Wednesday, April 16, 2014

How would you compare Laux's "The Life of Trees" to Brewster's "Where I Come From"?

“The Life of Trees,” by Laux, and Brewster’s “Where I Come
From” both deal with speculations about a quality of life that is less complicated and
more natural than the urbanized lives we live today. Almost through necessity,
therefore, both poems stress some of the ways of Nature. Laux devotes more lines to an
accurate and interesting description of inanimate trees while at the same time
attributing certain animate qualities to them. Brewster is less detailed, and concludes
her poem enigmatically with the reference to the door of the mind being blown open. It
is fair to say that the two poems share in the traditional pastoral impulse, though it
would not be correct to say that they are conventional pastoral poems. If one would like
to retain the term “pastoral,” it might work to say that they are “modern pastoral
poems.”

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