Fallen Tree - Analysis

The missing it as a counterfeit certainty

The poem circles a small, maddening absence: whatever it is, both possession and lack fail to deliver clarity. The speaker begins, We do not have it, but immediately undercuts the fantasy that possession would fix anything: those Who have it are plunged in confusion. The oddly concrete metaphor of the gold coin makes it feel like a token of legitimacy—something you can keep in a pocket—yet the poem insists it is so easy not to have it, as if the real condition of modern life is to live without a guaranteed credential for meaning. Even the phrase The contour of having it suggests that what we know is not the thing itself but its outline, its social shape.

A pocket around an endless library

The pocket image expands into a strangely sublime setting: a pocket / Around space that is an endless library where each book follows in divinely ordered procession, Like the rays of the sun. This sounds like the dream of total intelligibility: a universe where information lines up, where sequence itself is holy. But calling it a pocket around space is quietly paradoxical—how can a pocket contain the endless? The library’s promise of order is almost too perfect, almost cartoonishly reassuring, which makes it suspect. The poem dangles the idea that meaning exists as an archive you could consult, then hints that this archive might be only a comforting model of understanding, not understanding itself.

The unwanted pageant you now need

The turn comes with Yet: it was the pageant that you never wanted / But which you need now. The poem shifts from the abstract it to a scene—days becoming actors in a spectacle. Time begin[s] to form a vault / Above this ancient red stage, as if the sky itself were theater architecture enclosing you. The days are personified as performers: Each is good in his role, Very clever. But this cleverness is not comforting; it puts pressure on the addressee: it is up to you / To make sense. The tension sharpens here: the world may be expertly staged, but the burden of interpretation is not shared by the stage or the script—it is pushed onto you.

When reflection turns stranger and scolding begins

If you fail at that interpretive task, the poem imagines a social and spiritual consequence: Otherwise, in the rain-washed fiasco we drift into a dusk where even naming the moment becomes uncertain—Twilight? A coming triumph? Or some other / Diversion. The result is not simple ignorance but misrecognition: We shall never recognize our true reflections, and we will address those reflections as strangers, scolding, Asking the time of day. It’s a bleakly comic picture—treating yourself like a passerby, asking your own image for the hour—as if without a coherent story of time, the self becomes someone you interrogate rather than inhabit. The rain-washed quality suggests everything has been scrubbed clean, but what’s left is not purity; it’s fiasco: a blankness that provokes irritation and moralizing.

A hard question hidden in the pronouns

The poem keeps sliding between we and you: We do not have it, then it is up to you, then again We shall never recognize. That shifting address raises an uncomfortable possibility. If the crisis is communal, why is the labor of sense-making assigned to one you? And if the task truly belongs to you, why does the consequence fall on we? The poem’s logic makes interpretation feel less like private enlightenment than like a kind of civic duty—one person’s failure can ripple outward into everyone speaking to themselves as strangers.

The median kingdom: a place beyond weather, not beyond need

The ending intensifies the stakes by bringing in love: And the love that has happened for us / Will not know us. Love is described as something that occurred—almost like an event history has already recorded—yet it remains unable to recognize its own recipients. Recognition again becomes the core need. The poem offers a strange remedy: Unless you climb to a median kingdom / Of no climate, where day and night exist only for themselves. A kingdom without climate is a place without atmosphere, without the moods and pressures that weather imposes; it suggests stepping out of the daily dramaturgy the poem called a pageant. And yet the final image is stubbornly domestic: the future is our table and chairs. The poem doesn’t end in mystical abstraction but in furniture—shared objects arranged for living. What the poem finally asks is not that you obtain the gold coin, but that you reach a middle altitude where time stops bullying you and the future becomes something you can sit with: not a vault overhead, but a table in front of you.