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 —
Once each decade for 40 years (1976-2016), I censused a small population (~200) of Table Mountain Pines growing on a few xeric acres of the western shoulder of a basalt monadnock in western North Carolina, Looking Glass Rock. During the first census in 1976, I established an X-Y coordinate map of each tree/sapling, gave it an ID number, e.g., 2-17-0 (photo above), and photographed its location on the exposed basalt. I measured each individual’s height, diameter, and soil depth, although most were growing in cracks of the rock, and noted its apparent health: poor, average, robust. During the next four censuses, 1986, 1996, 2006, and 2016, I remeasured each survivor, added new seedlings, and noted deaths. Over time, I came to think of each tree as a friend, tough and fragile as you and I. As you might imagine, ED’s poem, “Four Trees”, instantly awakened memories (Barden 1977, 1988, 2000, 2020).
Barden.1977.Self-Maintaining Populations of Pinus Pungens Lam. in the Southern Appalachian Mountains. Castanea 42: 316-323.
——.1998.Drought and Survival in a Self-perpetuating Pinus pungens Population: Equilibrium or Nonequilibrium?. The American Midland Naturalist 119: 253-257.
——.2000.Population Maintenance of Pinus pungens Lam. (Table Mountain Pine) After a Century
Without Fire. Natural Areas Journal 20:227-231.
—— and Costa. 2020. Four Decades of Table Mountain Pine Demography on Looking Glass Rock. Castanea 85(1): 23–32.
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No surprise, I think “Him” in Stanza 3 refers to “Acre”, not “God” (atheist speaking). ED constantly amazes me by her apparent flip-flopping between atheism and deism, but does she ever really flip-flop? Sherwood (1968) suggests ED’s opinion of God may shift wildly from poem-to-poem, but she was never an atheist:
“The Emily Dickinson revealed in her works is complex and inconsistent, often contradictory, moving from ecstasy to desperation, from a fervent faith to a deep suspicion and skepticism, from humility and submissiveness to defiance and scorn. She is blasphemous as often as devout, and in her poetry God is accused of petty vindictiveness and cold indifference as often as He is celebrated for benevolence or admired for His majesty.” (Sherwood, W.R., Circumference and Circumstance. 1968. p 3.)”
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This 1863 poem asks: Do these Four Trees have a God-given purpose, or are they simply Darwinian descendants of an unknown primordial entity (a self-replicating molecule) whose origin will eventually be understood, or not, by science)?:
“What Deed is Theirs unto the General Nature —
What Plan
They severally — retard — or further —
Unknown —”
That ED had read, or read about, Darwin’s new book, ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life’. (Published 24 November 1859) can be answered with near certainty. She, Austin, and Edward eagerly read each issue of The Atlantic Monthly cover-to-cover. The July, August, and October 1860 issues contained a serialized, 11,000-word review of Darwin’s book by America’s leading botanist, Harvard’s Asa Gray. Teen-age ED had created a professional-quality set of herbarium specimens that would make any botanist proud, and the 29-year-old ED would have devoured Gray’s essay.
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I prefer ED’s alternate phrase in Line 15:
What Plan
They severally — promote — or hinder —
Unknown —”