First off, welcome to our thoughts on poetry. Sometimes, I, George Minick, will share one of my favorite poems, and sometimes, my colleague, Ed Shigure will. We hope you find these posts of interest.
The Forest for the Trees
Memory, particularly noticeable as we age, is rarely a straight line. It is more like a circle, a circle we explore tentatively or with abandon, but a circle with edges that never lock into focus. In Susan Stewart’s masterful poem “The Forest,” memory is not just the subject matter; it is the very engine driving the poem’s structure.
From the opening lines, Stewart strips away the romantic illusion that we can perfectly retrieve the past:
You should lie down now and remember the forest,
for it is disappearing–
no, the truth is it is gone now
Instead of trying to accurately paint a landscape that no longer exists, Stewart creates a stunning mechanical mimicry of the mind trying, and clearly failing, to remember.
The Mechanics of Remembering
To achieve this hypnotic effect, Stewart relies on a specific structural tradition. The poem is a clever variation of a pantoum, a poetic form where lines from one stanza are carried over and repeated in subsequent stanzas. By continually weaving older lines into new quintains (five-line stanzas), the poem forces us to constantly double back.
When reading it, I experience something akin to the sensation of being lost in the woods. As I move forward in the text, I spot familiar lines that make me wonder if I am wandering in circles. The poem explicitly acknowledges its own looping, musical nature, describing the repetition “like a light left hand descending, always on the same keys.”
A Sinking Landscape
The brilliance of “The Forest” lies in how its physical landscape mirrors the instability of the unconscious mind. The sensory details are rich, dark, and damp: “black humus,” “the texture of drying moss,” and the “musk from the mushrooms and scalloped molds.”
The speaker repeatedly warns us that the ground is not solid. By comparing the forest floor to a sea, Stewart illustrates how memory is fluid and overwhelming: something that cannot be steadily walked across and has the potential to drown one. The birds in this forest “sing without a music where there cannot be an order,” highlighting the chaotic, fragmented reality of attempting to stitch the past back together.
Breaking the Spell
After eleven stanzas of this mesmerizing, cyclical rhythm, Stewart provides a notable structural shift. The entire poem has been built on five-line stanzas, keeping the reader trapped in its rhythmic loop. But in the final stanza, this pattern breaks. Stewart expands the architecture into a six-line stanza (a sestet). The cyclical repetition exhausts itself, and the speaker is dumped out of the memory-trance into harsh reality:
Once we were lost in the forest, so strangely alike and yet singular, too,
but the truth is, it is, lost to us now.
The forest is gone, and the poem leaves us standing in the sudden, quiet wreckage of that realization. Stewart’s “The Forest” is a breathtaking reminder that form and function in poetry, when perfectly married, can recreate the exact environment it is portraying.
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