Explicating a Poem
An explication is a paraphrase or summary of a poem—its
basic situation and what it says. It doesn’t interpret; the
idea is to just objectively report, in your own words,
what’s happening in the poem.
Explication can help you to get a handle on even a difficult
piece, and is also useful when discussing poetry in an
essay.
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To a Blossoming Pear Tree
Beautiful natural blossoms,
Pure delicate body,
You stand without trembling.
Little mist of fallen starlight,
Perfect, beyond my reach,
How I envy you.
For if you could only listen,
I would tell you something,
Something human.
An old man
Appeared to me once
In the unendurable snow.
He had a singe of white
Beard on his face.
He paused on a street in Minneapolis
And stroked my face.
Give it to me, he begged.
I'll pay you anything.
I flinched. Both terrified,
We slunk away,
Each in his own way dodging
The cruel darts of the cold.
Beautiful natural blossoms,
How could you possibly
Worry or bother or care
About the ashamed, hopeless
Old man? He was so near death
He was willing to take
Any love he could get,
Even at the risk
Of some mocking policeman
Or some cute young wiseacre
Smashing his dentures,
Perhaps leading him on
To a dark place and there
Kicking him in his dead groin
Just for the fun of it.
Young tree, unburdened
By anything but your beautiful
natural blossoms
And dew, the dark
Blood in my body drags me
Down with my brother.
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An Explication of James Wright’s “To a Blossoming Pear Tree”
The speaker is apparently sitting or standing before a pear tree, presumably
in spring, in no particular location. He speaks to the tree, and describes it as
delicate, fearless, unreachable, and enviable, and then says that he will tell
the tree “something human.”
In the second stanza, the speaker recalls an incident in which an old man
propositioned him on a dark, wintery street in Minneapolis. Addressing the
tree again as “beautiful” and “natural,” he then muses on how free the tree
must be of concern for the desperate and nearly dead old man, who risks
pointless and even sadistic violence on the streets in his pursuit of love.
In the third and final stanza, the speaker again remarks on how
unburdened, young, beautiful, and natural the tree, and then makes an
abrupt assertion about how his “dark blood” brings him “down” with his
fellow man.
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An Interpretation of James Wright’s “To a Blossoming Pear Tree”
James Wright’s poem “To a Blossoming Pear Tree” is about the terrible burden and fatality of being
human—in sharp contrast to what he sees as an ideal, free, and beautiful natural world. To be
human is to be broken and even sick—although, in the end, Wright’s view is tempered by a
paradoxical insight.
The speaker of the poem first addresses the tree in terms of its delicacy, beauty, tenderness, and
purity, saying that he envies it. Indeed, one can feel the longing in his voice: “how I envy you.” He
then recounts an incident which is everything that the pear tree is not: ugly, shameful, suffering, and
brutal—a world, in other words, that is human and anything but natural. Interestingly, the speaker
describes the encounter in a way which implicates himself in the old man’s shame. He says that he
“flinched,” when he receives the sexual proposition, and that he “slunk away,” just like the old man,
doing what he can, just like the old man, to avoid the “cold,” which may include pointless or even
sadistic violence on the streets. This picture of the human world is in direct and stark contrast to the
world of the pear tree.
By the time the speaker comes back to present moment and the tree and, for a third time, describes
it as free, youthful, beautiful, and natural, he has given us a very bleak view of humanity indeed.
Interestingly, however, in describing what is the bleakest in the human condition—our entrapment in
our own bodies, in desire, loneliness, and need—he is at the exact same time asserting the
brotherhood of all people. Our connection to each other may be nothing more than the blood that
runs in our veins and our common mortality, but it is a connection nonetheless. Love and
connectedness, in Wright’s poems, are always hard-won and always redeem what would otherwise
be intolerable suffering.
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An Interpretation of James Wright’s “To a
Blossoming Pear Tree”
James Wright’s “To a Blossoming Pear Tree” is typically understood as a very compassionate poem in
which a man identifies with a desperate bum on the streets, contrasting the brutal and fateful human
world to the natural world of a blossoming tree. Wright’s poem is a moving one, and we should take
care not to read against its ultimately humane message. It’s hard not to notice, however, the
gendered language of the poem, especially in the speaker’s description of the tree. Ultimately, and
despite the poem’s best intentions, it relegates women to a position of absolute, even inhuman
Other. The world of men is equated with humanness; the world of women with the impossibly Ideal.
From the very first stanza, we get a description of a tree which is both wholly separate from the
speaker and also interestingly feminine, even slightly childlike. The tree is describes as ________
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