The theme of Tennessee Williams’ “How calmly does the orange branch,” from his play, The Night of the Iguana, is a common one of connecting love lost, aging and dying, and courage. The speaker compares his own situation to that of an orange tree, and in doing so commits the pathetic fallacy in an especially distracting way that gives the poem an unappealing comic effect.
First Stanza: “How calmly does the orange branch”
The speaker remarks on how the “orange branch” can “observe the sky” as it ages, yet it simply observes without complaint and without prayer for a different circumstance. The tree does not experience feelings of “betrayal of despair.”
The pathetic fallacy here makes even the most immature reader giggle and think that, of course, a tree does not weep, pray, or suffer despair—at least not as a human being does.
Second Stanza: “Sometime while night obscures the tree”
The speaker then reports that after the highpoint of the tree’s life is gone, it will undergo a “second history.” He again waxes quite poetic by metaphorically employing “night” in its capacity to “obscure[ ] the tree,” a situation which heralds the “second history.”
Third Stanza: “A chronicle no longer gold”
The tree past its prime is “no longer gold,” reminding the reader of Robert Frost’s little ditty, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” The dying tree then begins “bargaining with mist and mould,” as it suffers “the broken stem,” while “plummeting to earth.”
The peculiar little drama, however, is only one of many which could befall the tree in its existence and demise. There is no particular reason even for this tree to be “plummeting to earth”.
Fourth Stanza: “An intercourse not well designed”
The speaker becomes especially befuddled in this stanza’s scene; he insists that “beings of a golden kind” are not “well designed” to experience interaction with the “earth’s obscene, corrupting love.” The tree’s colors are meant to “arch above” such corruption.
His leap from a dying tree felled perhaps by lightning to the earth’s corrupting love causes a disconnect in the speaker’s thematic movement. His logic is broken, quite possibly because he has tried to compare a tree’s aging to man’s in terms that simply do not work.
Fifth Stanza: “And still the ripe fruit and the branch”
The fifth stanza reveals a desperate attempt to provide a refrain that has not become habituated to the rest of the poem. So the claims that the “ripe fruit and the branch” continue to “observe the sky” in the same manner as in the opening cause two problems: (1) the speaker seems to have forgotten that he has felled the tree, so (2) he simply repeats his fancied refrain instead of addressing the issue.
Sixth Stanza: “O Courage, could you not as well”
With much confusion, the reader confronts the final stanza, which addresses “Courage”; the speaker implores “Courage” to dwell in him as well as in the “golden tree.” Thus, he again commits the pathetic fallacy giving the tree courage as well as the calmness he bestowed on it in the beginning.
Linda Sue Grimes - As a writer, researcher, and SRF devotee, Linda Sue Grimes has studied poetry and practiced Kriya Yoga for over thirty years..
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