Song of the Barren Orange Tree
Federico García Lorca
(translated by W.S. Merwin)
Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.
Why was I born among mirrors?
The day walks in circles around me,
and the night copies me
in all its stars.
I want to live without seeing myself,
and I will dream that ants
and thistleburrs are my
leaves and my birds.
Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.
*
_______________________
I view this poem as an illustration of man's existential predicament.
Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize: to see an expansive, indifferent universe in terms of themselves, making it intelligible, warmer and cuddlier. By writing in the voice of a sentient tree that similarly views existence as a reflection of itself, Lorca depicts the absurdity of this perspective.
Just like humans, the barren orange tree is dependent on reflections of itself in the material world for information about its own existence. Thus in the first stanza, it thinks that the day is "walking in circles" around itself, when in reality the earth revolves around the sun, causing the sun to change its position in the horizon, causing the tree's shadow to shift its position over the course of one day. But the tree, of course, believes its shadow to be fixed; it is the world that revolves around it instead. Its belief system places it at the center of the universe.
At night, speckles of moonlight shine between the tree's tangled mass of leaves and branches and illuminate the ground, like tiny "stars." As humans, we know the these fragments of moonlight reaching the ground are merely incidental. Yet to the orange tree, in making sense of limited information about itself and the universe, these fragments of light are literally *itself*: during the day, the tree sees itself reflected in the ground as shadow; at night, the tree sees itself reflected in the ground as bits of moonlight. Starlight issuing forth from molten stars from distant solar systems, from the tree's perspective, are merely copies of what the orange tree believes to be itself. The tree literally remakes the heavens in its own image.
Ultimately, this poem is about the orange tree's struggle with self-consciousness. The tree is seeking tree-like meaning and order in the universe--it wants to see the universe fashioned in terms of itself, in terms it can understand.
Of course, as humans we see the futility of this exercise. We see the absurdity of the confrontation between the orange tree's quest for a meaningful, central role in the universe and its objective inconsequentiality: it will not bear fruit, it will not leave a mark. We can empathize with the tree, while appreciating logically that its situation is absurd.
Thus, the tragicomedy of human existence, expressed metaphorically from the perspective of a barren orange tree.
