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The Call of the Wind. Wild Visits and Dark Atmospheres in Poems by Poe and Dickinson

Imagine this: A dark and desolate December night. Outside, an icy storm is raging. The fading embers of a long burnt down fire provide no comfort and instead only project distorted and wreathing shadows onto the cold floor. A tired man is sitting at his desk, pouring over old, moth-eaten volumes of long forgotten wisdoms. His only company is the yawning darkness beyond the windows and the person-shaped void next to him. It is quiet except for the disconcerting rustling of the curtains and the frozen rain beating against the windowpanes. Then, suddenly, he sits up straight: someone is tapping against his door.

Now, imagine this: a woman is sitting alone at her desk with only a book of poetry to keep her company. Through the open window, a golden sunbeam warms her left knee. No sounds disturb her peaceful perusing of the lines, only the wind murmurs quietly as he passes through the grass in her colourful garden. The birds are chirping merrily, a bright melody accompanying the wind’s calming chant. The bumblebees’ content humming completes the little concert. The woman turns a page; her mind filled with beautiful words about beautiful things. When it knocks politely at her door, she smiles.

Though structurally similar – a person sitting alone at their desk hearing a knock – these two scenes could not appear more different. It takes just a few tweaks and one scenario suddenly feels dark, cold and lonely, whereas the other feels peaceful and quiet. Tweaks to what is usually referred to as a text’s atmosphere; a term that appears to be very straightforward on first glance. But of course, for a literary scholar like me, the easier the answer, the more questions I have. For example: Which narrative and/or poetic factors constitute and contribute to the atmosphere of a literary text? Is it a subjective phenomenon or can there be a poetics of atmospheres? Is the literary atmosphere in any way related to the physical atmosphere? How can we, within the context of literature studies, talk about it in a productive way? And, most importantly, what does “atmosphere” even mean?

Atmospheric Relations

Depending on whom you ask, the term can imply a wide range of different things: a climate scientist may tell you that it refers to the accumulation of gases surrounding our planet, whereas a psychologist might say that it refers to a certain type of mood that is prevalent in a room. Natalie Dederichs, in an attempt to combine these different concepts, defines the atmospheric in her book Atmosfears. The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction (2023) as “the ways in which we are embedded in and affected by spheres of interaction with our environments” (13). Atmospheres, therefore, are not only invisible, indescribable phenomena of the “in between” of individuals and their environment (cf. Gernot Böhme), but rely on and are constructed by the interaction and the distribution of agency between them. Anthropocentric, narrow conceptions of the term are thus no longer productive. When it comes to defining what it means to be an “affective and relational being in the world” (22), Dederichs further suggests that literary analysis can lend a hand to ecocriticism. After all, what better way to look at the immersive dynamic resulting from the friction between material reality and the individual than “where the interrelatedness of matter and text, reader and world(s) plays such an important role in the aesthetic experience?” (15) She further points out that, especially within the context of ecocriticism, literary atmospheres are uniquely equipped to enable “an embodied understanding of climate change because it is through atmospheric encounters that we are drawn into an affective engagement with the surrounding world” (20).


“The Raven,” by E. H. Wehnert, illustrating the poem by Poe (1856) via WikiCommons

But what, we may ask now, even are “atmospheric encounters”? After all, human beings always exist within and are dependent on (physical) atmospheres. Can we even distinguish between commonplace breathing and an “atmospheric encounter”? And which criteria can we employ to determine the difference?  These questions lead us right back to the scenes with which I began this essay. The first “atmospheric encounter” occurs in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven”(1844) where, as the title suggests, a raven (a representative of the ‘outside environment’) plays a key role. Because the bird can speak, it allows us to explore the (uncanny) dynamics between human and non-human agencies. The second example, Emily Dickinson’s poem “The Wind’s Visit” (approx. 1863), introduces similar dynamics, although the visitor (a gust of wind) is neither really tangible nor visible and thus more of an “imaginary presence” (Dederichs, 14).

Conditions of an “Atmospheric Encounter”

The scenic openings above reflect the outsets of “The Raven ” and “The Wind’s Visit ” (in that order). Both start with the poem’s speaker sitting alone in their house, when they suddenly hear a knocking. Both assume that it must either be “a visiter [sic]” (l. 16, Poe) or “a guest” (l. 5, Dickinson). The different connotations of each term (a “guest” is usually someone familiar who is encouraged to linger, whereas mention of a “visitor” implies formality and passing) foreshadow the later events of each poem. The tapping which disturbs the speaker of “The Raven” in his exhaustion-induced sleep is at first hesitant. The speaker describes: “I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, // And so faintly you came tapping, … // That I scarce was sure I heard you” (l. 21ff, Poe). Eventually, it grows more insistent and the “visiter [sic]” knocks several more times and “somewhat louder than before” (l. 23, Poe), until the speaker finally opens the correct window. Through a number of different stylistic devices in the first few stanzas (e. g. repetition, gemination, epiphora, internal rhyme), the plea for entry receives a sense of urgency on a textual level as well. In “The Wind’s Visit”, the visitor knocks politely on the speaker’s door. Again, the (lack of) insistency for requesting admission is reflected on the narrative level, as the onomatopoetic alliteration of the “t”-sound in the opening line (“The Wind – tapped like a tired Man –“ (l. 1, Dickinson)) imitates the slow, rhythmic knock of the visitor asking for entrance.

Both speakers eventually bid their unexpected visitors entrance. The speaker in “The Wind’s Visit” quickly musters up the courage to answer the knocking and “like a Host – ‘Come in’ // I boldly answered” (l. 2f, Dickinson). The speaker in “The Raven” is more hesitant, already unsettled by the raging storm outside. He has to reassure himself several times that “’Tis the wind and nothing more” (l. 36, Poe) making the noise. After the knocking continues, he eventually resolves that, in fact, there must be a physical being outside asking for entrance. The way in which the visitors knock and the speaker’s reactions to it each complement each other: a polite, slow knocking in “The Wind’s Visit” results in a calm, friendly bid for entrance, whereas the increasingly insistent, repeated knocking in “The Raven” causes uneasiness and heightened discomfort in the speaker. Here, the overall mood of the poems not only aids the readers imagination but, again, foreshadows the later events. The speakers’ reactions mirror the fact that an unexpected visitor is much more likely to turn into a guest invited to stay if they turn up at a pleasant hour of the day, instead of in the middle of the night.

The manner of first encountering the visitors, how it relates to their tapping, and the resulting dynamics of agency also differ quite significantly between the poems. The anthropomorphised gust of wind in Dickinson’s poem, for instance, does not require a door to be opened. Still, he waits for the verbal affirmation and invitation of the speaker before he enters. The theme of politeness and restraint is therefore continued, and the speaker controls the situation thus far. The raven, on the other hand, struts in as soon as the speaker opens the window: “Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he” (l. 38f, Poe). Although he does not fly in in a frenzy, he still wastes no time with waiting for an affirmation or welcome. The speaker thus loses his agency over the situation as soon as the window is opened. This comparison shows how the contrast between a welcome guest in “The Wind’s Visit” and an unexpected visitor in “The Raven” is intensified.

Atmospheric Agency – Anxiety or Assuagement?

However, neither poem lets this be the last word in terms of agency. In Dickinson’s poem, the wind’s calm manner of knocking and respectful entrance differ quite strongly from his conduct within the room. Whereas before entering, he is anthropomorphised through comparisons and personifications and has a corporeal presence (he can knock), these features all disappear as soon as he enters: he is a “footless guest” (l. 5, Dickinson) with “No Bone … to bind Him” (l. 9). He returns to being a meteorological phenomenon that cannot be controlled; his movements are described as “[r]apid” (l. 5), “flitting” (l. 17), and “flurriedly” (l. 19). This is also reflected on the textual level: the poem contains a large number of enjambments, and the sentences exclusively end with dashes or no punctuation at all. This creates the reading experience of rushing through the poem. In “The Raven”, the bird also does not behave how one would assume based on its bid for entrance. Although the raven enters “with many a flirt and flutter” (l. 37, Poe), he refrains from rushing about the room like the wind and instead “[p]erched, and sat, and nothing more” (l. 42, Poe) on a marble bust of Pallas Athena. The manner of asking for admission and the visitor’s behaviour within the room thus do not differ only between the poems but also on the intradiegetic level of each individual poem.

Neither the raven nor the wind remain quiet for long. Although the wind cannot articulate actual words, the speaker still refers to his utterances as a form of speaking: “His Speech was like the Push // Of numerous Humming Birds at once” (l. 10f, Dickinson). More than that, “His Fingers, as He passed // Let go a music – as of tunes // Blown tremulous in Glass” (l. 14ff). This passage pertains to the Aeolian wind harp, a popular poetic symbol during the Romanticism period. Named after the Greek wind god Aeolus, it refers to an instrument whose strings are set in motion via directing a gust of air or wind into a resonance space. According to the Cambridge University Dictionary of Literary Symbols, it is also commonly used as a “metaphor of the internal breeze or breath responding to the inspiration of a natural wind” (8) which increasingly “came to represent the experience of creative resonance between mind and environmental forces in the Romantic imagination” (Dederichs, 49). This is also the case in “The Wind’s Visit”: the speaker describes that the wind not only enters their residence but their “Residence within” (l. 4, Dickinson, emphasis added) and leaves its “music” there. The gust of wind consequently does not create music on an actual aeolian harp; it is the speaker who becomes the resonance space for the wind’s natural inspiration.

Aeolian harp in the old castle of Baden Baden – Instrument with strings installed in front of an open window (wikicommons)

In order to look at the wind not only as a metaphor for inspiration (also note the German term “Inspirationshauch”, which literally translates to a “whiff” or “breath” of inspiration) but as an atmospheric phenomenon, let us return to Dederichs, who states that the atmospheric functions as “a particularly fruitful category to theorise the tensions and fuzzy borders between perceiver and perceived, subject and object” (14). Considering the fact that the wind enters the speaker’s “Residence within”, the environmental phenomenon in this poem serves as a good example for the ways in which an atmospheric encounter “shakes concepts of physical presence and destabilises anthropocentric notions of agency” (12). The immersive and, crucially, reciprocal dynamic of encounters with the atmospheric becomes evident through the speaker having to allow the wind inside and the wind in turn evaporating the borders between inside and outside, between individual and environment, and forcing the speaker to surrender control over the interaction. Especially the wind’s invisibility and lack of tangibility thus reflects the misassumption of anthropocentric control over encounters with non-human agents and atmospheric phenomena. Notably, the concession of control over the interaction is not negatively connotated in “The Wind’s Visit” (more on that later).

The cover of the first edition of Poems, publ. 1890

In “The Raven”, the opposite is the case: the tensions resulting from encounters with the atmospheric and loss of agency to a non-human party are decidedly uncanny. Just as the wind, the raven is not a silent visitor. In fact, Poe states in “The Philosophy of Composition” that he chose the raven as a visitor precisely because he is “a non-reasoning creature capable of speech” (Poe, “TPoC”, 679). Thus, the tension between human and non-human agency (i.e., between a reasoning and a non-reasoning creature) has been consciously considered and employed by Poe in his poem. It immediately arises as soon as the raven invades the speaker’s space without waiting for him to welcome him inside and thereby assuming agency of the situation. The speaker, still very much preoccupied with grief for his deceased love Lenore, starts a conversation with the raven who, much to his amusement, can only speak one word (“Nevermore”). This allows the speaker to guide the conversation and to reassume control over the interaction. Unfortunately, he quickly begins to ask himself “what this ominous bird of yore … // Meant in croaking ‘Nevermore’” (l. 69ff) and grows more and more perturbed by the bird’s answers to his increasingly distressed questions. For example, the speaker asks whether he will be reunited with his beloved in heaven, whilst being fully aware of the negating answer the raven will give him. Poe states in “The Philosophy of Composition” that the speaker “experiences a phrenzied pleasure in so modeling his questions as to receive from the expected ‘Nevermore’ the most delicious because the most intolerable of sorrow” (680). This means that although it is the speaker who leads the conversation, he allows the influence of the raven’s answers on his mental state to grow because he wants to feel sad. Once more, the non-human agent from the outside invades not only the speaker’s personal space but also their (state of) mind.

Moreover, the raven is not only “the bird of ill-omen” (Poe, “TPoC”, 679) and a “renowned harbinger of … despair” (Farrant/Urakova, 161), but also a familiar representative of everyday encounters with nature. This makes him a very suitable “baseline from which the uncanny will emerge, the necessary starting point for de-naturing to take place” (Farrant/Urakova, 160) and thus a good vehicle to create “an immersive and yet disruptive experience of otherness” (Dederichs, 20). The atmospheric encounter is not a positively connotated affective-immersive experience like in Dickinson’s poem, but rather an uncanny affective-invasive circumstance.

Remains of an “Atmospheric Encounter”

The theme of dwindling human agency in atmospheric encounters culminates in the poems’ endings. The wind in Dickinson’s poem leaves the speaker as unceremoniously as he came: “He passed … // He visited – still flitting – // … ‘twas flurriedly” (l. 17ff, Dickinson). This is reflected in the poem’s sudden ending as well (“Again, He tapped – … // And I became alone –“ (l. 19f)). As previously established, the gust of wind/inspiration, “[t]o offer whom a Chair // Were as impossible as hand // A Sofa to the Air” (l. 5-8), cannot be controlled or detained and leaves the speaker much as they were in the beginning; almost as if the visit had never occurred. However, the dash at the end of the last line (instead of the grammatically more conventional dot), suggests a certain openness to the encounter that is transferred to the reader:

Readers remain in very much the same situation as that in which Dickinson’s speakers often find themselves: we have received a miraculous visitor … who just as miraculously abandons us in a state of acute susceptibility. None of these poems can be said precisely to end, since they perpetually maintain themselves at the instant and in the condition in which they stopped. (Anderson, 218)

The result of this atmospheric encounter’s dynamic therefore is an open one. The speaker opened themselves up to the visitor’s influence and is rewarded by an immersive-affective, inspirational experience. Although they surrender control over the situation, they do it willingly (“boldly”) and the loss of agency is not marked as uncanny – rather it becomes something at once inspirational and aspirational. Anderson, too, resolves that Dickinson uses the encounter with the atmospheric phenomenon wind as a “synecdoche for transcendent experience” (213) and as allegory for the overlapping of “transcendent life and circumstantial, daily existence” (205).

The speaker in “The Raven” has no such luck. In fact, he experiences the opposite of Dickinson’s speaker’s calm inspiration, as he is increasingly negatively affected by the raven’s answers. As previously mentioned, he initially finds himself amused by his unusual, feathered visitor (cf. l. 43), a fact that is also evident in his use of archaic pronouns to address the raven. However, with his “ease reclining” (l. 75) progressively during their conversation, he eventually grows more and more frenzied and almost hysterical in his desire to get rid of the ebony bird: “Get thee back into the tempest and … // Leave my loneliness unbroken! – quit the bust above my door! // Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” (l. 98ff) Unfortunately for him, the raven, who understandably has no desire to return to the storm (and also cannot understand him), will not leave. This presents a problem to the speaker, who has come to regard his visitor as a “demon” (l. 105) and “thing of evil! – prophet still, if bird or devil” (l. 85). The raven has become “emblematical … of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance” (Poe, “TPoC”, 684), not only to the poem’s readers but also to the speaker himself. The speaker is torn between the desire to “forget this lost Lenore” (l. 82f) and the pain her memory brings, and to remember her forever (cf. Stanzas 13 & 14). Using Farrant and Urakova’s words to return to the atmospheric dynamic of this encounter: “the raven is an intruder; he comes from outside and eventually ‘masters’ the narrator in his own chamber. Instead of being caged … he entraps the narrator” (162). Although the raven has no harmful intentions, he still possesses all the agency in the situation, simply because the speaker attributes it to him. He is the one who continues to ask questions and the one who decides to feel distressed by the answers. It is the encounter with the atmospheric that leads the speaker down a spiral of grief and hopelessness, until he ultimately resolves that “my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor // Shall be lifted – nevermore!” (l. 107f) Again, the atmospheric agent invading the individual’s space holds agency not because they simply took it but because the subject encountering the atmospheric awarded it to them (although this time, not consciously). Again, the encounter is dynamic and reciprocal instead of one-sided.

The “Atmospheric Encounter”: Brushing or Bruising Experience?

According to Dederichs, the atmospheric “points to the ways in which we are embedded in and affected by spheres of interaction with our environments” (13) and that which draws us “into an affective engagement with the surrounding world” (20). This is, as the comparison of Poe’s and Dickinson’s poems has shown, not only a feature of contemporary prose, but also present in lyrical encounters. The dissolution of human agency, which Dederichs emphasizes several times, also seems to be a defining feature not only of physical and (literary) atmospheric encounters, but for the writing of poetry itself as well: To be an individual that enters into a dynamic and/or creative relationship with its surroundings means to surrender at least a certain degree of control over the situation. This can either be a daunting dynamic (cf. “The Raven”) or a calming and rewarding experience (cf. “The Wind’s Visit”), depending on the willingness of the individual to let go of their own preoccupations and the openness they bring to the encounter. Dickinson’s speaker voluntarily surrenders control to the atmospheric phenomenon and is left inspired and with the invisible remnants of a pleasant, ephemeral visit. Poe’s speaker, however, is too preoccupied with his emotions to productively engage with his visitor. The atmospheric encounter is not only a metaphor for his mental state (the knocking and raven are a metaphor for grief as something invasive that cannot be ignored) but also a catalyst for the speaker’s inner turmoil and as a mirror for his feelings. Whereas Dickinson’s speaker remains alone but not lonely, Poe’s speaker is not alone anymore, but lonelier than ever. In one case, the encounter is the beginning of the end, in the other, the end is just the beginning.

            Ultimately, both atmospheric encounters model physical experiences as much as they (re)imagine the effect of writing and composing poetry. To read this not as a mere metaphor but as (metonymical) consequence of dynamic relations with our surroundings reminds us to contemplate our reciprocal affiliations with the atmospheric. It allows us to reflect both on our status as readers, writers, and beings in the world, and to recontextualize ourselves within the complex dynamics of our environment and learn to engage with them in a productive way.

Aive Jürgens is a graduate student at Ruhr-University Bochum (MA Comparative Literature and Anglistik/Amerikanistik). She is particularly interested in questions of narrative unreliability, mythology, and gothic fiction, but always happy to explore new topics.

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Dickinson, Emily. “The Wind – tapped like a tired Man – (152a).” Poems 1891: Packet XXVIII, Fascicle 29. Houghton Library/Harvard University, ca. 1862, pp. 150f, https://www.edickinson.org/editions/1/image_sets/12175331. Accessed: May 07 2025.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Raven.” The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, and Context Criticism, edited by G. R. Thompson, Norton, 2004, pp. 58-61.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Authoritative Texts, Backgrounds, and Context Criticism, edited by G. R. Thompson, Norton, 2004, pp. 675-684.

Secondary Sources

“Aeolian Harp.” A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, edited by Michael Ferber, Cambridge University Press 2007, pp. 7-9, https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/7B96B80D7F2A27E3A2A10081AC0F5936/ 9780511481475c_p7-247_CBO.pdf/dictionary.pdf. Accessed: May 15 2025.

Anderson, Douglas. “Presence and Place in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry.” The New England Quarterly vol. 57, no. 2, 1984, pp. 205-24. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/364993. Accessed: May 07 2025.

Dederichs, Natalie. Atmosfears: The Uncanny Climate of Contemporary Ecofiction, edited by Moritz Ingwersen, Solvejg Nitzke et al., Transcript, 2023 (= Critical Futures 2).

Farrant, Timothy, and Alexandra Urakova. “From ‘The Raven’ to ‘Le Cygne’: Birds, Transcendence, and the Uncanny in Poe and Baudelaire.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 2014, pp. 156-74, https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.15.2.0156. Accessed: May 15 2025.

“Inspiration.” Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Deutschen, edited by Wolfgang Pfeifer et al., Akademie-Verlag, 1993, https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/Inspiration. Accessed: May 25 2025.

Lin, Leah. “Hummingbirds Spiritual Meaning: A Simple Guide to Their Special Symbolism.” Birdfy, 31. Juli 2024, https://www.birdfy.com/blogs/blogs/hummingbirds-spiritual-meaning-a-simple-guide-to-their-special-symbolism?po s=1&_sid=29c35d087&_ss=r. Accessed: May 15 2025.

Miller, Cristanne, and Emily Dickinson. “Introduction.” Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them, Harvard University Press, 2016, pp. 1-22, https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674968752. Accessed: May 07 2025.

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“Raven.” A Dictionary of Literary Symbols, edited by Michael Ferber, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 167-69, https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/7B96B80 D7F2A27E3A2A10081AC0F5936/9780511481475c_p7-247_CBO.pdf/dictionary.pdf. Accessed: May 15 2025.

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Talking about Trees in “Dark Times”. Re-Reading Brecht and Rich

One more war makes all the difference, yet, I am not going to write about war or Ukraine or Russia or how many more wars there are. I am still going to write about trees. How can I? How can I talk about trees when the world is burning, when bombs are falling on people, when thousands are forced to flee their homes and try to get where you are, sitting in safety, writing about trees?

What times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!

Quoting Brecht has become a cliché and still, it is the reference that came to my head immediately when Russia invaded Ukraine and war came so painfully close to my home. I am saying “I” and “my”, because I do not possess and I don’t want to assume the ability to universalize my thoughts. But I do want to connect them to trees and, yes, that means I am reassuring myself what I am doing, writing about trees “in dark times”. This is not an analysis or an interpretation, this is me finding my way to trees through texts, this is what I do, this is the only way I know how.

I don’t want this to be another postcard or a meme with an inspirational quote on it. But I also don’t want this to be an academic text either. This is personal and so is my work. So I invite you to read with me.

To those born after

by Bertolt Brecht (1939)

Truly, I live in dark times!

A trusting word is folly. A smooth brow
A sign of insensitivity. The man who laughs
Has simply not yet heard
The terrifying news

What times are these, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it entails a silence about so many misdeeds!
That man calmly crossing the street
Is he not beyond the reach of his friends
Who are in need?

It is true: I still earn a living
But believe me: that is just good fortune. Nothing
That I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I am spared. (If my luck runs out
I am lost.)

They say to me: eat and drink! Be glad that you have the means!
But how can I eat and drink when
It is from the starving that I wrest my food and
My glass of water is snatched from the thirsty
Yet I do eat and I drink.

I would like to be wise
In ancient books it says what it means to be wise:
To hold yourself above the strife of the wolrd and to live out
That brief compass without fear
And to make your way without violence
To repay evil with good
Not to fulfil your desires, but to forget them
Such things are accounted wise.
But all of this I cannot do:
Truly I live in dark times!

This is the first of three parts of a poem in which the tree verse is only a tiny part in a much larger attempt to address “those born after”. The German “Nachgeborenen” is a peculiar word that is not really in use (at least to my knowledge) but immediately produces a temporal relationship which you cannot escape. For this first part to be set in the present of the lyrical I generates some friction with the title addressing future beings. It creates a feeling of witnessing someone experiencing the very things they talk about, thus, a feeling of immediacy that has the potential to hurt. And it should. While the second part reflects on the lyrical I’s own involvement in “the dark times” in the (injust) fight for justice and the third ends in a plea to look with forbearance (Nachsicht) on those who succumbed to meanness and hatred in the very attempt “to prepare the land for friendliness”, this first part could as well say “you” where it says “I”. At least, that is what it sounds like to me.

I have read this poem often and wondered about it – there are answers to it and myriads of interpretations – because it neither excuses nor accuses itself or its reader of ignorance, but it complicates the relationship between presence and past by pulling the latter so much closer.

I don’t live in dark times, I want to reply – the sun is shining, the buds on the branches of the tree in front of my window are almost bursting into leaf and bloom, I am warm and sheltered, my family and I are healthy and can expect help should we not be – but I live in dark times, because people around me are dying of a disease that we are close to forgetting, the leafs on the trees are too early because of a warming climate and the warmth I enjoy in my home and my office comes from fossil fuels that finance a war, right now (and they have financed war and injustice for too long) – “Yet I do eat and drink” and I enjoy sunshine and birthday cake and playing with my kid. 

It feels presumptuous to even compare “my” dark times to Brecht’s or, for that matter, to those who have to flee, who starve, who don’t know what tomorrow look like. So, am I the “man calmly crossing the street”? Probably, but so is the I in this poem. Again, there is no excuse, no accusation, but many question marks. So what about the conversation about trees? 

Sure, I am practiced enough in what I do, to connect to the thread that I have laid out in the last paragraph – the tree buds, the gas, global heating – to a by now equally familiar argument, that it would be just as criminal NOT to talk about trees. Look at what is happening to them – where the forests aren’t outright burning, trees are in peril of pests and drought, dangers with which they would be able to deal, would we not continue to burn fossilized beings on an almost unimaginable scale. But how on earth can you even make such an argument? Can you really weigh humans against trees? I’m not going into the moral argument here. I am not a deep ecologist. Instead, I not only “eat and I drink”, I heat my home and I enjoy the pleasures of fossil fuelled life. So why talk about trees if that makes you look even worse? Is it a case of “virtue signalling” (a problematic concept in itself), that is, plain hypocrisy – me filling my blog with thoughts about difficulty that is virtually non-existent? While I hope not, I am not sure. And I shouldn’t be. 

Where I look for answers, or more precisely, for a language to even approximate the feelings of loss and lostness and their blatant a-synchronicity with my daily life, is literature. Poems especially, because they intensify the contradictions without necessarily offering an escape. Sure, there is escapist reading (and I want to stress that I do think that this is an absolutely legitimate form of engaging with text and not with the world for a while), but this is not ,I think, what “a conversation about trees” means. Again, it’s tempting and almost easy, now, to dwell on the “almost” in “almost a crime”, in order to defend conversations about trees. They don’t need defending, though. Because it’s not about the conversations or about the trees. It’s about the ways in which we judge them, conversations and trees and the people clinging to both.

So don’t be mean to people talking about trees, even now? Or don’t stop talking about trees, because they are still in peril? And it’s all connected? I really don’t know which of these things I want to suggest or ask or get on with. All of them, none of them. I don’t know.

To have you listen at all

If talking about trees means you are turning away from the world of humans and human suffering, it would, indeed, be hurtful. There are many claims that most people’s new found (or old) fondness of trees is nothing but puppy love. A caring for nonhumans that masks the carelessness with which we treat other humans. Gerbrand Bakker, for example, accuses forester Peter Wohlleben of fostering just this kind of infatuation and, thus, of diverting attention from the historic and present plight of humans by confusing them with trees. To me, this sounds a lot like what Michael Rothberg calls “competing memory” (2009). That is, the fight for a place in “collective memory” as if it were a case of “real-estate-development” with space for only one kind of attention, only one line of remembrance and, taking it further, only one species deserving of care. 

Put like this, it sounds even more ridiculous to me and, as Leila Essa has shown in her wonderful essay, this kind of thinking leads to even more exclusion (even where it means well). If we treat attention and memory, both forms of care, like scarce resources, we are engaging in a hypocrisy that is even worse than caring for trees instead of humans: after all, our collective track record of saving scarce resources is, to put it mildly, not great. Claiming that there is not enough attention or capacity to remember seems, at least in tendency, like a very convenient excuse.

Yet, it happens. You can turn to trees to turn away from humans. Sometimes you must, but sometimes that hurts trees as much as it neglects humans. In a sort of Midas-effect, everything we turn our attention to, turns to metaphor and symbol, if not to gold as in the myth of king Midas’s eternal punishment. There we go – that makes talking about trees even worse and poetry…no! Because these kinds of conversations, the poetic type that is, know how to grow metaphorical language into something that is both real and not, both about trees and about humans, both eating and not ignoring the hunger of others. 

What Kind of Times are These

by Adrienne Rich (1991)

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

The first time I read it, it seemed to me, Adrienne Rich was providing me with an optimistic call for attention to trees. We do have to talk about trees! People will listen, when we talk about trees! She (or the lyrical I) clearly loves them and the mushrooms with whom the trees grow, as did Brecht by the way. But this is not a poem about the love for trees. At least I am not sure it is (only) about that. There is so much silence entailed in that poem, it almost bursts at the seams. The sadness of that last stanza…”why do I tell you/ anything?” Because you might not listen to me, if I were talking about anything else. Because maybe there is a kernel of truth to the suspicion that we talk about trees to avoid other conversations. 

We can’t. A conversation about trees does, indeed, “entail a silence about so many misdeeds!” But it is getting harder to look past this fact. The silence might be all that is left if we do. So, “to have you listen at all, it’s necessary/ to talk about trees.” This need not be a purely sad statement. If trees retain the ability to make people listen that is a good thing. I am convinced of it. So turning to trees might mean turning away for a moment – but not for longer. The challenge lies in being happy (tree buds, spring!) and aware (global warming, war), in not letting the one outshine the other. We need to the silence to care for the unheard, one might say, if that didn’t sound too much like another damn inspirational quote. So, with the trees, I am heartbroken, yet, I try not to turn away for too long. They can’t and so can’t many humans right now.

This has no conclusion.

——

Brecht’s poem: To those born after, An die Nachgeborenen first published in Svendborger Gedichte (1939) in: Gesammelte Werke, vol. 4, pp. 722-25 (1967), here: The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, translated and edited by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine. W.W. Norton 2019, pp. 734-736. Another translation as well as the German original in full can be found here.

Adrienne Rich, “What Kind of Times are These” from Collected Poems: 1950-2012, W.W. Norton 2018, p. 291. (The Dark Fields of the Republic 1991-1992).