Dana Gidia’s poem “Planting a Sequoia” is a sweepingly beautiful and aching story of a man planting a tree after the death of his son. The speaker is planting a sequoia tree in remembrance and honor of his recently deceased son; the poem itself is told as if the writer were the speaker, in the first person point of view. Throughout the poem, the author compares the tree and the son in order to show the reader why planting this tree is so important to the speaker. The tree itself acts as a symbol of the child and as a sign of hope. Gidia also utilizes several time elements throughout the poem as well in order to show how long he hopes this tree will stand and act as a memorial to his dead son. Lastly, the author uses diction to create both a somber mood of mourning and a sense of hope for the future of the tree.
All the way throughout the poem, Gidia compares the new sequoia tree with his dead baby boy. The writer describes planting the tree, “wrapping in your roots a lock of hair, a piece of an infant’s birth cord. / All that remains above earth of a first-born son.” This serves to show the reader that the boy has recently died and also to show that the tree is being planted in remembrance of the son. By planting the tree and infusing “a few stray atoms brought back to the elements” into the tree (that is, the only part of his son left “above earth”), the speaker is letting his son live through the tree and giving him a means of surviving after death. The speaker tells how he will care for the tree, “giv[ing] you what we can—our labor and our soil/Water drawn from the earth when the skies fail,” further reinforcing the notion that the tree has become and will continue to act as a surrogate for the child. The use of consonance through the repetition of the ‘s’ sound in the sentence “nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees… /A slender shoot against the sunset” sounds smooth and easy to the reader’s ears. This consonance shows the smooth transition the speaker has made to help the tree grow. He will “give it what he can” and do all he that is in his power to make sure the tree grows and is prosperous.
The tree itself acts as a symbol and a stand-in for the dead son, both for the speaker and for the reader. The first stanza describes the planting of the tree, almost making it sound like a burial: “All afternoon my brothers and I have worked in the orchard, / Digging this hole, laying you into it, carefully packing the soil.” By using apostrophe and speaking directly to the tree, the speaker confuses the reader in making him think that he is talking to his son and describing his son’s burial. This notion is reinforced all throughout the poem when the tree is equalized with the son. Later in the poem, the speaker tries to keep himself busy taking care of something so that he can feel fulfilled as a father when he cannot truly fulfill his son’s prosperity. The fact that he is planting a sequoia tree is symbolic of this lack of prosperity, lack of future, for his son. They are not planting a tree to celebrate a new life for the “earth to bear,” but to mourn for the lost life of “a first-born son.” The speaker describes the tree-planting tradition of the Italians: “In Sicily a father plants a tree to celebrate his first son’s birth— / An olive or a fig tree—a sign that the earth has one more life to bear. / I would have done the same, proudly laying new stock into my father’s orchard / A green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, / A promise of new fruit in other autumns.” Since his son has died, however, the “promised fruit” will never come, and to display this mourning for his son’s death, the author doesn’t plant an olive tree or a fig tree, both of which are highly useful fruit bearing trees with great cultural importance. Instead, he “def[ies] the practical custom of our fathers” by planting a sequoia tree, a mammoth of a tree that lives for a very long time but does not produce useful fruits. Just like the tree, his son will not “bear fruit” throughout his life because he has died. In this sense, the tree serves both as a symbol for the death of the child, and as a beacon of hope that he will somehow be able to live forever.
This sense of everlasting life is expounded upon throughout the rest of the poem as well, in addition to several other time elements. The speaker hopes that the tree will live until after “our family is no more, all of [the child’s] unborn brothers dead,” and will someday be able to “stand among strangers, all young and ephemeral to you, / silently keeping the secret of your birth.” Since his son cannot have a long, fruitful life in the regular sense of the word, he hopes that by planting this tree and infusing his son into the tree, the boy will be able to live long after the speaker and his immediate family is dead, the rest of the family “scattered,” the child’s “mother’s beauty ashes in the air,” because he thinks this will fulfill what could not be fulfilled because of the boy’s death. The extreme sense of sadness that the death of the child has created is further explained by describing the planting of the tree as being while “An old year [comes] to an end.” By describing the year as old, the speaker gives the reader a sense of how long time can seem when one is mourning the death of one’s child. This also creates empathy in the reader for the speaker because of his heart brokenness and sadness at losing a child. There are few things harder in a human’s life than losing and having to bury a child, and this can create a warped sense of time in the parent. The speaker speaks of traditions, going back many generations, when he tells of the tradition of planting an “olive or fig tree” whenever a child is born. He does so in order to describe the timeless importance of a first-born baby son. By telling of its importance, he creates an ever more tragic scene when he describes planting the tree and letting go of his son.
The writer utilizes fantastic diction and phrases throughout the poem to describe the feelings of the speaker about the death of his son. He describes the setting of the planting of the tree: “Rain blacked the horizon, but cold winds kept it over the Pacific, / And the sky above us stayed the dull gray.” By using words like ‘cold,’ ‘blackened,’ and ‘dull gray,’ the writer creates a somber mood of sadness and darkness and cold. Standing in stark contrast to this in the next paragraph is the description of “a green sapling rising among the twisted apple boughs, / A promise of new fruit in other autumns.” In describing this scene of natural beauty, the speaker contrasts the normal feelings one has when their first-son is born with his current feelings of depression at the death of his first-born son. He goes on to describe another hopeful scene of “Nights scented with the ocean fog, days softened by the circuit of bees” in order to describe his hope that the tree will live long and be prosperous in its own way and will live to see more hopeful days. Further reinforcing this is the fact that they plant the tree in a place “bathed in western light, / A slender shoot against the sunset.” This diction is much warmer and light than the telling of the present because the speaker has a great sense of hope that his son will love through this new tree and will be able to have some sort of life beyond his own death.
