The Black Walnut Tree By Mary Oliver Summary

In Mary Oliver’s, The Black Walnut Tree, she exhibits a figurative and literal understanding on the importance of family and its history. The poem is showing that your emotional value is what’s more important than your physical value (money). By using symbolism and imagery the poet illustrates an intricate relationship between the “Black Walnut Tree” to the mother and daughter being both rooted deeply in the earth and past trying to reach for the sun and the fruit it will bring. Symbolism constitutes the allusion that the tree is the family both old and new. Imagery portrays the image that the tree and family are connected by similar trails and burdens. Her uses of metaphor, diction, tone, onomatopoeia, and alliteration shows how passionate and personal her and her mother’s connection is with this tree and how it holds them together. There is a difficult decision ahead the mother and daughter both analyze the advantages and disadvantages to cutting down this tree. They have a dispute (line1) and “talk slowly, trying in a difficult time to be wise” (line 10). Using

We cherish tradition because it is cyclic and familiar, and that is comforting to us. In Oliver’s poem, “The Black Walnut Tree”, such ideas are reflected through the narrator’s and her mother’s reluctance to get rid of their tree. Through emphasis and imagery, Oliver conveys the all too familiar conflict between the struggle to have money, and yet still honor our spiritual ties with the past. This story is being told in first person point of view, which makes the tone of this poem is serious, heartfelt, and nostalgic. Family means much more than blood, it is like branches on a tree, we all grow in different directions yet our roots remain as one. People are put in your life is for many different reasons, they maybe there to help you through any life circumstances and some are there to form a bond with you that is just secured and