Winter is supposed to favour the evergreen. In this untitled poem by Erin W, the speaker, an evergreen tree, starts out sounding like the winner. Her sister, the "feeble hazel twig," stands bare and shivering, while she is "grim and grand," wrapped in "sweeping skirts." But the poem is really about how badly that victory sits with her. Her good fortune turns out to be a kind of hunger, and by the end we suspect the sister she pities is the one she has envied all along.
The central idea is that having more is not the same as being loved or being free. The speaker is "well-fed, well-dressed," yet she feels "that gnawing in the pit of my / Full stomach." The line break does the work here. "My" hangs at the end of one line and "Full" opens the next, so fullness and gnawing collide on the page. The hazel, by contrast, "was empty," but that emptiness left "room enough for love." The poem builds a topsy-turvy economy in which possession is a weight and lack is a kind of grace.
The voice is the poem's most interesting feature. The speaker keeps insisting on her own calm, and the insistence gives her away. "Hate her? No. I know what hate is" sounds like denial, and she immediately defines hate by describing how others hated her for being "green / And grand." The aside "You too, you know" pulls in a second listener, "my dear," so we seem to be overhearing a private, slightly conspiratorial grievance. Her stammering repetitions ("In green. In green." and "Pitied. Piteous.") sound like someone repeating a comfort to herself, and the more she repeats it, the less convincing it gets. Even her sister's shivering is waved away with "of course." The image of the sister's "bare, white arms" reaching up "in suppliance" while the speaker "busied mine / Amid my sweeping skirts" is telling. One sister is able to ask for something, and the other is too proud, or too fussy, to reach out at all.
The form follows the speaker's loss of composure. The opening lines run in steady, nearly regular iambic pentameter, with no end rhyme. "Our sister was a feeble hazel twig" ticks along like a metronome. As her feelings break through, the lines stretch, shorten and spill into one another ("lucky / Evergreen with all my shadows gathered close"), and the whole poem runs on without a stanza break, like a single outpouring. The only real echo of rhyme is "evergreen" and "green" in the first four lines, and that word keeps returning until the final line closes the circle: "clad in green" at the start, "see again in green" at the end. Since green is also the colour of envy, one reading is that she is relieved to be finished with it. That is an interpretation, not a statement the poem makes.
The indented line "Had room enough for love" and the sharp "And now, my dear?" form the hinge. The seasons turn, and the speaker's advantage turns into a handicap. In spring the hazel will "kiss the sun and taste new spring," while the evergreens are "grotesque, forgotten, drained / Of blood and pitch and clout and consequence." That list slides from body (blood) to tree resin (pitch) to social power (clout) to importance (consequence), so that tree and person blur together. Judging by the imagery of arms, skirts, stomachs and appetite, the poem may be about women, bodies or class as much as about trees. It never says so outright, which keeps the fable open.
The ending is bitter rather than triumphant. "I laugh to think her full and splendid" is an ugly laugh, and the prediction that "all the hungry ones will hate her now" shows how the cycle of admiration and resentment simply passes to the next person who is looked at. The poem is significant because it gives the unlikeable sister the voice and lets her reveal herself. She is proud, wounded, spiteful and strangely perceptive. Her last warning, "How little she can know what fullness means," may be true, and the poem leaves us unsure whether she is wise or merely jealous.