On a hot, hazy day the speaker is pushing through a dense cedar swamp, sweaty, annoyed with himself for leaving the familiar road. He stops to rest, and looks up to find a strange figure looming over him: a dead, barkless tree that has been raised upright again, carrying wires “from men to men.” The speaker talks to it as if it were a ghost or a traveler—asking where it is going, what news it carries, whether it is bound for Montreal. The tone is uneasy and wry: he is half-delirious from heat, but also genuinely startled by this human-shaped, human-made thing in the wild. The poem creates a mood of humid exhaustion and uncanny solitude, mixing a joke with something spectral.
An Encounter — Summary
Once on the kind of day called ‘weather breeder,’ When the heat slowly hazes and the sun By its own power seems to be undone, I was half boring through, half climbing through A swamp of cedar. Choked with oil of cedar And scurf of plants, and weary and over-heated, And sorry I ever left the road I knew, I paused and rested on a sort of hook That had me by the coat as good as seated, And since there was no other way to look, Looked up toward heaven, and there against the blue, Stood over me a resurrected tree, A tree that had been down and raised again-- A barkless spectre. He had halted too, As if for fear of treading upon me. I saw the strange position of his hands-- Up at his shoulders, dragging yellow strands Of wire with something in it from men to men. ‘You here?’ I said. ‘Where aren’t you nowadays? And what’s the news you carry--if you know? And tell me where you’re off for--Montreal? Me? I’m not off for anywhere at all. Sometimes I wander out of beaten ways Half looking for the orchid Calypso.’