The Black Walnut Tree by Mary Oliver is a symbol of family roots and success that bestows the warmth of good times even during hard times. The walnut tree, which is the center of discussion, symbolizes the merry fruitfulness of a time when the family was affluent. The poem opens with the discussion of an argument between mother and daughter over cutting the walnut tree to pay off the house mortgage and the mother’s reluctance to do so. The poem ends with the daughter realizing that the walnut tree is a remembrance of her father, who migrated from Bohemia and prospered in Ohio. A generation of farmers found their prosperity in nature. The daughter realizes the significance of the walnut tree in their lives, for it embodies her father: a monument that represents sunshine and provides shade in the scorching heat of summers. The poem symbolizes the walnut tree as a remembrance of the father. The poet symbolizes nature (in the form of the walnut tree) as a mausoleum for remembering good times.
A mausoleum or remembrance is an object that helps in remembering a person, time, or incidence. The walnut tree was probably sown by the narrator’s father, and now, when her father is no more, the tree stands as a remembrance of the departed soul. The narrator and her mother face a severe emotional dilemma when hard financial times bear the proposition of cutting the tree to save them from further poverty. The poet says:
“What my mother and I both know
is that we’d crawl with shame
in the emptiness we’d made
in our own and our father’s backyard.” (Oliver, 1978)
But due to the emotional attachment present with the tree prevents either of them from cutting it. The narrator believes that there is an element of her ancestors in them that stops them from cutting the tree. Their ancestors, who were farmers, bore new life on the land, and the tradition runs through the family. She says even though money was a pressing need, there was a greater force shaping their decisions, and that was their desire to “dig and sow.” Thus, they were essentially a family which bore life to the world and so could not cut the tree. The poem instills the tree as a remembrance of good times. The tree symbolizes life, and the ancestors of the narrator’s family were the life-givers. The narrator and her mother continue to do so by sacrificing their own happiness.
The poem written in free verse is a short poem of thirty-five lines. The title immediately draws the reader’s attention toward the natural world and the center of emotional conflict in the poem. Like the large branches of an ancient walnut tree, Oliver’s poem is shrouded in the shadow of her family tree. The walnut tree assumes eclectic importance in the lives of the narrator and her mother. Even though hardship and financial crisis demand them to utilize all the available means to recover from this servitude, their inner self prevents them from cutting a tree that stands as a remembrance of the narrator’s father and the days gone by.
The narrator and her mother do not cut the tree: “So the black walnut tree/swings through another year” (Oliver, 1978). But a feeling of emptiness driven by poverty remains in the heart of the narrator. She says that even though the walnut tree remains to shade their backyard, the tree provides fruit but at the cost of the increasing mortgage:
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip –
the crack of the mortgage. (Oliver, 1978)
This is the irony presented in the poem, which indicates that the remembrance of a dead man was saved at the cost of the lives of two people who are alive. A lingering question that the poet subtly strikes is if the remembrance is worth it if the mortgaged house is taken away by the lender? The poem does not answer these questions, but it makes the readers think that a remembrance saved from the atrocities of poverty and let to live at the cost of others’ suffering.
The remembrance is saved. The mortgage spirals, and maybe the house will be given away to the lender. Once the house is sold, so would the walnut tree. Then could the narrator actually save the monument that her father had built? The question lingers in the mind of the readers as the poem ends.
Works Cited
Oliver, M. (1978). Teh Black Walnut Tree. In M. Oliver, New and Selected Poems: Volume Two.