Easter is supposed to be the season of renewal, and Peter Viereck opens his poem by quietly cancelling it. "This was the Easter when it rained so little" sounds like the start of an anecdote, a remembered spring that simply went wrong. But the dust that "grimed" the olive groves along the road carries more than weather. Olive trees have long been associated with peace, endurance and sacred ground, and Easter adds the promise of resurrection. Against all that, the poem sets a landscape in which nothing rises, and one tree in particular that gives everything it has and still ends with nothing.
The first stanza describes a general failure, and its central image is a sharp one. The twigs are "sapless" and "brittle", and Viereck compares them to "wires yielding glint to rust". The simile is unexpected, because it pulls the organic world into the mechanical. The branches stop being living things and become corroded metal, and the glint they surrender, the bright metallic sheen, doubles as the sunlight they once stored. That connection is built into the sentence: the trees cede "their hoard of stored up sun and all their greenness". The word "hoard" is worth pausing on. It suggests treasure kept in a vault, and drought is the thief, or perhaps the tax collector, who takes it all.
The second stanza narrows from the whole grove to a single "crest", and the poem turns on a dash: "Except one crest, whose brightness drained its root." Here the logic becomes strange and quite bleak. We expect the exception to be a survivor, a tree that held out. Instead, its very brightness is the cause of its ruin. The crest stays green and luminous only by consuming the root beneath it, so its beauty is a kind of self-destruction. The other trees are dull but they are, in a sense, simply drying out. This one burns itself up trying to stay alive.
The final two lines push the idea into more abstract and more unsettling territory: "Here clay had pushed beyond all clay's uncleanness / And then, exhausted, withered without fruit." Clay is the old image of human material, the stuff from which mortals are shaped, and "uncleanness" suggests moral and physical imperfection. The line seems to describe an effort to transcend ordinary earthly limits, to rise above what the material is made of. The poem does not tell us what that effort stands for, and it is more suggestive for staying open. Judging by the imagery, one natural reading is that this is any striving for spiritual or artistic perfection that costs more than the living thing can afford. The achievement is real, since the clay does get "beyond" its uncleanness, but it comes too late and at too high a price. The result is not fruit, which is the whole point of an olive tree, but only a bright and barren crest.
The form supports this sense of tension held and then lost. The poem is two quatrains in alternating rhyme, abab and cdcd, with the rhymes little/brittle, dust/rust, greenness/uncleanness and root/fruit. The line lengths are even, built on a steady iambic pentameter, and the neatness of the pattern contrasts with the disorder of the scene. Two of the rhymes deserve attention. "Greenness" and "uncleanness" are feminine rhymes, ending on an unstressed syllable, so the lines seem to trail off and fade, which suits a poem about exhaustion. "Root" and "fruit" close the poem on a rhyme that should promise fertility and delivers the opposite, since the root has been drained and the fruit never comes. The last word, "fruit", arrives preceded by "without", so the poem ends on an absence.
What makes the poem memorable is how much it fits into eight lines and how little it explains. It refuses the comfort that its Easter setting invites. There is no rain at the end, no resurrection, only a bright branch that spent itself and withered. Readers can take it as a nature poem, a religious reflection or a warning about ambition, and the compressed, precise language holds all of those readings together without choosing among them.