Section 5
The brief fifth section (lines 63–71), concerns the
transformation of the tree by Orpheus’s song.
The subject of Orpheus’s song now turns to
fire. Trees are naturally afraid of fire, but the
tree speaking the poem takes joy in the fire of
language that consumes him. It causes him to
take flower out of season. It fills him with the full
knowledge of language, so that he now knows
the name of Orpheus’s instrument, which he
could only describe earlier through metaphor.
His transformation frees him from the con-
straints of time, so that he is able not only to
directly experience his former existence as a seed
but also to ‘‘be’’ his remote evolutionary ances-
tors hundreds of millions of years ago and at the
same time their fossil remains.
Section 6
In the sixth section (lines 72–79), the tree passes
beyond merely achieving consciousness. A feel-
ing wells up inside him that seems to be trans-
forming him into a human or divine condition. It
creates an internal stillness that the tree surpris-
ingly compares to becoming bored. The tree fur-
ther describes the sensation in paradoxical terms
as a cold flame.
Section 7
In the seventh section (lines 80–92), Orpheus
begins to move away from the tree. He steps
out of its shadow, breaking whatever connection
he had established by entering it. The trans-
formative power of Orpheus’s song begins to
weaken. What had been a river of music becomes
a trickle.
Section 8
The eighth section (lines 93–115) gives the tree’s
reaction to the withdrawal of Orpheus’s music.
Without any hesitation, and seemingly without
any purposeful willing of the action on its part,
the tree pulls its roots out of the ground and
begins to walk, following Orpheus as he departs.
Orpheus’s ability to make trees walk with his
song is the traditional miracle of the Orphic
tradition that was the original inspiration on
which Levertov constructed her poem. The
trees on the wooded hillside behind the narra-
tor-tree also begin to walk, following Orpheus. It
is far from clear whether the music gives them
some specific command to walk, or whether their
longing to hear the music is so great that they
follow Orpheus to keep listening to it. The tree
notes that although its and the other trees’ walk-
ing makes a sound like thunder, they can still
hear the music, suggesting that it is reaching
them by some means other than the sense of
hearing.Section 9
The very brief ninth section (lines 116–120)
describes in simple terms the trees following
after Orpheus. These lines, each printed sepa-
rately, are all partial lines, much shorter than
the average in the poem and consisting of as
few as one word. In all the section consists of
only a single sentence, but each line nevertheless
contains a complete phrase, line 120 even con-
taining two independent clauses. This follows
ideas of the Black Mountain school of poetry,
which was characterized by the separation of
lines by grammatical rather than metrical units.
The section perhaps also reflects another Black
Mountain idea, that each line should constitute
the words spoken with a single breath. In that
case, the brevity of the lines can be seen to rep-
resent the shortness of breath caused in the
anthropomorphic tree by the heavy physical
exertion of walking for the first time, as if it is a
human being out of breath. The close packing of
the two independent clauses in line 120 perhaps
then models the rapid rushing of the trees after
Orpheus. The only new information in the sec-
tion is that the trees consciously try to reply to
Orpheus’s music with the sounds made by shak-
ing their leaves.Section 10
The tenth and final section of the poem (lines
121–161) completes the episode of the trees
walking and gives a brief summary of the other
major myths associated with Orpheus. The song
of Orpheus has begun at dawn, and Orpheus
continues to lead the trees on their migration
throughout the day. They do not merely walk,
but Orpheus also uses his song to teach the trees
to dance in time to the music. Finally Orpheus
leads them to a grassy field, and as the trees form
a circle around him they create a grove. The
trees’ dance fills Orpheus with the whole range
of human emotion. At sunset, he changes his
song so that it leads the trees to take root in
their new places. Throughout the night the
music again pours over the trees like water, but
this time like rain rather than dew, nourishing
them in their new configuration. Orpheus leaves,
and the trees anxiously await his return. The treeA Tree Telling of Orpheus