Can You Imagine?
Can You Imagine? - meaning Summary
Nature Beyond Human Sight
The poem asks readers to imagine trees as living, responsive beings rather than motionless scenery. By returning to the phrase “surely you can't imagine,” it challenges the assumption that human sight defines what is happening in nature. The trees' imagined desire for sun, shade, movement, and company leads to a larger thought: their long patience may also contain a kind of happiness beyond human understanding.
Read Complete AnalysesFor example, what the trees do not only in lightning storms or the watery dark of a summer's night or under the white nets of winter but now, and now, and now - whenever we're not looking. Surely you can't imagine they don't dance, from the root up, wishing to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly more shade - surely you can't imagine they just stand there loving every minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings of the years slowly and without a sound thickening, and nothing different unless the wind, and then only in its own mood, comes to visit, surely you can't imagine patience, and happiness, like that.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.