AP Lit - Poetry Prompt - The Black Walnut Tree
The following essay is meant as a study guide only and definitely is not an invitation to cheat. With that said, feel free to borrow from it, paraphrase it, and adopt ideas from it that you like. Sometimes the best way to learn to write well is to read how someone else might have written a response to the same prompt. For many of the AP students I interact with, the primary challenge is learning to form an argument that builds on itself in a logical way. You may find reading my response helps you formulate a strategy for answering the prompt. Learning to integrate evidence in a way that makes sense to the argument is another key skill that can boost an essay score. Read this carefully and see how it compares to your own writing.
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Last reminder; if you're doing a "cut and paste" with this essay then that's plagiarism and that can have huge consequences. Plus, your AP teacher will know. Trust me. They know your writing, your voice, and they know when you turn in an essay that doesn't sound like you.
That humanity can only experience the world in the present creates an inherent tension between the present, past, and future. This tension may be felt most acutely in the context of family where honoring forebears requires something starkly different than doing what is best for the family in the present moment. Mary Oliver’s “The Black Walnut Tree” is a free verse poem that tells the story of a family’s decision whether to remove a tree from their backyard. Oliver uses an extended metaphor, imagery, and word choice to explore the relationship between the tree and the family and, therefore, the present and the past.
The imagery of the poem seems designed to illustrate the contrasts between the present, past, and future. The opening line establishes that a mother and daughter “debate” their fate and the fate of the tree. During the debate, images of “dark boughs,/ smashing the house”, “roots in the cellar drains”, heavy leaves, and fruit that is hard “to gather away” help establish the reality of the present and future while making the case for removing the tree. The poem includes the opposing points in the debate through the imagery of a dream in lines 19-25, with their forefathers “filling blue fields” in Ohio with “leaves and vines and orchards” establishing the daughters' understanding of their past. Finally, the imagery of mother and daughter who would “crawl with shame/ in the emptiness [they’d] made” establishes that in spite of the debate, they will inevitably decide to keep the tree. While the poem deals with the particular human drama of family, the imagery centers almost entirely around nature, leading the reader to conclude that the family has a close connection to the earth and it’s ironic indifference to human drama. That indifference is reinforced by the poet's use of word choice.
While the imagery centered on nature, the particular word choices utilized by the poet hint at a kind of brutality. This brutality seems tied to nature, and thus to the family’s past and present. The conversation about possibly selling the tree begins by saying that “some storm” would likely “churn” it’s “dark boughs”, “smashing the house”. Already the word choices establish a dark mood in the poem. As mother and daughter consider the “difficult time” of their current moment, the trees' leaves getting “heavier”, and the fruit getting “harder” to gather are discussed in support of removing the tree. The word choices in lines 16-19, though, may offer the most insight about the mother and daughter, where the speaker says that they’re motivated by something “brighter” than money. She describes that something “moves” in their “blood” that urges them like a “trowel” to “dig and sow”, leaving the reader to make connections to the earth, to farming, and perhaps to children. One reading of this poem might imagine that mother and daughter find themselves alone, now, because war, disease, or a natural disaster has taken the men or the children of the family away from them. The word choice leads the reader toward that reading, but it is the metaphor of the tree that establishes the connection more fully.
The Black Walnut tree itself is a symbol, a metaphor, for the family and the poem utilizes the metaphor to draw parallels between the family and the tree. The Black Walnut tree is, at its most basic, a symbol of the family tree. However, the blending of the circumstances of the house, the family, and the tree make for a nuanced exploration of the tension between a family’s past and it’s present. The metaphor, established through imagery and word choice, uses the tree as a possible solution to the looming anxiety driven by the “whip-crack of the mortgage” payment due every month. Selling the tree, and thus forgetting the family heritage, would allow mother and daughter to pay off the mortgage. In this metaphor the tree threatens the integrity of the house with its roots in the cellar drains and boughs that threaten to smash, and so removing it would seem the obvious solution. However, removing the tree would mean mother and daughter turning their backs on the legacy of which they are the current caretakers. The poet implies a farming life with a root cellar and “churning” winds, and so the reader might imagine that a decision to cut down the tree would mean paying off a mortgage that would allow mother and daughter to move away from the farm and its hardships and memories. But that would mean abandoning their legacy. The decision to keep the tree, keep the home, keep their legacy, and keep their family seem inevitable, if not painful, by the end of the poem.
The exploration of the tension between past, present, and future, is explored through the relationship between the family and the tree. Oliver uses imagery, word choice, and figurative language to show both the rational and emotional aspects of the decision to keep the Black Walnut tree, and thus the decision for mother and daughter to keep their heritage.