"A Work of Artifice" Poetry Response

A Work of Artifice 

The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.

            -Marge Piercy

          a Bonsai tree

Definitions:

Artifice- clever or artful skill.

Bonsai-  the art of growing trees, or woody plants shaped as trees, in containers. (Japanese)

Croon-  to sing softly

Trees hold a sense of wisdom and history. I have always been drawn to them, being the reason why this poem caught my eye. The title does not give away the theme of the poem as most titles do. The definition of artifice is to have a "clever or artful skill" and can also mean skill in trickery. 

The first five lines give a sense of hope. A bonsai tree is a Japanese tree meant to grow very large but are kept in small pots and containers, pruned and whittled to the owners like. What I got from the first five lines is that if something is free it can reach it's full potential. It shows the image of what could be if it wasn't controlled.

The following three lines show what it has become. A feeling of "ah" came over me when I read how small the owner had it. An eighty foot tall tree can be trained, forced to exist at only nine inches? I began to think that the rest of the poem would be about tress and how easily manipulated they are but as the poem moved on  I saw a change of concentration, it moved to the manipulator.

The next eight lines concentrates on the person pruning the tree  to maintain it's sad nine inches. This could be simple or I could go off a stretch. When Piercy begins to give the image of the gardener whittling and crooning to their plant, describing it as domestic and weak but small and cozy and lucky I begin to see the ignorance of humans. When in control we see things as cute and lucky to be kept under such good care when its full potential is greater! The final eight lines I begin to see a comparison between the tree and humans. "With living creatures . . ." Humans are living creatures, we are as just easily manipulated as the bonsai trees. Our feet can be bound, our brain crippled, our hair curled. The reference to hair also makes me believe that the subject has been changed to humans once again.

The last line is the only line I cannot elaborate on. I can't understand what Piercy is trying to say with "the hands you love to touch." Is it moving on to the parents pruning and whittling their children? The mother putting curlers in their child's hair and the child loving the feeling of her mothers touch? I don't know.

A new favorite.