Central panelists speak for the trees

By Emma Carmichael

An afternoon session at Central Connecticut State University’s 19th annual Sustainability Symposium turned the spotlight not on carbon data or policy reports, but on birch trees, burning forests, and a 14th-century poet who once traveled by horseback through the forests of Western Europe.

The panel, titled "The Forest and the Trees: Representations of Trees in the Literary Canon," brought together four members of Central's English Department to trace how writers across centuries have depicted trees and what those depictions reveal about humanity's evolving relationship with the natural world.

Dr. Candace Barrington opened by transporting the audience to 1373, when Geoffrey Chaucer — then a middle-aged royal envoy — rode horseback from London to Milan on a trade mission for the king. Along the way, she argued, Chaucer absorbed the forests of France, the Rhine Valley, the Alps, and northern Italy, each with their own distinct tree species and canopy.  

When Chaucer later adapted Boccaccio's Italian epic into “The Knight's Tale” — the first story in “The Canterbury Tales” — he included a "catalog of trees" for the hero’s funeral pyre. Rather than translating Boccaccio's Mediterranean species directly, Chaucer swapped in the trees his English readers would recognize, such as birch, aspen, willow, hawthorn, and dogwood.

Barrington then revealed a remarkable global afterlife for that tree list. “The Knight's Tale” has been translated into more than 1,550 non-Anglophone languages, and many translators, she found, have made the same instinctive choice as Chaucer: Keep familiar local trees, drop the exotic ones, and add regional species. 

A Brazilian Portuguese translator added trees indigenous to the Amazon. An Afrikaans translation reflected southern African ecosystems. A Finnish translator did the same. One exception stood out — and gave Barrington a pause. A recent Farsi translation, surreptitiously delivered to her from Iran, departed from the pattern entirely; instead the translator compressed the entire tree catalog to a single brief phrase, retaining no species at all. 

“The empty silence is foreboding,” Barrington said, asking the audience to keep the region in their thoughts.

Of fruit, Frost, and fire

Eric Leonidas took the audience to a very different kind of forest — the imagined paradise of Milton's “Paradise Lost” — and to a single word he said one of his students first brought to his attention: “amiable.” 

In Milton's Eden, hanging fruits are described as “amiable,” and Leonidas traced the word back to its Latin root, amare, which means “to love.” The fruit isn't merely attractive; it is lovable. To Milton, he explained, all matter — from the celestial to the terrestrial— shares one living substance, and trees in paradise are irreducibly social beings. 

Leonidas said, “Milton urges us to see the relationship between human and non-human as one of give and take, occasional tension, enduring love, and persistent reliction.”

Susan Gilmore taught the room a Girl Scout camp song — “Mighty birches passing by” — before turning to Robert Frost's 1915 poem “Birches,” and the way it resists easy allegory. 

Unlike Frost's grimmer poems about fallen nature, she argued, the birches in that poem remain stubbornly, physically real, bending and springing back. She connected Frost's closing lines — "Earth's the right place for love / I don't know where it's likely to go better" — to a lesson about resilience and restoration. 

“The poetical lesson we can learn from Frost’s mighty birches,” she said, “is both humbling and empowering.”

Amy Pozorski closed the panel with the most urgent material: Denis Johnson's 2011 novella “Train Dreams,” in which a logger named Robert Granier returns home in 1920 to find his cabin, his wife, and his daughter consumed by a catastrophic wildfire. The spruce trees, felled by the logging industry throughout the book, fall again as "flaming mammoths" that spread the blaze across the valley. 

Pozorski drew a direct line from Johnson's fictional 1920 fire to the record-setting California wildfire season of 2020, when more than 4.3 million acres burned. 

“The novel uncannily predicts the last few years that have each marked record damage in the wake of forest fires,” Pozorski said. “The ghosts that hunt the text are the latest generation who much now find their way in the world in the time of the Anthropocene.”

During the discussion that followed, an audience member asked why trees hold such irresistible power over literary artists. The panelists noted that trees accompany human life at every stage, from food source to lumber to fuel to ash, and carry the weight of spiritual symbol — the tree of knowledge, the tree of life, the cross. 

Barrington noted that tree rings are a climate archive. Leonidas pointed to the Hebrew phrase etz hayyim — tree of life — as evidence of how deep the roots run. Several panelists argued that literature's greatest contribution to climate conversation is the one thing data cannot supply: feeling. 

“Without the feeling, without the passion, without the motivation to change,” Gilmore said, “the data is just the data.”