The Trees Are Down Analysis

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The Trees Are Down by Charlotte Mew is a poem in which the poet is angry about the destruction of the trees. The second line, “Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees” is a quote from the Bible - Revelation 7:3. This sentence sets our mind to the idea that cutting down trees is wrong, and a clue of what to expect in the poem to come. The part of this quote which applies to the poem, “Hurt not the trees”, is repeated at the end, thus using repetition as a way of conveying her emotions to the reader. The fourth and fifth line of the poem use heavy onomatopoeia - “... grate of the saw... swish of the branches... crash of trunks... rustle of trodden leaves. This creates a scene for the reader, by depicting the sounds the poet heard. In the last two lines of the first stanza - “With the “Whoops” and the “Whoas”, the loud common talk, the common laughs of the men, above it all.” - the poet expresses her anger against the men who cut down the trees, talking down to the 'common' men who think they're above the act of destruction they're committing. Notice that she does…show more content…
Charlotte Mew then returns to the story of the rat: “If an old dead rat did once, for a moment, unmake the spring, I might never have thought of him again. It is not for a moment the spring is unmade today.” She is comparing the feeling of spring being gone with the rat for a moment to the spring being lost forever with the loss of the woods. In the next line she talks about how the spring was in the trees 'from root to stem', and 'the men with the “Whoops” and Whoas” have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness ['whispering' possibly describing the sound of wind through the leaves or something similar] away.' This stanza has described how the loss of the trees is equal to the loss of half the

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