Trees Symbol Analysis

The trees in the story symbolize the many life-giving qualities that B. Wordsworth himself represents. Indeed, the story begins with trees that are brimming with life—the bee-infested palm trees in the boy’s front yard. A short time later, the boy visits B. Wordsworth’s house to “eat mangoes” and is struck by the variety of fruit trees in his front yard.  In the middle of the story, B. Wordsworth responds to the boy’s question about why he keeps “all this bush” in his yard by telling a story about how the overgrown yard, trees and all, are meant to keep alive the memory of a wife and her unborn child who died. The story ends with the absence of trees as the boy passes the place where B. Wordsworth used to live and notices that the house, trees, and yard have been torn down and replaced by brick and concrete. The trees in all these instances reflect B. Wordsworth’s own vital, life-giving, generative qualities as a would-be poet, qualities that he models for the boy. When the boy eats the mango from B. Wordsworth tree, for instance, the juice drips down his chin as if from an overabundance of sweetness and delight. The trees throughout the story represent an ideal in which life, joy, and creativity manage to transcend hardship and suffering. Their final absence in the story suggests a kind of defeat, one that leads the boy to question whether B. Wordsworth, so closely associated with nature, ever actually existed.