Some Trees - Analysis

Trees as a lesson in how to be together

The poem begins with a deceptively simple act of looking: These are amazing: each tree Joining a neighbor. But the speaker’s amazement isn’t botanical; it’s ethical and relational. The trees model a way of existing side by side that feels like language without argument, like community without coercion. When Ashbery says it is as though speech / Were a still performance, he suggests a kind of communication that doesn’t need to persuade or even move. The trees “say” something by holding their positions—connection as presence rather than explanation.

Chance arranging itself into meaning

One of the poem’s main tensions arrives early: the trees are Arranging by chance, yet the speaker can’t stop reading them as significant. The natural clustering is random, but it looks like intention. That contradiction powers the poem: we want to believe the world is legible, even when it is indifferent. The phrase Arranging by chance also quietly describes human relationships—how people meet, how intimacy begins—while already hinting that our desire for a story may exceed the facts.

The turn to you and I: agreement with the world, distance from it

The poem pivots when observation becomes self-recognition: With it, you and I / Are suddenly what the trees try to tell us. The couple stands this morning / From the world at a distance that is paradoxically described as agreeing / With it. That’s a distinctly Ashbery-like knot: to be far from the world and yet in accord with it. The trees make the speakers feel momentarily aligned—two people joined like neighboring trunks—while also underscoring how fragile that alignment is, depending on light, morning, and mood.

Merely being there and the risky promise of touch

The trees’ “message” is stated with startling directness: their merely being there / Means something. The speakers are invited into a sequence of hopes—touch, love, explain—as if physical closeness could lead to emotional clarity and then to understanding. Yet the ordering matters: explanation comes last, almost as a wish rather than a guarantee. The poem’s tone here is bright but wary, like someone allowing themselves a belief they don’t fully trust. It’s not that the trees explain anything; it’s that they make explanation feel briefly possible.

A gratitude that is also an admission of helplessness

When the speaker says they are glad not to have invented / Such comeliness, it sounds like humility, but it also admits dependency: beauty arrives from outside us, and we can only receive it. Immediately, the scene complicates into contradictions: A silence already filled with noises and A canvas on which emerges a chorus of smiles. The world is both blank and crowded; quiet and loud; empty and already speaking. The “canvas” suggests art, but here the speakers aren’t painting—meaning “emerges” on its own, as if the morning insists on interpretation whether or not we are ready.

Reticence as self-protection in a puzzling light

The final lines cool the earlier confidence. The couple is Placed in a puzzling light, and moving: their situation is lit up but not clarified, and their motion implies time passing, the moment already slipping. Their days put on such reticence, as if silence becomes clothing, a practiced posture. Then comes the defensive note: These accents seem their own defense. The “accents” could be the little sounds and gestures of the morning, or the inflections of speech between lovers, but either way they protect as much as they reveal. The poem ends not with explanation achieved, but with the recognition that even our ways of speaking may be shields.

The unsettling question the trees leave behind

If the trees’ closeness is Arranging by chance, what exactly are the speakers calling comeliness—the world’s gift, or their own need to see a pattern? And if touch, love, explain is the dream, why does the poem finish with reticence and defense? The trees might be promising intimacy, but they might also be warning that meaning is something we project onto merely being there, then protect with the very “accents” that keep us from saying too much.