sensitivity extends not only to plants, but to what are usually disliked and unconsidered ground-dwellers, moles and grubs. Kunitz, however, dignifies the moles as human, as possessors of homes with “halls” under attack from humans and their machines. Grubs are exalted by having “dominions” making it not just grub homes suffering an attack, but grub communities and lands. From the ground’s smallest and most hidden creatures, Kunitz fast cuts to the largest and sometimes most visible, the “giants” of the sky: trees. These giant grandfathers, king-or queen-like with their crowns, are now humbled, forced to their “knees” in submission to the new, self-crowned kings of the wood, humans. This exaltation of plants and “lower” animals is the kind of sensibility describable asbiophilia, care for all that lives. Kunitz, however, goes further by dignifying plants and animals, and, at the same time, vilifying humans. Or more precisely, vilifying a specified set of human actions.

If personification is Kunitz’s tool to enliven and vilify machines, and, in addition, extra-enliven and dignify nature, a rather opposite technique is employed on people, one depicting them as not fully alive. If, in the first stanza, the neighbors can be said to be “dead” to the import of the events in front of them, the fourth stanza is inhabited by the “ghosts of children.” The word “shade” enhances the real and figurative deaths in this scene. Shade describes not only the shade of trees but, in a long literary tradition, the state of a person after death, as in the phrase describing the afterworld, “land of the shades.” Children playing in the shade of trees, “racing beyond their childhood,” says Kunitz, disappear into “grievous old age,” die and become shades. Kunitz seems to say that an absence of treeshade— which describes many a sparsely-arbored, fifties suburb—hastens people into the “suburbs” of human old age, and finally, the “suburbs” of death (life as urban), a final move to the land of shades. Such a claim might be explained this way: eradication of trees and plants helps kill off memories of what was, pushes humans increasingly into hope for an unknown and suspect future, hastens time and therefore, the approach of death. Nostalgia and cognizance, on the other hand, work to slow time, to make aging less grievous, less, if you will, suburban. “Suburbs,” then, not only describes a place outside the “urb(an),” but a purgatory on the edge of life, an anteroom to the land of the shades.

In stanza four, “the green world,” or nature, is again personified—nature turns the page of an old book, its own biography. Nature has a long tradition of comparison to a book, one that with the Book of God comprised the two-volume set of the Book of Life. Nature turning the pages of its own book is a kind of objectification (nature as book), personification, and deification (nature as a kind of god or demiurge) rolled into one. The particular page nature turns is “death-foxed,” not just yellowed or brown with age, but possibly inhabited by images of nature’s losses like a page of deceased relatives in a family photo album. If the picture conjured up from Kunitz’s description is of nature sadly turning the pages of its own history, mourning its losses at the hand of its own children (humanity), the reader’s response might be one similar to Christ crucified: empathy for a god under attack from its own, from those who know not what they do.

As one might expect from the title, “The War Against the Trees,” the poem’s last stanza brings readers back to those victims of “war,” those “great-grandfathers of the town / So freshly lopped and maimed,” those “giants” brought “to their knees” in a “seizure” of death. In this last stanza, the trees are toppled, their roots exposed. The craters left behind are “too big for hearts,” these giants being larger in size and in sensitivity than the humans killing them. Kunitz calls the exposed roots, “club-roots” which is also the name for a plant disease caused by a slime mold. Symptoms of the disease include large malformed roots. Because this definition does not fit well with these toppled, healthy elms, club-root is probably a play on club foot, defined as “a congenitally deformed or distorted foot.” Add this personification of tree roots to the word, “amputated,” that follows, and readers are not only presented with murdered bodies, but deformed corpses. The image of club-roots radically morphs with the word, “gorgons,” female monsters with snakes for hair who turn those looking at them to stone. “Gorgons” is a somewhat imperfect attribution because the word might provoke a conflation of trees with monsters rather than tree corpses as monstrous. Apart from this quibble, “gorgons” is effective because the exposure, the sight, of “club-roots” indicates that the once-green earth is being desertified into a treeless, stony moonscape. These gorgons, however, are different from the blindness-causing gorgons of myth since the club-roots do not cause blindness, but are blind, another injury to these sympathy-provoking trees already “maimed,” “lopped,” “amputated,” and brought “to their knees.”

In the last stanza’s fourth line, the blindness metaphor is mixed with an aural component when the gorgon roots cry “Moon,” a kind of synesthesia where a sight (and site) is so offensive it “cries out” to be heard. Yet Kunitz seems doubtful anyone else hears the trees crying out, even if “caught / in the rear-view mirrors of passing cars.” More likely it is that upon seeing the site, drivers will not view it as a slaughter, like the poet. Or, if they do, Kunitz thinks they will be too busy to give it much thought. And if a driver should stop her car and ask Mr. Kunitz (is he not one of the witnesses?) who it is that’s bulldozing the land, he just might answer, “All of us.”

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2001. Semansky’s most recent collection of poems, Blindsided, has been published by 26 Books of Portland, Oregon and nominated for an Oregon book award.