The Trees Are Down quiz

Questions and answers

1. 1

   Question 1. Which literary genres best describe "The Trees Are Down"?

   • Correct answer: Modernism, Lyric Poetry & Elegy
   • Romanticism, Nature Poetry & Ode
   • Realism, Dramatic Monologue & Satire
   • Naturalism, Pastoral Poetry & Idyll
   • Neoclassicism, Formal Ode & Epic

   Modernism, Lyric Poetry & Elegy is correct. Mew writes in the Modernist tradition: free verse, fragmented structure, and psychological intensity rather than formal ornament. The poem is an elegy — a lament for the dead — but for trees rather than people, expanding the convention. Its first-person emotional directness makes it lyric, and its 1920s London setting places it firmly in early Modernism.

   Read the passage
2. 2

   Question 2. The speaker says "It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day." How does the loss of the trees differ from the day the dead rat spoiled the spring?

   • Correct answer: The rat spoiled spring for only a moment, but the trees take half of spring away for good
   • The rat's death was a crime by the workmen, but the trees fell from old age and storms
   • The rat made the speaker laugh at spring, but the trees make her angry at the city
   • The rat ruined spring for everyone who saw it, while the trees matter only to the workmen

   The dead rat did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, and the speaker might never have thought of it again. The trees are different: spring was in them from root to stem, and when they are carted away "Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them." The comparison turns a passing shock into a lasting grief and shows how deeply the speaker's life has been bound up with the trees.

   Read the passage
3. 3

   Question 3. What is the effect of the epigraph from Revelation 7:3: "Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees"?

   • It is an ironic choice that undercuts religious authority, demonstrating that no biblical commandment, however ancient, can prevent the relentless advance of urban construction and modern development in London
   • It is a decorative flourish drawn from scripture, signalling the poem's literary ambitions and lending it an air of learning without passing any moral judgment on the workmen
   • It establishes a mood of spiritual consolation, suggesting that although the trees are destroyed, divine providence will guarantee their eventual renewal in a future season in the city's gardens
   • Correct answer: It frames the destruction of the trees as a violation of divine law, casting the workmen as unwitting transgressors of a sacred biblical command — a moral frame that the poem's closing line then enforces

   By choosing a verse from Revelation — the Bible's final and most authoritative book — as her epigraph, Mew elevates the felling of London plane trees into something cosmically transgressive. The workmen are not simply doing their jobs; they are, knowingly or not, defying a divine commandment. The epigraph also sets up the poem's circular structure: the same words return in the final line, spoken by an angel, so the poem begins and ends with the same moral injunction. This circularity gives the warning the force of judgment rather than mere lament.

   Read the passage
4. 4

   Question 4. What role does the memory of the dead rat in stanza 2 play in the poem?

   • A piece of dark humour that lightens the poem's grief, demonstrating the speaker's ability to find unexpected comedy even in a sorrowful subject, much as the workmen find amusement in the destruction around them
   • A nostalgic detail that recalls happy childhood walks in the countryside, establishing the speaker's long personal connection to the natural world she now sees destroyed
   • Correct answer: A pivotal symbol of the poem's central moral argument: that even the most despised living creature has a claim on life and spring — a standard by which the trees' destruction becomes all the more grievous
   • An image of urban squalor and decay that contrasts with the trees' whispering loveliness, reinforcing the separation between the natural world and the dirty, overcrowded city environment

   The dead rat is the poem's pivotal moral pivot. The speaker admits she once thought a rat was "a god-forsaken thing" — worthless, contemptible — but then corrects herself: "at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive." The logic is quietly devastating. If even the most despised creature has a right to its share of spring, then the great plane trees have that right a thousandfold. The memory makes the trees' loss intolerable not by arguing their beauty but by establishing the moral minimum: all living things, even the ugly and unwanted, deserve their moment of life. When the trees are brought down, that minimum is violated.

   Read the passage
5. 5

   Question 5. When Mew writes of the "grate", "swish", "crash", and "rustle" of the falling trees, which sound device is she primarily using?

   • Consonance — the repetition of identical consonant sounds at the ends of neighbouring words, creating a hard, percussive and deliberately jarring texture
   • Correct answer: Onomatopoeia — words whose sound imitates or evokes the actual noise they describe, recreating the soundscape of the felling for the reader
   • Alliteration — the repetition of the same consonant sound at the start of neighbouring words, giving the lines a musical, chant-like effect
   • Assonance — the repetition of vowel sounds within nearby words, creating internal rhyme and a sense of harmony across the whole of the stanza

   Mew uses onomatopoeia extensively throughout the poem: words whose sound mirrors the thing they describe. The harsh, guttural "grate" of saw on wood, the hissing "swish" of falling branches, the violent "crash" of trunks, and the dry "rustle" of trodden leaves together recreate the acoustic experience of the felling for the reader. These jarring sounds are deliberately contrasted with the softer sonic textures of the trees themselves — "whispering loveliness", the quiet movements of small creatures — creating a moral contrast: the workmen's noise is violent; the trees' passing is quiet and dignified.

   Read the passage
6. 6

   Question 6. What does "Elegy" mean in this story?

   • Correct answer: A poem of mourning and lamentation for the dead, traditionally serious in tone and often meditating on loss, mortality, and what survives after death
   • A poem celebrating rural life and nature, typically contrasting an idealised, peaceful countryside of shepherds and fields with the noise and corruption of city life
   • A poem written in praise of a living person, typically formal and celebratory in tone, honouring their achievements and virtues and urging them to greater deeds
   • A poem that takes the form of a speech by a single speaker who unconsciously reveals their character and moral failures through what they say

   An elegy is a poem of mourning — one of the oldest and most sustained forms in the Western literary tradition, from Milton's "Lycidas" to Tennyson's "In Memoriam." Mew adapts the form by directing her lament not at a human being but at trees. This extension of elegiac grief beyond the human is itself one of the poem's most radical gestures, treating the loss of the planes as genuinely worthy of the solemnity the form brings. Examiners often ask students to note how Mew uses the conventions of elegy and what it means to apply those conventions to non-human subjects.

   Read the passage
7. 7

   Question 7. How would you best describe the formal structure of "The Trees Are Down"?

   • Iambic pentameter with a regular ABAB rhyme scheme across five symmetrical stanzas, giving the poem a formal stability that contrasts with the violent chaos of the felling
   • Terza rima, the interlocking three-line stanzas Dante used in the Divine Comedy, linking the poem to an older tradition of visionary journeys through loss, sin, judgment and destruction
   • A ballad form with regular four-line stanzas and alternating rhyme, whose folk simplicity undercuts the seriousness of the poem's ecological subject and its elegiac, reverential and prophetic tone
   • Correct answer: Free verse with five irregular stanzas, varying line lengths, and no consistent rhyme scheme — a form that mirrors the unpredictability of grief and the disruption of the trees' destruction

   The poem is written in free verse: no regular metre, no consistent rhyme scheme, five stanzas of irregular length. The formal freedom is not accidental — it mirrors the unpredictability of grief and the physical chaos of the work. Long, sweeping lines capture the speaker's extended lament; sudden short interjections — "(Down now!—)", "(Whoops and Whoas)" — mimic the crash of each tree. The irregularity itself is expressive: just as the destruction of the square disrupts the expected orderliness of the gardens, the poem disrupts the expected regularity of formal verse. The lack of a fixed ending point in the stanzas mirrors the ongoing, accumulative nature of the loss.

   Read the passage
8. 8

   Question 8. In which posthumous collection was "The Trees Are Down" first published in book form?

   • The Farmer's Bride (1916)
   • Correct answer: The Rambling Sailor (1929)
   • Saturday Market (1921)
   • The Yellow Book (1894)

   "The Trees Are Down" was first collected in The Rambling Sailor (1929), published by the Poetry Bookshop after Mew's death in 1928. Her first collection, The Farmer's Bride, had appeared in 1916.

   Read the passage
9. 9

   Question 9. What is the effect of the poem ending with the speaker hearing an angel cry "Hurt not the trees" — echoing the epigraph?

   • A deliberate structural echo that signals the poem belongs to the sonnet tradition, in which the volta marks a transition between the opening and closing movements and the final line answers the first
   • An ironic contrast: the epigraph presents an ideal that is immediately violated, and the closing cry of the angel simply repeats that ideal without any expectation of it ever being observed by the indifferent, laughing workmen in the gardens
   • Correct answer: A circular structure that gives the poem the force of moral judgment: the divine command of the epigraph is not merely a literary quotation but a law that has been broken — and the angel's cry at the end confirms the transgression
   • A sense of narrative resolution, suggesting the speaker has moved through her grief and arrived at acceptance, even peace, with the destruction of the trees, as the quiet rain falls on the emptied gardens

   The circular structure is one of the poem's most powerful formal decisions. The epigraph states the divine law; the poem records its violation; the final lines have the speaker hear an angel repeating that law over the fallen trees. This is not consolation — the trees are already down. It is judgment: the command was clear, the transgression was real, and the angel's cry arrives too late. The circularity gives the poem a quality of inevitability. The law was always there; the destruction happened anyway; and now only grief and the persistent echo of the violated commandment remain.

   Read the passage
10. 10

    Question 10. What do the workmen's "Whoops and Whoas" and "loud common laughs" reveal about one of the poem's key themes?

    • Correct answer: The workmen's noise and laughter represent human indifference to the natural world — not malice, but a failure of awareness that the speaker finds as distressing as intentional cruelty
    • The "loud common laughs" are a celebration at the end of a demanding week's work, and Mew presents them with a measure of admiration for the energy and discipline of their physical labour
    • The workmen are presented as deliberate villains who take pleasure in the ecological destruction they cause, suggesting the poem is a straightforward attack on the working class
    • The workmen are shown to be aware of the trees' value but compelled by economic necessity, giving the poem a sympathetic view of the pressures of urban labour and working-class poverty

    The workmen are not evil — they are simply indifferent. Their shouting and laughing suggest men doing a normal job, unaware that anything sacred is being lost. This human indifference is in some ways more painful than deliberate cruelty, because it implies that the destruction of the natural world is routine, unremarkable, easily drowned out by noise and commerce. Mew places their sounds against the trees' "whispering loveliness" not to condemn the workers personally, but to identify the moral gap: the trees die quietly, attended only by sparrows and small creatures; the workmen fill the air with noise and laughter, utterly unaware of what they are ending.

    Read the passage
11. 11

    Question 11. What does "Personification" mean in this story?

    • The use of words whose sounds imitate the noises they describe, so that a reader hears the thing itself in the texture of the verse
    • A brief reference to an outside text, person, historical event or place, used to deepen a poem's meaning by calling up a comparison the reader already recognises
    • An explicit comparison between two different things using the words "like" or "as", used to highlight a shared quality and make an image more vivid
    • Correct answer: The attribution of human qualities, feelings, or actions to a non-human subject, making it possible to grieve it as one would grieve a person

    Mew personifies the trees throughout: she speaks of their "whispering loveliness", of the speaker's heart beating with "the hearts of the planes," and of their dying being witnessed only by small creatures. This personification is central to the poem's emotional and moral argument. If the trees merely have aesthetic or ecological value, their loss is a shame. But if they have something like inner life — hearts, loveliness, presence — then their destruction is closer to the loss of a person. The personification transforms an elegy for plants into an elegy for beings, enlarging the moral circle the poem draws.

    Read the passage
12. 12

    Question 12. What theme does the poem explore through its linking of the dead rat, the trees, the workmen, the sparrows, and the angel?

    • The superiority of the natural world over human civilization, with the trees representing a moral purity that human beings in the city have permanently forfeited
    • The isolation of the human speaker from a natural world that she can observe and mourn but never truly belong to, understand, or protect from industrial destruction
    • Correct answer: The interconnectedness of all living things: that every creature — from the most despised rat to the tallest tree — participates in the same web of life, and to cut any strand is to diminish the whole
    • The futility of individual protest against the forces of industrial progress, suggesting Mew believes ecological grief is real but ultimately powerless to save the trees

    The poem builds a vision of the interconnectedness of all living things. The dead rat — the most despised creature in the poem — is granted the same moral standing as the great plane trees: both deserve their share of spring, their moment of life. The trees die attended by sparrows and small creeping creatures, not by human mourners. The angel of Revelation cries for the earth, the sea, and the trees — all together, as a single sacred system. By placing all these beings within the same moral frame, Mew argues that life is a web, and that every act of destruction diminishes everyone in it, however small or humble their part.

    Read the passage
13. 13

    Question 13. What does the line "Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them" reveal about the speaker's relationship to the trees?

    • The speaker is anonymous and representative — the phrase "for me" signals that she is speaking on behalf of all the Londoners who have lost access to green space, fresh air and natural beauty in the crowded modern city
    • Correct answer: The speaker has a personal, long-standing bond with the trees — they are part of her experience of the seasons — and their loss is a private grief that changes her relationship to the natural world permanently
    • The speaker is a professional naturalist or botanist whose livelihood depends on the plane-trees in the gardens, giving her a practical rather than an emotional reason to oppose their felling
    • The speaker is a child recalling the trees from her earliest memories, making the loss especially poignant because the felling destroys an irreplaceable connection to her own personal history

    The phrase "for me" is small but crucial. The speaker is not making a general ecological argument here — she is speaking of personal loss. These particular trees, in this particular square, have been part of her experience of spring for what the poem implies is her whole adult life. "Half the Spring" is a startling measure of loss: not just the trees themselves, but an entire season has been diminished. The trees gave her something that no other trees will replace. This intimacy elevates the poem from a general protest about deforestation to a specific elegy — a mourning of these trees, this loss, this irreplaceable part of one life.

    Read the passage
14. 14

    Question 14. Which London gardens inspired the poem, when Mew watched the plane trees being felled for new construction?

    • Hyde Park, London
    • Russell Square Gardens, Bloomsbury
    • Correct answer: Euston Square Gardens, London
    • Regent's Park, London

    Mew watched workers fell the great plane trees in Euston Square Gardens, near her home in Bloomsbury, in 1922. The poem is sometimes described as one of the first modern English protest poems about urban deforestation.

    Read the passage
15. 15

    Question 15. Did it happen? Review these statements about the poem and mark each one.

    • The poem opens with an epigraph from the Book of Revelation.

      Happened

      The poem opens with "— and he cried with a loud voice: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees" (Revelation 7:3). This biblical frame is central to the poem's moral argument.

    • The speaker sees the trees being felled from her window and goes outside to confront the workmen.

      Didn't happen

      The speaker never goes outside or confronts the workmen. She listens — the poem is an act of witnessing and lamenting from a distance, not direct confrontation. Her response is grief and the imagined voice of an angel, not action.

    • The speaker recalls a dead rat she once saw in spring, and reflects that even a rat deserves its share of life.

      Happened

      In stanza 2, the speaker remembers seeing a dead rat "on the wet, black road" in May, and concludes: "at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive." This memory becomes the moral foundation for her grief at the trees' destruction.

    • The poem uses a regular sonnet form with a strict ABAB rhyme scheme throughout.

      Didn't happen

      The poem is written in free verse with five irregular stanzas and no consistent rhyme scheme. Its formal irregularity is expressive — mirroring the disruption of the destruction and the unpredictability of grief.

    • The poem describes the trees as tall, green, and lonely against the sky.

      Happened

      Mew describes the trees as "Green and high / And lonely against the sky" — a line that captures both their physical grandeur and a quality of solitary vulnerability that makes their felling seem all the more sorrowful.

    • The workmen are shown pausing in their work to reflect on the beauty of the trees they are cutting down.

      Didn't happen

      The workmen are presented through their noise — "Whoops and Whoas", "loud common laughs" — with no sign of reflection or awareness of what they are destroying. Their indifference is one of the poem's central moral observations.

    • The poem ends with the speaker hearing an angel crying "Hurt not the trees," echoing the epigraph.

      Happened

      The final lines complete the poem's circular structure: "I heard an angel crying: 'Hurt not the trees.'"‌ The epigraph's command returns as the angel's cry, giving the poem the force of moral judgment rather than simple lament.

    • The poem was published in The Farmer's Bride (1916), Mew's first collection.

      Didn't happen

      The poem was written in 1922–23, six years after The Farmer's Bride. It was first collected posthumously in The Rambling Sailor (1929), published by the Poetry Bookshop after Mew's death in 1928.

    Read the passage
16. 16

    Question 16. Why is "The Trees Are Down" historically significant in the context of environmental literature?

    • Nature poetry in 1923 was common and well-established; Mew's poem is entirely typical of its period in expressing a conventional, sentimental concern for the natural environment
    • The poem reflects the Romantic tradition of nature writing, placing Mew directly in the lineage of Wordsworth and Keats, who wrote extensively about the destruction of natural landscapes
    • Mew's ecological concern is primarily a private and personal one — she mourns these specific trees for sentimental reasons, without any broader environmental significance
    • Correct answer: The poem is often cited as one of the earliest widely-anthologised English poems of ecological grief — a moral framework for mourning the natural world that would not become mainstream for another half-century

    In 1923, the concept of ecological grief — the serious emotional and moral mourning of harm to the natural world — was not part of mainstream literary culture. Mew's poem treats the felling of city trees with the full weight of biblical allusion, elegiac tradition, and personal intimacy. It anticipates by decades what would later be called ecological literature or nature writing in the modern sense. The FAQ describes it as "one of the earliest widely-anthologised English poems of ecological grief" — a poem that arrived long before the cultural language to describe what it was doing had been developed.

    Read the passage
17. 17

    Question 17. How would you best describe the overall tone of "The Trees Are Down"?

    • Correct answer: Elegiac and morally urgent — grieving, reverential, and quietly prophetic, combining personal loss with a sense that something sacred and universal has been transgressed
    • Detached and observational, with the speaker recording the felling as a journalist might, noting each sound and detail while keeping personal feeling at a careful distance
    • Resigned and hopeless, suggesting the speaker believes ecological destruction is inevitable in a modern industrial city and that any organised protest against it is futile
    • Angry and polemical, with the speaker explicitly condemning the workmen and the city authorities responsible for the felling and demanding their official punishment

    The tone is elegiac and morally urgent. There is no anger or polemic — the speaker does not attack the workmen directly. Instead, she grieves with a reverence that borrows from biblical tradition, personal memory, and the elegy form. The poem is prophetic in the Revelation sense: it does not predict the future but declares a moral truth about the present. The dead rat memory and the "half my spring" admission make the grief intimate; the angel's cry and the Revelation epigraph make it cosmic. Both registers are held together throughout, giving the poem its distinctive emotional weight.

    Read the passage
18. 18

    Question 18. What is the effect of the short, parenthetical interjections — "(Down now!—)" and "(Whoops and Whoas)" — within the poem's longer lines?

    • They are stage directions, indicating that the poem was originally written for public performance and that these bracketed phrases should be spoken aloud by a different voice, perhaps by one of the workmen
    • Correct answer: They interrupt the speaker's flowing lament with the actual sounds and shouts of the felling, creating a jarring contrast between her grief and the brutal immediacy of the destruction happening outside
    • They signal moments of irony, drawing attention to the comedy of the situation and lightening the poem's otherwise heavy emotional register with the workmen's cheerful shouts
    • They function as refrains — repeated musical phrases, like the chorus of a song, that build a regular, hypnotic rhythm and give the whole poem a gentle, song-like quality

    These parenthetical interjections are moments where the physical reality of the destruction breaks through the speaker's meditative lament. The long, flowing lines of the poem represent the speaker's inner world — her memories, her grief, her reflections. The short, bracketed cries represent the world outside the window: the literal sound of trees falling, the literal noise of the workmen. The contrast between these two registers — meditative grief and brutal noise — is one of the poem's central structural tensions. The parentheses formally separate the two worlds even as they collide: the destruction keeps interrupting the mourning.

    Read the passage
19. 19

    Question 19. What does the ending of the poem — the speaker hearing an angel cry "Hurt not the trees" — contribute to its meaning?

    • The ending is optimistic: the angel's cry suggests that divine intervention is imminent and that the plane-trees will somehow be restored or replaced by new ones in a future season
    • Correct answer: By closing with an angelic voice rather than her own, Mew elevates the poem's grief from personal loss to universal moral law — the destruction of the trees is not merely sad but wrong, and something beyond human authority confirms it
    • The ending deliberately undermines the poem's seriousness by introducing a fantastical element, a voice from the sky, that prevents readers from taking the ecological argument literally
    • The angel's voice signals the speaker's loss of faith, as she projects her own despair onto an imagined supernatural figure to avoid taking personal responsibility for her grief

    The ending lifts the poem's grief out of the personal and into the universal. Throughout the poem, the speaker's grief is intimate — her trees, her spring, her memories. But in the final stanza, a voice beyond the human confirms what she has felt: the trees' destruction was not merely sad but morally wrong, a violation of divine law. The angel does not restore the trees or console the speaker. It simply repeats the commandment that was broken. This is the poem's final, devastating gesture: the law was always there, it was always clear, and it made no difference. The grief is both personal and cosmic, both powerless and absolute.

    Read the passage