This post ‘The Trees NCERT Solutions Class 10 English’ provides NCERT solutions for Class 10th English First Flight poem The Trees by Adrienne Rich. I recommend first read the summary of The Trees to understand the Thinking about the Poem The Trees questions better.
The Trees Thinking about the Poem
Q.1.(i) Three things that cannot happen in a treeless forest
Ans. No bird can sit on a tree, no insect can hide in it, and the sun cannot bury its feet in shadow.
Q.1.(ii) What picture do the words “sun bury its feet in shadow” create? What are the sun’s ‘feet’?
Ans. The sun’s ‘feet’ are its rays or beams that reach down to the ground. In a forest full of trees, these rays are hidden among the shadows on the forest floor — so it looks as though the sun has buried its feet in the shade. The image makes the sun seem like a living being walking through the forest.
Q.2.(i) Where are the trees in the poem? What do their roots, leaves and twigs do?
Ans. The trees are inside the house — houseplants kept in the veranda and the rooms. All night their roots work to free themselves from the cracks in the veranda floor; the leaves strain towards the glass; the small twigs grow stiff with the effort; and the long-cramped boughs shuffle under the roof.
Q.2(ii). What does the poet compare their branches to?
Ans. To newly discharged patients, half-dazed, moving slowly towards the clinic doors.
Q.3.(i) How does the poet describe the moon at the beginning and at the end of the third stanza? What causes the change?
Ans. At the beginning, the whole moon shines brightly in a sky that is still open. At the end, the moon is broken like a mirror, its pieces flashing in the crown of the tallest oak. The change happens because the trees have now moved out into the forest. Seen through their branches and leaves, the moonlight is scattered into bright fragments.
Q.3.(ii) What happens to the house when the trees move out of it?
Ans. The glass breaks as the trees stumble out. The house is left empty, though the smell of leaves and lichen still reaches into the rooms like a voice. The whispers in the poet’s head will be silent by tomorrow.
Q.3.(iii) Why does the poet not mention “the departure of the forest from the house” in her letters?
Ans. Because it is too big and too personal an event to be written about casually. We are often silent about happenings that are important and so unexpected that they embarrass us. The poet quietly sympathises with the trees and does not wish to make their escape a matter of ordinary news.
Q.4.(i) Does the poem present a conflict between man and nature?
Ans. Yes. Like A Tiger in the Zoo, it shows a living thing kept in captivity for man’s pleasure. Man cuts down whole forests and then keeps a few plants indoors for decoration. These trees are prisoners, and their struggle all night to free their roots and reach the empty forest is a revolt against that imprisonment. Nature belongs outside, not in a veranda.
Q.4.(ii) What new meanings emerge if the trees stand for human beings?
Ans. Adrienne Rich often uses trees as a metaphor for people — especially for women. Read this way, the poem becomes the story of human beings confined within four walls, denied space to grow. Their night-long struggle is the struggle for freedom and identity, and their move into the open forest is the moment when the oppressed step out into the wider world to take their rightful place. The poet, sitting inside and hardly mentioning it in her letters, is the quiet witness to that liberation.
Q.5. Compare with ‘On Killing a Tree’ by Gieve Patel
Ans. Both poems are about man’s relationship with trees. Patel’s poem describes, in a cold and ironic voice, how much cruelty is needed to kill a tree — it must be uprooted, and its roots scorched and choked. Rich’s poem is the opposite: her trees are not killed but set free, and they escape from the house to the forest by their own effort. Patel shows man’s destructive power; Rich shows nature’s power to resist and return.
Homophones (page 79)
- refuse (/rɪˈfjuːz/ — to say no) / refuse (/ˈrefjuːs/ — rubbish, waste)
- dove (/dʌv/ — a bird) / dove (/dəʊv/ — past tense of dive)
- invalid (/ɪnˈvælɪd/ — not valid) / invalid (/ˈɪnvəlɪd/ — a sick or disabled person)
Glossary: disengage — separate; strain — make efforts to move; bough — branch; shuffling — moving repeatedly from one position to another; lichen — crusty growth on tree trunks.
