The Black Walnut Tree Literary Elements

The speaker is a woman who lives with her mother.. She does not appear to be married or have children of her own as the relationship with her mother is contextually established as the most important in her life.

Free verse adhering to no formal meter. The poem’s 35 lines comprise one single long stanza which may be intended to resemble the high thin trunk of a tree before branches begin sprouting.

“…sharp and quick as a trowel / that wants us to dig and sow” is a simile which connects the tradition of farming and respect for the soil to the decision of whether to sacrifice the tree for money or not.

“We talk slowly, two women trying in a difficult time to be wise” uses the repetitive quality of alliteration to underscore the closeness of the relationship between mother and daughter.

The poem begins in the middle of a logical debate weighing the pros and cons of deciding to keep an increasingly burdensome tree in the yard or allow it to be cut up and sold for lumber in order to raise money to pay off the mortgage. Ironically, however, the ultimate decision is made entirely on the basis of emotional attachment to the tree which is partially instigated by a dream the speaker overnight.

Nature Poetry

The poem is set in a home shared by a mother and her adult daughter someone where in Ohio in the present day.

Conversational and semi-confessional with a duality of tension between rationality and emotionality.

Protagonists: daughter and mother. Antagonist: the mortgage.

The conflict is the topic of debate addressed in the poem’s opening line: "whether to sell the walnut tree as lumber to raise money to pay off the mortgage or not."

The climax arrives with the revelation that the decision is to keep the tree in place rather than cut it down to be sold as lumber.

The decision to not sell the tree is foreshadowed by the speaker’s characterization of themselves as possessing an inherent urge “to dig and sow.”

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“Something brighter than money moves in our blood” uses “blood” as a metonym for ancestry.

“The blue fields of fresh and generous Ohio” endows topography with the human attribute of generosity.

“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 fathers' backyard” uses overstatement to describe the sense of emotional betrayal of their ancestors if the two women cannot even take care of a single tree.

“The whip-crack of the mortgage” uses onomatopoeia to suggest the financial state of the mother and daughter by conveying the monthly house payment through the terrifying sound of an instrument of punishment.