English Commentary

Commentary on “Planting a Sequoia”

“Planting a Sequoia” is an elegy which intents to shows a father’s grief about the death of his newborn son, who plants a Sequoia tree in response to his death. The use of imagery makes clear that new hopes for the future arise for him.

Through rhetoric devices such as the parallelism “digging this hole laying you into it, carefully packing the soil” the setting is emphasized. He is addressing this poem to his newborn son that he is burying. The juxtaposition of “hold year coming to an end” and “celebrate his first son’s birth” creates the contrast between life and death, which the poem concerns. Nature is portrayed similarly through the antithesis “Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees“. By the alliteration "Silently keeping the secret of your birth" it is emphasized that the mourning father has acknowledged the death of his baby and looks into the future.

Also sensory imagery such as "Rain blackened the horizon” and “Cold winds kept it over the Pacific” create the dark and negative mood of mourning through the negative adjectives. While it is a Sicilian Tradition to plant olive trees at birth which will then promise “fruit in other autumns", he plants a Sequoia tree in symbol of his son which is very old living and will be “ethereal” to strangers even when the family has passed away. Through "Wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord" it is therefore shown that he gives the tree the human qualities of his son. The symbol of the tree therefore is the memory of his son which he wants to keep alive by all matters. The new hope of keeping the memory alive through this tree is therefore shown the brighter mood in the euphemism of his family’s death “when our family is no more” and the metaphor “his mother’s beauty ashes in the air”.

The metaphor of sunset again represents and end which the father wants to prevent him from. The plant should be “bathed in western light” which refers to the purification of his son after death. Also the structure of the poem containing of 5 quintics supports the idea that there is hope in all this morning as every last verse of a stanza ends with a relieving sentence such as “silently keeping the secret of your birth” and “a slender shoot against the sunset”.

As a conclusion the Elegy is driven mainly by imagery in support of the idea that there is hope wherever there is grief. The author might therefore have addressed this poem to himself to cure his pain about the death of his son or addressed it to people suffering from a loss.