Most poems about nature ask us to look at a tree. Balachandran V's "Song of the Tree" does something more uncomfortable and makes the tree look at us. From the opening line, "You who stand beneath me," the speaker is a tree addressing a human being, and the poem becomes a long, courteous monologue in which a lifetime of generosity is set beside a lifetime of harm.
The first half is built on giving. The tree offers the "fragrance of my little flowers," fruit "for your child," a rough trunk to lean on, and leaves that fan the tired in the heat. Many of these lines are commands: "Look up," "breath in deep," "Lean on to me," "feel my heart." Yet none of them sounds bossy. They sound like a host pressing food on a guest. The tone is even playful. A flower dropping on someone's head is "my humble gift," and the question "Did it hurt?" is asked almost teasingly.
Then the same question returns, and everything changes. "Did it hurt when you cut / Chopped off the branches / And sawed off the trunk." This repetition is the poem's hinge. A joke becomes an indictment, but the tree never raises its voice. It asks about the human's pain, even about the "strain" of "pulling at my roots," as though the man's wasted effort were the sad part. The reproach lands harder for being so gentle. The grammar also stumbles here ("when you cut / Chopped off"). Whether by design or roughness, it reads like a voice catching.
The imagery makes the tree a body. It has "rough" skin, a heart that "throbs," and "veins full of the blood of love." Its hollow is a home for nesting birds, and the squirrels "tickl[e] my heart." So when the tree is felled, what is lost is a household: birds, songs, squirrels, and the human's own child "who played beneath my shade." The man has destroyed something that sheltered his family.
Formally, the poem is free verse with uneven lines and no fixed metre, written in plain, almost spoken English. Rhyme appears only occasionally, as in "vain" and "strain," "hole" and "soul." The last rhyme, "alone" and "stone," sits several lines apart, so it arrives like a quiet echo rather than a flourish. This plainness gives the poem the simplicity of a fable. The speaker explains rather than argues.
The most striking moment is the apology: "Forgive me Sir, I am just a tree / Fated to die, faithful to men." The tree calls the man "Sir," shrinks itself with "just," and asks forgiveness for being destroyed. It is a bitter inversion, and "faithful" is the key word, since the tree's loyalty survives even the axe. The ending carries that loyalty to its limit. In the freezing night, the tree's body, now firewood, burns "to embers" that "glow in love, for you alone / And your child, warm, asleep." Even its destruction becomes another gift.
The last line turns the poem's logic around: "Think of me – lest your heart turn to stone." All the way through, the tree has been the one with a heart, a pulse and blood. Now the danger is that the human, not the tree, will become lifeless. Wood that was alive becomes warmth, and a living person might harden into something that feels nothing.
That reversal is what makes the poem worth reading. It is an environmental poem, but it works through empathy rather than statistics or slogans. Its meekness may strike some readers as idealised, since real trees do not forgive. But the poem is a fable, and the tree's forgiveness is more unsettling than anger would be. It leaves the reader holding the poem's own question, "Did it hurt?", with nobody left to answer it but ourselves.