A tree speaks, or seems to speak, in four deceptively simple lines. The opening is a proverb-like statement: “Though leaves are many, the root is one.” It sounds like ancient wisdom, balanced and calm. Then the tree becomes a person: “Through all the lying days of my youth / I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun.” The speaker remembers youth as a time of display—many leaves, bright flowers, movement in sunlight. That display was not exactly honest. The word “lying” carries a double edge: the days were false, and the young self was perhaps lying to itself, performing a pretty surface while ignoring the hidden root. The final line reverses our usual feeling about growing old. “Now I may wither into the truth.” Withering sounds like loss, but here it is a movement toward truth, as if drying up the noisy foliage lets a person finally become what they are.
The poem’s central idea is that wisdom is a kind of simplification. In youth, there are many leaves; in age, one root. The many things—impulses, poses, ambitions, pleasures—are not necessarily evil, but they can distract from the single underlying reality. The root is “one,” a word placed at the end of the first line where it gathers weight. The speaker does not say the root becomes visible; the speaker says “I may wither into the truth,” as if truth is not something you find outside yourself but something you are reduced to. The word “may” matters too: it suggests permission or possibility rather than doom. To wither is allowed, even welcomed.
The poem is built around strong contrasts: many versus one, leaves versus root, youth versus truth, sun versus withering. The opening word “Though” already hints that the bright many will not be the whole story; the turn comes with “Now,” which separates the long “lying days” from the present condition. The rhyme scheme is ABAB—“one” with “sun,” “youth” with “truth”—and this cross-rhyming threads the two states together even as the poem separates them. The first and third lines belong to the bright, leafy world; the second and fourth are more inward. Yet the rhymes connect those worlds: “youth” is answered by “truth” at the very end. The rhythm is mostly iambic, with a slight irregularity that keeps the poem from sounding like a nursery rhyme. The longer middle lines swell with youthful movement—“I swayed my leaves and flowers in the sun”—while the final line is shorter and barer, almost as if the language itself is withering. The last stressed word, “truth,” lands with quiet finality after the soft consonants of “wither.”
What makes the poem significant is its compression. In four lines it turns a familiar idea—age brings wisdom—into a vivid physical image, and then gives that image a surprising emotional tone. Withering is usually an image of decline, something to be feared. Here its value changes: the tree does not regret losing its leaves; it seems relieved, or at least ready. The phrase “wither into the truth” is a paradox. Dying back becomes a form of ripening. That is why the poem feels both sad and strangely hopeful. It does not pretend that age is only gain, because the word “wither” keeps the loss present. But it suggests that what is lost is mostly surface, and what remains is real.
The poem can be read as a tiny ars poetica: poetry too can shed decoration and grow plain and exact. But it also works as a piece of personal reflection. The first-person voice makes the tree intimate, not merely symbolic. We are not told where the speaker is going or what the truth is; the poem remains open. The “truth” is as hidden as the root. What matters is the direction: through all the lying days, through the sunlit swaying, one can move downward, inward, toward the single root. That movement is the “coming of wisdom with time.”