A Girl

The tree has entered my hands,
The sap has ascended my arms,
The tree has grown in my breast –
Downward,
The branches grow out of me, like arms.

Tree you are,
Moss you are,
You are violets with wind above them.
A child – so high – you are,
And all this is folly to the world.

-Ezra Pound

There are tons of interpretations of this poem by Ezra Pound but I like this one, by Paul Shingle on helium.com, best.

“Nothing inspires like a child’s imagination. And, nothing saddens like an adult who’s willing to rain on the parade (and imagination) of the child. Ezra Pound reminds his readers of these facts with his very simple poem, “A Girl.”

First, it should be noted that the entire poem is but ten lines long. It is divided into two stanzas of five lines each. When one reads the first verse, one could be duped into thinking that this is a deep metaphor for a person becoming an inanimate object. (The opening line:”The tree has entered my hands.”). Over the course of the first stanza, the narrator figuratively becomes the tree. The reader is fascinated as to how things will progress. The second verse, however, takes on a different voice. The narrator, now, is a third person teller, different from the little girl who told the reader of her transformation. The second verse shows that, at least this adult gets it.

The second verse narrator is talking to the original protagonist, telling her, essentially, you have become what your imagination set you out to be. His ending, saying that “All this is folly to the world.” is a message to the girl; “Don’t let the world tell you that there’s something wrong with having an imagination. Be a tree, a flower, whatever it is you want to be. So what if the world finds this to be folly. Just be. Let your imagination be.”

Remember, the reader is inferring from the mind of a child. The child is simply stating, “…the tree has grown in my breast-downward; the branches grow out of me, like arms.” Think about that. This girl’s imagination has worked so well, she thinks of her arms as the metaphor, and her “treeness” as real. Brilliant.

As one gets older, it’s easy to forget the simple joys of letting your imagination fly. And, it’s easy for a child to allow the imagination to work. Such a pity that the adult can’t hold on to the joy of the child. This is exemplified beautifully in Ezra Pound’s poem, “The Girl.”

Read more at: http://www.helium.com/items/2261953-poetry-analysis-a-girl-by-ezra-pound