Shel Silverstein is pure joy. His world is magical, playful and free. So I do not understand why “The Giving Tree” continues to be his most popular poem.
“The Giving Tree”, as many of us know, is a beautifully illustrated poem with Silverstein himself as the illustrator. It is about, well, a very giving tree, attributed the personal pronoun, ‘she’, and a rather nasty boy, who, despite growing quite old, is always called the boy.
This boy, when very young, would swing from the branches of the tree and sleep in her shade. The boy is said to love her very much. Growing up, he stopped doing these things and instead said: “I want to buy things and have fun./ I want some money?” The tree said that since she did not have any money, he could take her apples and sell them. He did and the tree was happy.
He left her. She pined for him. When he returned as a young man, as frankly exploitative as earlier and as greedy, he wanted a wife, children and a house. The tree asked him to cut off her branches to make a house and that is what he did. And the tree was very happy.
He wanted a boat next, and the tree gave him her trunk, which, naturally, made her very happy. Finally when he returned as an old man, she was just a stump, because she had given him the rest of her, and he wanted to sit and rest. So she set her stump up and gave him rest, needless to say, feeling very happy.
Some feel the poem is an expression of selfless love. Church organisations had picked it up. But for others, it is an obvious allegory that can be read at many levels, all very disturbing.
The poem can be read as a mother-child relationship, with the child a spoilt male brat and the tree a picture of morbid self-sacrifice as a model of motherhood. Or perhaps the poem is about a man-woman relationship, though the parental theme is overwhelming. Whatever it is, the endless giving is painful to watch, and also scary, because one knows it is often considered model behaviour for mothers/women still. The poem is read, of course, also as what Man — the Child is the father of the Man — and rampant consumerism are doing to Nature. Today’s boyhood is tomorrow’s Anthropocene and, in the process, the poem conflates Tree, Mother, Nature and Earth and presses them in the service of Man without the consent of any.
The fundamental problem is that we are not sure whether the poem is critiquing the boy or valorising the tree’s sacrifice. This ambiguity is surprising in Silverstein, who, otherwise, with his delightful wickedness and accompanying illustrations, puts an end to all kinds of bad behaviour, bullying and annoyance with a whack.
Offenders meet with drastic ends. This is his poem, “Magical Eraser”: “She wouldn’t believe/ This pencil has/ A magical eraser./ She said I was a silly moo,/ She said I was a liar too,/ She dared me prove that it was true,/ And so what could I do—/ I erased her!” An imagination that does not admit the possibility of magic needs to go. Fairy tales do not survive the test of reality in Silverstein’s unsoppy world, as in “In Search of Cinderella”: From dusk to dawn, the prince seeks the tender foot that fits the crystal shoe, and ends up hating feet.
Why should a predatory boy poison such a world?
I would revise “The Giving Tree” a little, if I could. Instead of giving the boy her apples, in my poem, the tree would drop one large, hard fruit on his head. This would be my small gesture towards easing the burden of the endless giving placed on the tree/woman/nature, doing my bit for gender and environment and calling out those who manipulate in the name of love. Who knows, a falling apple could again perhaps lead to a great discovery?