Three times a tree cracks, and three times the same line comes down on the poem like an axe-blow: "Oh, you have fallen down on your head / You have fallen on your head." Jack Spicer's ballad is short and almost nursery-rhyme simple, yet it manages to feel like a small piece of folk mourning with something odd and unsettled underneath. It is a lament for a dead woodcutter, but the poem never tells us who he was or how he died. What it gives us instead is a chain of causes and a voice that gradually moves from outside the death to inside it.
The structure is the first thing to notice. Each stanza pair follows an identical plan: a two-line statement about a tree, then the repeated refrain. The statements work like fragments of a proverb or riddle. "Because the figtree was sapless / It has cracked at the root." "Because the oaktree was rootless / It has cracked at the branch." Each has the logic of explanation, a "because" followed by a result, but the logic is strangely scrambled. A sapless tree cracking at the root makes a kind of sense, since the part that should carry life has dried up. A rootless oak cracking at the branch is stranger, because without roots it would surely fall rather than split. The poem imitates the language of cause and effect without quite obeying it, which is how grief often behaves: we demand reasons, and the reasons we find don't fully fit.
The third pair changes everything. The first two "because" clauses concern trees; the third turns into a confession: "Because I walked through the branches / I have scratched out my heart." Suddenly there is an "I," and the damage is not to wood but to a heart. The woodcutter's world of trees, the place where he worked and presumably died, becomes a thicket that wounds the speaker too. Walking through branches is an ordinary, even clumsy action, yet the result is violent and self-inflicted: "scratched out" suggests both a wound and an erasure. The speaker has not merely witnessed a death; something in them has been torn away by passing through the same landscape.
The refrain is the poem's most haunting feature. Its address to "you" is blunt, almost scolding, in the way that people sometimes speak to the dead, half tender and half exasperated. "You have fallen on your head" has the flat, childlike tone of an accident reported, and the slight redundancy of saying it twice, with "down" added in the first line, gives it the quality of an incantation. Because it never changes while the stanzas around it shift from trees to the speaker, it begins to feel like the one fixed fact in an unstable world. The trees may crack at root or branch, hearts may be scratched out, but the woodcutter's fall stays exactly the same. Repetition here is a form of helplessness: the speaker can only say it again.
The title tells us we are in ballad territory, and the poem borrows the ballad's habits: refrain, plain diction, parallel stanzas, a death at the centre. But it strips the form down. A traditional ballad usually tells a story; this one withholds almost everything. There is a deliberate irony in the fact that a woodcutter, a man whose job is to bring trees down, is mourned through images of trees falling apart. The figtree and the oaktree seem to stand in for him, or for the speaker's sense of a stable, rooted world giving way.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it does with so little. Its imagery is drawn from a handful of words, such as sap, root, branch, head, and heart, and each is used with a bareness that lets them carry more than they say. Spicer takes a familiar mourning form and lets the strangeness show through its simplicity, so that the poem reads like a lullaby for someone who will not wake, sung by a speaker who has been scratched by the very branches that surround the loss.