Ruth Jewell's "Old Pine Memories" begins by correcting itself. "She was a grand old pine / She, I always thought of her as She" – the speaker stops mid-thought to insist on a pronoun, as though anyone calling the tree "it" would be getting her wrong. That small interruption sets up the whole poem. An adult looks back on a pine from childhood and argues, gently, that it was never just scenery. It was a playmate, a shelter and a friend, and its loss, which the poem only hints at, is felt as the loss of a person.
The first stanza gives the tree a voice before it gives her anything else. She "would whisper and sing / songs of water, / earth, / sun, / wind". Each element has its own line, so the reader slows down and takes the list one breath at a time, much as wind moves through needles. The tree becomes a place where the natural world speaks. The sibilance of "whisper," "sing," "songs" and "sun" makes the lines hiss softly. The stanza ends with "and welcome" and then "how I loved her voice", and there is no full stop anywhere. The feeling simply spills over.
The childhood scenes are the most physical part of the poem. The indented lines on the board swing – "twisting, then releasing / gazing up into the branches / dizzy, whorls of green light" – step away from the left margin as if the page itself were spinning. "Whorls of green light" catches what a child sees when she tips her head back and the canopy blurs. The next line is deliberately flat: "It was game, who would get sick first." The missing "a" and the matter-of-fact tone sound like a child's shrug, and the line is funny and true. Then the tree becomes architecture. Children build "houses made of her sticks and needles", and she is "always home base". The phrase works twice, as the safe spot in a game and as the place you return to. The word "always" suggests how dependable she felt.
At night the mood darkens without turning frightening. The tree "rapped on my window", which could be eerie but reads as a friend knocking. The rain "sang through her arms of green and brown", so the singing from the first stanza returns and the branches have become arms. Then comes the poem's neatest reversal: "snow held her branches down / creating a cave beneath to shelter in." The weight that bends her is what makes a refuge for the child. The tree is burdened, yet she still protects, and the poem hints at the generosity of that.
Up to this point the tree has always been "she." Then the poem turns to "you": "Pine tree-friend / you sang me to sleep / danced with me in the wind / shielded me from hot summer sun / protected me from rain and snow." The speaker stops describing and speaks to the tree directly, as people do at a grave. The verbs pair delight (sang, danced) with safety (shielded, protected), and they run through the seasons from summer sun to winter snow. The hyphenated "tree-friend" makes the two nouns inseparable. After all this accumulation, the last line is almost bare: "Oh, how I miss you my friend." The past tense of the whole poem and that final "miss" suggest the tree is gone or out of reach, but the poem never says how, and it doesn't need to.
The form matches that restraint. There is no rhyme and no fixed metre. Line lengths shift with the speaker's thoughts, and the indentation gives some moments a visual rhythm. This looseness makes the poem sound like someone remembering aloud, which suits a piece built from memories.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to treat grief for a tree as exaggerated. It never lectures about nature. It simply lists what the pine did – sing, shelter, hold up a swing, become a house – and lets the sum of those gifts explain the sadness. Anyone who has loved a particular place, a tree, a corner of a garden, will recognise the feeling.