Planting A Sequoia, written by Dana Gioia, included in her larger work, The Gods of Winter published in 1991. The work is written in first person point of view because the narrator. This poem’s central assertion is remembrance and honoring of the dead with the family and rebirth. The poem is about the a father that plants a sequoia tree in honor of his recently deceased infant son. Gioia uses imagery in the first few stanzas to emphasize the severity of the father and his families’ grief and despair. In these sections he also reveals the setting of the poem which is Sicily and the reason he chose a sequoia tree. The very first stanza of the Gioia’s poem sets the tone for the poem, which was melancholy, with the imagery the author uses.
The narrator says that the tree will be given all they can give it. He also describes his plans for the future for the tree. He plans for the tree to “stand among strangers” as an everlasting memento to their family and his birth. This is important because it draws back to the central assertion of the poem which was honoring the dead with family and rebirth. The rebirth is addressed in the last stanza, where the narrator describes what his plans for the child tree are in the future when he and all of his family are dead and their descendants are scattered. The reader can see this throughout the poem when the narrator persists in referring to the tree as “you”. This “you” is his deceased infant son that he mourns. This is the reason that for example in the first stanza, his actions were careful and soft as to not damage his precious tree. Through personification the tree became his child, this is the reason that this tree is so significant so the whole family helped in its planting. The type of tree is also significant because a Sequoia tree is one of the largest trees to have ever existed and one of the most long living. This serves as an appropriate symbol for the deceased child because he can take on the life of the tree, to grow and expand, the things he could not do in a human body. This is significant because it draws back to the central assertion of remembrance, honoring the deceased with family,