the lost sensual experience of walking in a forest is also an attempt to create a poem that will act as a kind of storage device for future generations to re-experience what a forest is like when there is no other way of doing so.

      When Stewart chose the forest as her central symbol, it was part of her quest, as she told interviewer Jon Thompson in Free Verse, to explore nature “as a reserve beyond the facts of history.” She also commented that when she later came across Robert Pogue Harrison’s book Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, she learned “in a deeper way how much of my thinking was connected to a long tradition of the place of forests in the Western imagination.”

      In his book, Harrison traces the complex and sometimes contradictory Western attitudes to the forest in society and in literature from ancient times to the present. The term “forest” derives from the Latin foris, meaning “outside.” In ancient and medieval times, forests lay outside civilization. They were the homes of outcasts and misfits, the mad and the persecuted, as well as saints and religious hermits. The institutions of the West, such as religion, law, family, and city, originally established themselves in opposition to the forests, which literally covered most of the land.

      Harrison points out how in literary history, forests are often places of terror, fear, nightmare, and enchantment. They sometimes represent the unconscious mind. (Stewart, in her interview with Thompson, explained that her concept of the forest was linked in her mind to the unconscious as a “source of terror.” She added that it was also a source of “consolation.”) Harrison gives an example from one of the stories in the Decameron by Boccaccio (the third story of the Fifth Day), in which two young lovers run away from home and end up getting lost and separated in a forest. The violence they encounter there symbolizes the shadow side of sexual desire. Shakespeare’s wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a similar function: the four lovers who spend a night in the forest come face to face with their unconscious desires.

      At the same time, there is also a tradition, beginning with Petrarch in the fourteenth century, in which literary forests are transformed into places of nostalgia. This is particularly apparent in the literature of the eighteenth century and beyond, into the romantic era. In this period, forests were conceived, writes Harrison, “in terms of some originary plenitude—of presence, innocence, community, or even perception.” According to Harrison, in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, written in Germany in the early nineteenth century, “The forests . . . represent the ancient unity of nature—the unity and kinship of the species.” In a comment that seems especially relevant for “The Forest,” Harrison says that in romantic and symbolist literature, “forests have the psychological effect of evoking memories of the past; indeed, that they become figures for memory itself. They are enveloped, as it were, in the aura of lost origins.”

      It is those lost origins (“that place where I was raised”) of which the speaker in “The Forest” goes in search. The fact that the speaker appears to be cut off from them suggests that modern life is an impoverished, anemic thing, disconnected from the richness suggested by the many-sided image of the forest. Harrison claims the romantic poets had a similar perception. William Wordsworth, for example, deplored city life and felt a deep connection to the life of nature. He could recover that “originary plenitude” (to use Harrison’s phrase) only in the presence of nature or in moments of quiet introspection when he could recall such experiences. Wordsworth is also one of the poets cited by Roszak, along with Shelley, Blake, and Goethe, as being possessed of the vision of the unity of all life that the modern West must recapture if it is to save itself from sterility and despair.

      Unlike Roszak and the poets he champions, Stewart offers no panacea for restoring human life to a fuller consciousness of itself and its relations to nature. She does not believe in Wordsworthian-style epiphanies. “The Forest” remains a rather bleak poem that speaks more of loss than of recovery. “Slaughter,” Stewart’s poem that immediately follows “The Forest” in the first section of The Forest, offers a small clue to Stewart’s thinking about how life might be perceived differently. Like “The Forest,” “Slaughter” is a poem about loss, and its mood is equally somber. The speaker, whose tone is not dissimilar to that of the speaker in “The Forest,” is reflecting on how “the breakdown in the fullness of the world” first took place. She/he alludes to some knowledge about this that had been hidden behind “the given- / ness of all things to us now.” In other words, the way things appear to people now are not necessarily the way they always were, even though it may seem that way. The bulk of the poem is then taken up with a detailed description of the way an animal is killed in a slaughterhouse. The killing seems to become symbolic of the rupture of a primal unity between man and nature, and the speaker is a lone voice trying to understand how this rupture happened. Even though no one in the slaughterhouse is interested in pursuing the speaker’s line of thought, s/he wants to go back to the moment at which the doomed animal is stunned, which may symbolically represent the moment “the fullness of the world” is sundered:

Now let us go back to the stunning,

to the meeting of a human and animal mind, let us

go back and begin again where the function

overwhelms all hesitation and seems like

an act of nature.

      In other words, actions (and presumably perceptions too) that seem inevitable, part of the natural order of things, may not in fact be so. They may merely be the result of the inability or unwillingness of humans to be fully aware of what they are doing. Stewart has commented in an interview for Free Verse that “Slaughter” is “concerned with taking responsibility for habitual practices, and understanding their causes and consequences.” Seen in this light, the speaker in “Slaughter,” like the speaker in “The Forest,” is in search of the fresh moment when all possibilities present themselves, as opposed to the futility and emptiness of repetitive, habitual responses. Both speakers try to imagine their way back into lost origins, lost states of being, as constituting the only hope for the present. The speaker in “Slaughter” comes to the realization that “the real could not / be evoked except in a spell of longing for / the past.” This note of nostalgia characterizes “The Forest” also. It suggests that life is marooned between the emptiness of the present and the imagined fullness of the past and that humans are like lost travelers forever casting an eye back to the home they once knew, but which is lost to them now.

Source: Bryan Aubrey, Critical Essay on “The Forest,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

      Occasionally, a poem comes along that is so entwined, so interwoven within itself, that distinguishing content from construction is not an easy task. And when the method works, distinction is neither necessary nor desirable. “The Forest” is one such poem; its language so layered and overlapping that the words call as much attention to themselves as to the message they convey.

      If one must whittle this multifaceted work down to an overarching theme, it is this: history gets lost if it is not continuously repeated. The definition of “history” is not as generic as it seems. Here, it is specific to a physical, botanical entity made up of trees, shrubs, vines, small plants, and everything that lives among them—in short, a forest. This forest has a twofold representation—one, the actual, visible existence of the flora, and, two, the symbolic reference to things that fade from human memory if they are not carefully and intentionally preserved.

      Twenty-one lines of the poem are repeated, nearly all of them verbatim. The repetition is painstakingly constructed, allowing for two lines from each stanza to be echoed in the following stanza, sometimes with greater emphasis or a twist in meaning, but virtually always with the exact words. The pattern begins with the first and third lines of the first stanza: “You should lie down now and remember the forest” and “no, the truth is it is gone now.” These statements are repeated verbatim as the second and fourth lines of the second stanza, but their connotation is slightly askew from the original.

      In the first stanza, “You should lie down now . . .” appears to be a simple, though intriguing, statement of instruction: one should take time out to consider nature in its purest form because that form is quickly disappearing in a postmodern, technological, and artificial world. The abrupt and seemingly contradictory admission “no, the truth is,” suggests that the speaker is determined to be honest about the forest’s peril. It is not just “disappearing” after all; in reality, “it is gone now.”

      Consider how these lines are used in the second stanza. Presented between long dashes, “You should lie down now” is, here, a disruption in thought, a sudden reminder of the need not to forget. Its unexpected intrusion suggests an urgency greater than that in its initial utterance, like someone interrupting a conversation to repeat a request that has already been made moments before. The line “no the truth is, it is gone now” is treated similarly in this stanza. The most evident difference is that it is now italicized, indicating an obvious renewed emphasis on its message, but note the shift in comma placement as well. In the first stanza, the punctuation mark appears after “no,” following a simple rule of proper grammar. But in the second, the comma is placed between “is” and “it,” with no break between the opening adverb (“no”) and the words it modifies. Not only are the italics used to call attention to the importance of the line’s meaning, but also the punctuation is manipulated to show the rush of the first part of the phrase (“no the truth is”) and the slow, compelling thought in the second: “it is gone now.”

      If this detailed examination of only two lines of a fifty-six-line poem seems overburdened, it is not without intent. “The Forest” itself is laden with intricacies and echoes and redefinition. It continuously circles back upon itself, folding and unfolding its language as well as its meaning. The technique of presenting new and old information side by side is carried on throughout the work and serves to both muddle and mystify. Read only the new lines in the second stanza to see how they stand on their own as a cohesive set: “Not the one you had hoped for, but a life / nonetheless, you might call it ‘in the forest,’ / starting somewhere near the beginning, that edge.” Now, add in the two old lines from the first stanza and the effect is both to add a layer of density to the language as well as to accent the need to remember. Again, construction and meaning are interwoven.

      The layers of the poem deepen with each successive stanza. In the third, the line “not the one you had hoped for” is repeated, but this time it is parenthetical, thrown back into the mix as yet another reminder of what has already been said. This stanza, too, can be unfolded, with its three new lines standing alone as a complete thought: “Or instead the first layer, the place you remember / as if it were firm, underfoot, for that place is a sea, / which we can never drift above, we were there or we were not.” In the real poem, of course, there are two repeated lines that separate these three. They echo the need to recall the forest.

      Toward the middle of the poem, the language becomes more concrete in its description. There are “gray trunks,” “drying moss,” “mushrooms and scalloped molds,” “brambles,” “ferns,” and “twines of cinquefoil, false strawberry, sumac.” But even though the nouns have become more specific—delightfully graphic, actually—they still add to the poem’s density as they are reused and redefined. Perhaps their exactness and nearly tangible quality play another role as well. Note that as the language that describes the forest becomes more concrete, the speaker’s ability to remember the actual woods becomes more vague and unsure. The question, then, is whether all the particular details are the product of keen recollection or just desperate imagination.

      One of the initial indications that the speaker is losing her memory of the forest is that she admits, “Nothing comes down to us here.” The first time this line appears, it follows “though high in the dry leaves something does fall,” implying that, although she is aware of actual, physical movement in the trees, the certain fact of that movement is not visible to her. The second time the line appears, it plays the role of interrupter, falling between two other lines in the next stanza that continue the description of the forest’s plants and brooks. The ninth stanza, however, provides the greatest evidence of fading memory, overlapping language, and the need to preserve human histories. Once again, it is best to filter out the repeated lines in order to get at the heart of the new thought to consider. That thought is revealed in the first, third, and fifth lines of the stanza: “You can understand what I am doing when I think of the entry— . . . as a kind of limit. Sometimes I imagine us walking there . . . in a place that is something like a forest.” Suddenly, the forest is not a real forest but something like a forest. Note, also, the seemingly contradictory description of an “entry” as a “limit.” The beginning has become an ending, and it is all because of the fallibility of human memory.

      The line “in a place that is something like a forest” is one of the few lines in the poem that is not repeated. This fact alone is significant. Once a memory has begun to fade, its imaginary “shape” changes, like the actual shape of a visual object moving farther and farther away from the person watching it. No matter how one tries to recall it—to define or describe or envision it—the memory is obscured in multiple layers of confused thoughts. Losing the recollection of something tangible and vital like a forest suggests a loss of humankind’s own naturalness. One cannot feel connected to nature when the reality of it is lost from memory.

      Something like a forest is all the speaker in the poem has left. There is no need to repeat it because its meaning would not be altered. Unlike other lines that show up verbatim in subsequent stanzas, this one simply tells it like it is the first time around. Reality is blurred enough to make the speaker admit that she can no longer reach it. Her imagination must make up for all the realness that is lost.

      The final line of “The Forest” is a near repeat of the previously discussed third line of the first stanza and fourth line of the second stanza. This time it appears as, “but the truth is, it is, lost to us now.” The word “gone” is replaced with “lost,” and the commas come back into play with yet a third meaning.

      It is no coincidence that the poem ends with this pivotal message, and it is not surprising that the construction of the line is essential to its meaning. Consider the difference between the words “gone” and “lost.” While one may make a case that they generally convey the same point, their placement in this poem suggests otherwise. Stewart has constructed a work with dense, opaque language in which each component—whether a word or a punctuation mark—bears significance to the entire poem. The switch from “gone” to “lost” implies a responsibility on the individual who initially has an ability then loses it.

      Without getting bogged down in semantics, it is safe to assume that when something is gone, it is gone on its own, and when something is lost, someone lost it. In Stewart’s poem, it is a forest—both literally and figuratively—that has shifted from “gone” to “lost.” Human beings have removed themselves so far from nature and from natural living that it is difficult to visualize that kind of existence. Attempts to do so are odd and uncomfortable. Note the line: “Once we were lost in the forest, so strangely alike and yet singular, too.” The collective “we” implies both the speaker and all humankind, and there is both a weird kinship with and an undeniable estrangement from the environment.

      The comma placement in the final line is also worth considering. Here, the two words “it is” are enclosed in commas, and the punctuation serves to slow down the message for a very ponderous effect. The line is broken into three segments, each to be read thoughtfully and deliberately: “but the truth is,” “it is,” “lost to us now.” Obviously, such a dismally resigned final phrase leaves one to consider not only the hopelessness it suggests but also to ask, “Why?”

      The short answer is “we” have gone too deep. Humankind has mired itself in so many layers of attempts at progress that discerning the real from the false is not a simple task. Instead, the more one tries to comprehend the multiple layers of human history and make sense of how “we” got from there to here, the more muddled it all becomes. It is like someone taking a path through a forest, believing all she has to do is turn around and retrace her steps in order to exit at the point of entry. In turning, however, she finds the woods are thick behind her and the path overgrown. Attempts to find her way out only lead her farther and farther off the original path and deeper into the dense flora.

      This is the metaphor Stewart plays out in her well-built poem. She constructs a forest of trees from a forest of language—or vice versa—and ends up with a remarkably clear message. Although the conclusion offers no hope for what is “lost to us now,” the overriding point will only become more obvious as new layers are added to the history of humankind.

Source: Pamela Steed Hill, Critical Essay on “The Forest,” in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.