand a...

It's getting personal here, but not too personal. That said, it's important to note that we have a first-person voice in "Some Trees." Just like any first-person speaker, we want to be careful not...

Sitting on a park bench…Maybe Jethro Tull is there with the speaker, maybe not. In fact, we don't even know if there's a park bench or a park for that matter. But there are some trees! And there...

Over in "Form and Meter," we talked about the general structure of the poem that tends to look pretty orderly to us, even if it's not "meaningful." It's no surprise then that Ashbery uses a lot of...

Imagine if we didn't have a title for this poem. What would we make of that first word, "these"? The title, just like everything else we get in the body of the poem, is part of the larger picture (...

Remember, we're not encouraging you to shout about a battle royale between Kanye West and Taylor Swift, though the stakes would be rather high. Rather start with how you interpret Ashbery's words a...

It's hard to come up with an Ashbery poem that would be at Sea Level. That "tell it like it is" kind of method just isn't his style. So you're not alone in all of your head-scratching. But relative...

Did you know that W.H. Auden famously confessed (after handing Ashbery a fancy award from Yale) that he hadn't understood a single word of Some Trees? (Source.)Ashbery believes his poetry doesn't "...

Sure "Some Trees" is about a relationship. Who knows? It may even be a sexual one, but there's no sex here. It's just the trees and the speaker digging the scenery. Now, if you're the type that fin...