Maxwell Bodenheim’s “Advice to a Forest” appeared in his 1920 collection *Advice*. A Chicago-born modernist associated with the city’s literary renaissance and later with Greenwich Village bohemia, Bodenheim wrote free verse that could shift from lyric tenderness to sardonic social observation. Here he addresses the trees as if they were wise, living beings who need reassurance in the face of human violence. The poem’s central idea is a paradox: the forest should not hate the “little men” who come to cut it down, because those men are the ones trapped in a harsher world, and their victory will be brief. The real durability, the poem suggests, belongs to the still, rooted things.
The opening apostrophe works like a litany. “O trees, to whom the darkness is a child / Scampering in and out of your long, green beards” makes night a playful, trusting creature and gives the trees an ancient, bearded personhood. Sunlight becomes “a tattered pilgrim / Counting his dreams” in the trees’ “hermitage,” so the forest is also a holy retreat. The leaves make “an incense of sound,” blending nature with ritual. There is no regular rhyme or meter, but the repeated “O trees” and the long, breathy lines create a rhythm of swaying and return. The phrase “caught feet” is especially striking: roots are caught, but the trees are “reeling,” alive with motion that cannot move.
When the loggers appear, the advice is not resistance but forbearance. “Do not mingle your tips in startled hatred” treats the treetops as almost facial expressions. The men will saw the forest into “strips / Of pointed brooding, blind with paint,” turning living green into dead boards and painted surfaces. In the city, the poem says, those same men will chase “the grey staccato of their lives / Down a glaring maze of walls / Much harder than your own.” The clipped, harsh sounds of “grey staccato” and “glaring maze” mimic the mechanical, exhausting world the destroyers have built. Bodenheim reverses the usual logic: the forest’s rootedness is not a prison; the real prison is the painted, walled maze humans make for themselves.
Time becomes the forest’s quiet ally. The “deep brown gaze / Of stolidly amorous time” is patient, earthy, almost loving, and it will outlast the men who “bit into your hearts.” Those men will “stray off in a patter of rabbits’ feet,” suddenly small, frightened, and temporary. The trees are told to look down on them with “aloof and weary tolerance / That all still things possess.” The word “still” carries the poem’s moral weight: motionless, silent, enduring. The final lines return to the opening image, but now the darkness “was a child,” as if the vision has already become memory or elegy.
The significance of Bodenheim’s poem lies in this reversal of power. He does not simply mourn the forest or scold the loggers; he gives the natural world a superior patience and lets human civilization look frantic by comparison. In an age of accelerating deforestation and urban sprawl, “Advice to a Forest” remains an unusual environmental poem—not because it demands action, but because it imagines what real endurance might look like.