Those Two - Analysis

Trees Talking Like People

In Those Two, Ginsberg makes a tiny, funny scene do double work: it’s a joke about trees gossiping, and a sharper sketch of human habit—how quickly a real discomfort gets turned into a character flaw. The first tree voices a plain, bodily objection: I don't like that white car because it smells gasoline. That’s an environmental complaint, but it’s also an intimate one—smell is immediate, inescapable, and the car is under me, literally positioned as an intrusion. The poem’s central claim feels like this: when something genuinely stinks, we often respond not by addressing the stink, but by accusing the complainer.

Gasoline as a Real Problem, Not a “Mood”

The first tree’s sentence is simple and specific, almost childlike in its directness. It doesn’t make an argument about industry or climate; it just says the car smells gasoline. That plainness matters, because it makes the second tree’s response look worse. Instead of engaging the fact of the smell, the neighbor tree reaches for a familiar social weapon: you're always complaining. The poem captures how a legitimate sensory offense can be recoded as mere negativity—like pain being dismissed as attitude.

The Cruel Turn: From Complaint to Diagnosis

The poem turns on the word neurotic. In one move, the second tree converts an external cause (the car, the gasoline) into an internal defect. It’s not just that the first tree dislikes the car; it’s that it supposedly has a psychological problem. Then comes the nastiest detail: you can see it in the body, the way you're bent over. The bent trunk becomes evidence in a casual diagnosis—an insult that treats physical shape as moral proof. A living being’s posture, which could be age, weather, wind, or injury, is used as a reason to sneer.

A Tiny Parable About Blame

Because they’re trees, the exchange lands with a clean, deadpan absurdity; the tone is wry, almost tossed off. But the joke has teeth. The first tree is dealing with something placed beneath it—human machinery and its fumes—while the second tree polices demeanor and posture. The tension is stark: is suffering something to be solved, or something to be judged? In this little dialogue, the world that produces the gasoline disappears, and what remains is a scolding voice explaining that the problem is your personality.

And what if the bent-over shape is not proof of neurosis at all, but proof of endurance? If the gasoline smell is real, then the tree’s complaint might be a form of perception, even integrity. The poem leaves you with an uncomfortable thought: sometimes the most “reasonable” voice in the conversation is just the one most practiced at blaming the injured for showing it.