Wild Geese

I saw grey geese straining over the flatlands,
Wild geese vibrant in the high air,
Saw them as I feel them, flying
Felt my life stiffened out in their throats--
Iron rocks of the north by the wrinkled sea,
With the spring green corn piercing through,
Ribs of a black boat rotting in the sand,
Ribs of a giant
In the endless, wavering, surfprinted lines of desert dunes. . . .
I saw wild geese flying before sunrise,
And the grey whiteness of them ribboning the enormous skies,
And the spokes of the sun over the crumpled hills. . . .

Analysis (ai): The poem uses free verse with irregular line lengths and minimal punctuation, aligning with early 20th-century shifts toward looser forms, though less radical than contemporaneous modernist experiments like those of Pound or Williams.

Imagery and Theme: Natural imagery dominates, particularly flight and desolation, linking the geese to elemental forces. The speaker identifies with the birds not just visually but bodily, suggesting a fusion of self and landscape.

Connection to Author’s Oeuvre: Less performative than Tree’s theatrical poems, this piece emphasizes introspection and abstraction, standing out in her body of work for its quiet intensity and sustained metaphor.

Tone and Voice: The tone is restrained yet urgent, avoiding sentimentality. Unlike her more ornate poems, this one relies on juxtaposition and sparse detail to convey existential alignment with the migratory.

Temporal Context: Written early in Tree’s career, it reflects pre-war English modernism’s interest in nature and inner life, but without the fragmentation seen in Eliot or the mythic density of Yeats.

Less-Discussed Angle: Rather than reading the geese as symbols of freedom, the poem presents them as harbingers of endurance—life persisting in harsh conditions, mirrored in the “iron rocks” and “rotting” boat.

Geographic and Mythic Space: The setting blends real and imagined terrains—the flatlands, sea, dunes—constructing a borderland where the natural world echoes internal states.

Bodily Metaphor: The line “Felt my life stiffened out in their throats” transforms the geese’s call into a physical extension of the speaker, suggesting voice as both strain and survival.

Color and Light: Recurring greys, whites, and muted greens create a monochrome palette, disrupted only by the “spokes of the sun,” hinting at fleeting revelation without resolving ambiguity.

Contemporary Resonance: Though pre-1900s in tone, its ecological undertones and focus on transient life forms anticipate later concerns with impermanence and environmental change.

Place in Literary History: Not widely anthologized, the poem distinguishes itself through its fusion of corporeal sensation and landscape abstraction, rare in Tree’s otherwise society-focused writings.

Contrast with Popular Interpretations: While often read as a transcendental moment, the poem resists uplift; the geese do not liberate the speaker but mirror a shared rigidity and exposure to elemental forces.

Rhythm and Sound: Enjambment and alliteration (“wavering, surfprinted lines”) produce a breathless momentum, echoing the geese’s flight without mimicking it directly.

Symbolic Economy: Objects like the black boat and corn-stitched earth function not as symbols with fixed meanings but as nodes in a larger, unresolved field of perception.

Conclusion: The poem remains contained, ending not with resolution but with the image of light over hills, maintaining a distance between observer and observed.

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Of all who died in silence far away
Where sympathy was busy with other things,
Busy with words, inventing how to slay,
Troubled with rights and wrongs and governments and kings.

The little dead who knew so large a love,
Whose lives were sweet unto themselves a shepherding
Of hopes, ambitions, wonders in a drove
Over the hills of time, that now are graves for burying.

Of all the tenderness that flowed to them,
A milky way streaming from out their mother’s breast,
Stars were they to her night, ans she the stem
From which they flowered – now barren and left unblessed.

Of all the sparkling kisses that they gave
Spangling a secret radiance on adoring hands,
Now stifled in the darkness of a grave
With kiss of loneliness and death’s embracing bands.

No more!-And we, the mourners, dare not wear
The black that folds our hearts in secrecy if pain,
But must don purple and bright standards bear,
Vermillion of our honour, a bloody train.

We dare not weep who must be brave in battle-
‘Another death – another day – another inch of land –
The dead are cheering and the ghost drums rattle’....
The deaf are dumb and the dumb cannot understand....

Of all who died in darkness far away
Nothing is left of them but LOVE, who triumphs now,
His arms held crosswise to the budding day,
The passion-red roses clustering his brow.

Analysis (ai): The poem grapples with unseen loss in wartime, centering on children who perish without public notice, contrasting private grief with public performance of mourning. It maintains a restrained tone that gradually shifts from sorrow to a quiet, almost reluctant assertion of love’s endurance.

Imagery and Diction: Natural and celestial motifs—stars, shepherding hopes, roses—evoke innocence and transience, grounding abstract emotions in tangible forms. The recurring image of maternal connection frames death as a severance not just of life but of generative cycles.

Structure and Form: Composed in six quatrains with a loose iambic rhythm and irregular rhyme, the poem avoids rigid formalism, reflecting emotional instability. The structure follows a narrative arc: from loss, through suppressed mourning, to a symbolic apotheosis of love.

Historical and Cultural Context: Echoing concerns of early 20th-century wartime literature, it critiques the glorification of national sacrifice while emphasizing unnoticed civilian casualties, particularly children, a perspective less prominent than soldier narratives of the era.

Relation to Author’s Oeuvre: Unlike Tree’s more theatrical or cosmopolitan works, this poem stands out for its somber restraint and maternal focus, aligning closer to her lesser-known war-related writings that critique societal indifference.

Engagement with Modern Concerns: It anticipates mid-century disillusionment with state narratives of heroism, questioning performative patriotism and highlighting psychological cost—particularly on women—of suppressing private grief for public duty.

Less-Discussed Interpretation: Rather than reading the final stanza as triumph, the image of Love with "arms held crosswise" may suggest entombment rather than victory, subtly undermining the redemptive conclusion and implying that love, too, is crucified by war.

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And afterwards, when honour has made good,
And all you think you fight for shall take place,
A late rejoicing to a crippled race;
The bulldog’s teeth relax and snap for food,
The eagles fly to their forsaken brood,
Within the ravaged nest. When no disgrace
Shall spread a blush across the haggard face
Of anxious Pride, already flushed with blood.

In victory will you have conquered Hate,
And stuck old Folly with a bayonet
And battered down the hideous prison gate?
Or will the fatted gods be gloried yet,
Glutted with gold and dust and empty state.
The incense of our anguish and our sweat?

Analysis (ai): Written during the interwar period, the poem aligns with early 20th-century disillusionment following World War I, a shift from romanticized war narratives dominant before 1914 to more skeptical, critical perspectives found in works by contemporaries like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.

Themes of War and Aftermath: It questions the legitimacy of postwar triumph, probing whether victory truly dismantles systemic hatred and folly or simply masks them under renewed national pride and ritualistic glorification of sacrifice.

Contrast with Author’s Other Works: Unlike Tree’s often lyrical and persona-driven poems influenced by theatricality and myth, this piece adopts a restrained, urgent tone focused on collective trauma, marking a departure from her typical stylistic flamboyance.

Imagery and Symbolism: The bulldog and eagles—national emblems of tenacity and nobility—undergo ironic transformation, suggesting patriotic symbols lose moral authority once war ends and old power structures reassert themselves.

Engagement with Modern Concerns: The poem critiques militarized nationalism and institutional exploitation decades before postcolonial and anti-war movements gained prominence, anticipating later skepticism toward state narratives and the commodification of suffering.

Less-Discussed Angle: Rather than focusing on battlefield heroism or individual loss, it emphasizes the psychological continuity of oppression: victory rituals may re-inscribe the very systems combat allegedly opposed.

Form and Structure: A modified sonnet with irregular volta, it subverts traditional resolution; the closing rhetorical question refuses closure, challenging poetic expectations of consolation common even in war poetry of the era.

Place in Author’s Oeuvre: Among Tree’s lesser-known political verses, this poem stands out for its directness and moral clarity, diverging from her more impressionistic or character-based poems frequently anthologized for their aestheticism.

Reception and Obscurity: Overlooked in favor of her performance-related writings, this work gains significance when read as an early feminist critique of masculinist war ideologies, linking national triumph to unexamined cycles of sacrifice imposed on the vulnerable.

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Iris Tree

Wild Geese

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