Arborescent Trees: Analysis & Meaning
What Are the Arborescent Trees?
In Call Us What We Carry, Amanda Gorman introduces the tree as a central, recurring symbol through three poems titled "Arborescent I," "Arborescent II," and "Arborescent III, or Elpis." The term “arborescent” literally means “tree-like” or “resembling a tree in growth or structure.” Gorman uses this biological concept not to describe a physical forest, but to map the hidden architecture of human identity, trauma, and resilience. The first poem in the sequence establishes the foundational metaphor: “We are / Arborescent— / What goes / Unseen / Is at the very / Root of ourselves.” The tree is not a decorative backdrop; it is a structural diagram of a person. The visible trunk and canopy represent what the world sees, while the vast, subterranean root system embodies the unseen forces—memory, ancestry, grief, love—that anchor and nourish an individual. This motif connects to the book’s larger inquiry into collective memory and erasure, insisting that what is invisible or buried is not absent but foundational.
The tree motif draws power from its tangible, observed components: roots, branches, bark, and the tree’s innate capacity to bend toward light. Gorman returns to these components across the collection, each time layering a new emotional dimension onto the botany. A tree does not simply exist; it reacts, twists, scars, and grows. These observable behaviors become a precise language for describing how people process hardship. The poems never claim that human suffering is beautiful. Instead, they use the tree’s mechanical, wordless struggle as a parallel, making abstract emotional processes visible and concrete.
Recurrence and Meaning Across Three Poems
The symbol evolves significantly across its three dedicated chapters. Tracking this progression reveals a complete emotional arc from wounded stasis to active, light-seeking change.
“Arborescent I”: The Unseen Root and a Refusal to Leave
The first poem establishes the tree as an image of what is hidden and how distance distorts identity. The lines state that distance can “Distort our deepest / Sense / Of who / We are, / Leave us / Warped / & wasted / As winter’s / Wind.” The comparison to a winter wind suggests a force that strips a tree bare, exposing its structure while also making it appear barren. The poem immediately counters any impulse toward simple recovery or forgetting: “We will / Not walk / From what / We’ve borne.” This declaration is pivotal. The speaker refuses the idea of abandoning one’s burdens. Instead, the poem presents a complex image of dwelling with them: “We would / Keep it / For a while, / Sit silent & / Swinging on its branches / Like a child / Refusing to come / Home.” Here, the tree of trauma becomes something one can climb and inhabit, a structure that holds weight. The child refusing to come home complicates the symbol—there is a stubborn, almost playful intimacy with pain. The final lines, “We would / Again / Give up / Our world / For this one,” suggest that the act of carrying loss reshapes a person’s entire reality, a state of being that connects to the theme of grief and trauma.
“Arborescent II”: The Slant Toward Heat
The second poem shifts the tree’s focus from its roots to its capacity for tropism—the biological process by which an organism turns toward a stimulus. The speaker notes, “Like trees, / We’re always / Scoping out / Heat, / Not with / Our eyes / But the blur / Of our bodies.” This moves the symbol from passive suffering to an automatic, physical orientation toward survival. The poem does not claim that people actively search for joy with intellectual precision. Like a plant, the body has a “celestial / Stitched inside us.” The instruction that follows is simple and directional: “Slant upward.” The speaker acknowledges that injury is present, but that “ways / To sit & / Let joy find / This injury” exist. The tree does not eradicate the wound; it incorporates the search for light as a simultaneous, coexisting process. The act of grasping “at the very best / Of each / Other” becomes a form of collective phototropism, a shared bending toward warmth that aligns with the theme of unity and fellowship.
“Arborescent III, or Elpis”: Growth Out of Hurt
The final poem in the sequence redefines hope entirely through the tree’s physical logic. The subtitle “Elpis” is the Greek word for hope, and the poem opens by rephrasing a previous statement: “We do not hope for no reason. / Hope is the reason for itself.” This reframes hope not as a transaction but as a natural, self-justifying function, much like a tree’s impulse to grow. The comparison becomes explicit and conclusive: “The same as trees, / We, too, are shaped / By how we twist / Toward all that shoots / Us through with sun.” The verb “twist” is crucial. Growth is not a smooth, linear ascent. It is a contorted, adaptive movement in response to an external, life-giving force. The poem concludes with a succinct, single-word line: “Change.” This is not change as a mere decision, but as a biological outcome of sustained orientation toward light. The “hurt” remains as the soil, but the speaker describes “Growing / Up & out of this hurt,” a painful but definitive directional movement that embodies resilience and healing.
Thematic and Character Connections
The arborescent motif connects deeply to the book’s exploration of how a collective “we” carries history. In the poem “Call Us,” the speaker declares, “We are not me— / We are we. / Call us / What we carry.” The tree’s mycorrhizal network, an unseen underground system connecting individual trees into a single, communicating whole, serves as the natural correlative for this collective identity. The unseen roots are not just personal; they are communal, linking the living to ancestors and to each other.
The motif also applies to the specific lost and found figures in the collection. In “Lucent,” the speaker describes what people look like “stripped down / Like a wintered tree,” finding that “our scars are the brightest / Parts of us.” This image connects the tree’s bark and scars to the historical and personal figures the book explores, such as the resilient Ida B. Wells-Barnett or the victims represented by the lost and the dead. The poem continues: “We are felled oaks beneath it, / Branches full of empty.” A felled tree is a dead tree, but the speaker immediately pivots: “Look closer. / What we share is more / Than what we’ve shed.” The shared “bark” and “bones” become the remnants from which a full history can be reconstructed, linking the tree’s physical record to the act of collective memory.
The tree’s ultimate function as a vessel of preservation is made explicit in the poem “What We Carry,” where language itself becomes an ark. The poem begins with children holding dirt and understanding that “what is mired is miraculous.” It moves to a vision of a “language is a life raft,” a boat built from the preserved wood of the world. The poem “Arborescent I” depicts the speaker sitting on the branches of a painful tree, refusing to go home. By the book’s end, the tree has been transformed into the ark that carries the world forward into “tomorrow, / Carrying nothing / But the world.” This arc from the tree of trauma to the tree as a vessel of hope and transformation represents the book’s central project of carrying light through disaster.
Study Questions and Answers
1. How does Gorman reimagine the tree symbol from a static image of trauma into a dynamic process of growth?
The “Arborescent” poems map this transformation precisely. In “Arborescent I,” the tree represents an intertwined state of being with one’s burdens; the speaker refuses to walk away and instead chooses to sit and swing on the branches. This is a static image of dwelling with pain. By “Arborescent II,” the tree is no longer static. It is “scoping out / Heat,” its body functioning as a blur of motion towards survival. The poem introduces the biological concept of tropism, a turning in response to a stimulus. “Arborescent III, or Elpis” completes the arc by naming the result of this tropism: “Change.” The twisting of the tree toward the sun becomes the mechanism by which growth occurs out of hurt, transforming a symbol of rooted suffering into one of dynamic, directional healing.
2. What is the significance of the “unseen” in the arborescent metaphor, and how does it connect to the book’s larger project?
The poem “Arborescent I” directly states that the “Unseen” is “at the very / Root of ourselves.” An arborescent structure’s most extensive, life-sustaining part is its subterranean root system. This makes the unseen not a void, but a foundational, active network. This directly connects to the book’s project of testament and preservation, as outlined in “Ship’s Manifest” and “What We Carry.” The book is filled with recovered histories, from the story of the 1918 pandemic to unmourned lives. The unseen root system is the metaphor for this buried historical and emotional truth. The poet’s task, then, is not to invent new truths but to expose the root systems that have always been there, sustaining the visible world.
3. Explain how the tree motif merges with the idea of collective identity. Provide a specific textual link.
The poem “Call Us” merges the individual body with a collective ecosystem, stating, “We are not me— / We are we.” It does this through the biological image of the microbiome, our “persons made vessel / For non-human cells.” The body is a “country,” a “planet,” an interdependent system. The tree motif extends this logic. A forest is not a collection of isolated individuals but a single organism connected by mycorrhizal networks, often called a “wood wide web.” When “Arborescent II” describes grasping “at the very best / Of each / Other,” the trees model a collective slanting toward heat, a shared survival strategy. The arborescent “we” is a single, interconnected system of mutually sustaining life.
4. How does the image of the “felled oak” in “Lucent” complicate the tree symbol, and what revelation does it offer?
In “Lucent,” Gorman introduces the image of “felled oaks,” which are dead, fallen trees. This initially seems to disrupt the symbol of growth and resilience. A felled oak is a symbol of utter ruin and finality. However, the poem immediately instructs the reader to “Look closer.” What remains of the felled oak—its “bark, the bones”—becomes the shared remnant that is “more / Than what we’ve shed.” The poem then leaps to the image of a paleontologist who can “dream up a species, / Make believe a body / Where there was none” from a single fossilized femur. A felled tree is not an ending; it is a fossil, a preserved record of a life, an “opening” through which luminous truth can breach. The felled oak reveals that even in collapse, the form remains as a vessel for revelation, directly tying loss to the preservation of light.