There is more than a little significance that for the poem she posted on June 26, we return to the roof, a place that seems to play a large role in mythology of her life.
People go back to such places because they signify something important in their lives, sometimes they are protective places, sometimes, they are kind of places where we face our own morality.
This is a poem that evokes powerful spirits, both threatening and protective, with her caught in the middle of them, invisible at times, perhaps even with feelings of insignificance.
She is looking out at the world from this lofty place in an almost dream scape where the elements take on larger than life proportions. The most important elements in this poem are the tree, the sun and the shadows cast.
These spirits are created by the interaction of the very powerful sun and the tree.
The sun is mostly seen as a god-like force in mythology, often male, and as often, the tree is seen as female, and so we have a creation that comes from their interaction.
The tree in most mythology is a source of life, a positive force, powerful in its own right, such as those in the Garden of Eden. It’s shadow, cast across the surface of the roof top, however, takes on an almost Platonic glow, “hazy” as she might have put it, and unreal, in a way like Plato’s shadows in the cave. The shadow is not reality, it is “a gray transparent projection” of the tree, not completely substantial, almost spiritual, an illusion because “trees don’t grow on roofs.” The insubstantiality of the shadows is made clear by the fact that they come, and they go, appearing and disappearing.
Reality or perhaps as she puts it, truth, exists somewhere between the sun and the tree.
In the middle of these powerful forces, we have another – perhaps the poet – described as “you,”
And if you stand between the tree and its shadow, you cease to exist, casting no shadow because the tree erases you.
You are real there in the middle of some other reality and its illusion. You are created or as she puts it “cast into being” by your relative position to these other forces.
This idea of creation and mythological forces puts this poem in a different realm and raises questions about the poet, who seems to wander into a Freudian dream world, where she is exploring that line between real and unreal, and we are confronted by illusion and perhaps question existence itself.
The tree’s shadow is not real yet is produced by an interaction by a real tree and a real sun, and though the person in the poem is real, there is no visible sign of it, no shadow because you are shielded by the wide arms of the real tree that spreads it wide arms over you.
As said before, the roof top location is important because she has been there before, a landscape on which she had previously explored her own morality, where is now she appears to be questioning her own existence.
We do not know if this is the same roof top as in previous poems and assuming it is, then the only trees capable of casting a shadow over it come from the southwest side, out of the church yard, and is most likely during late afternoon.
Since she sees the shadow cast across the roof, she has to be standing on it with her back to the tree and the sinking sun, the sight of which inspires her to explore what is real, what is illusion, and where is her place in that world. How can she prove her own existence if she casts no shadow? When she is standing in someone else’s shadow.
She seems to define the tree as a protective force, using the word “shield.”
The sun is different, almost threatening in its power to expose things and to create illusions, creating things that don’t exist, hazy shapes, and the appearance of trees where trees don’t grow.
The sun comes off as a kind of trickster, making these false trees appear and disappear and so it becomes difficult to know what is true and not or as she ironically phrases it somewhere between the real tree and its shadow “lies the truth.”
Since she (the you in the poem) casts so shadow, how do you find truth, when you are caught in the “interplay” between these other forces, brought into being by your relationship to these others powerful icons.
Although not nearly as bitter as some previous poems, this poem seems raise questions about her finding herself, faced on one side by a trickster, perhaps malevolent force of the sun and the over protective sun who erases her.
She knows she is real, has value, but seeks some way to step out from the shadow of the tree without risk of wrath of the sun.
This poem suggests that she is feeling invisible in a world in which she really wants to stand out, threatened by some forces, over protected by others, and yet her reality seems to depend upon that “interplay” of forces.
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