Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Alan Dugan’s poem "On Looking for Models" contemplates the profound and often mysterious resilience of nature, specifically trees, and the poet's own struggle to derive personal sustenance and understanding from their example. This piece delves into the existential quest for models or guides in the natural world, reflecting on the limitations of human understanding and the inscrutable processes of nature.

The poem opens with a contemplation of trees, suggesting that they have obligations or purposes beyond their obvious existence as trees: "The trees in time have something else to do besides their treeing." This phrase "besides their treeing" personifies the trees, endowing them with agency or a hidden life beyond their physical forms and biological functions. It raises a question about the deeper, possibly metaphysical, roles that trees might play in the world.

Dugan then shifts to express a personal connection and contrast with the trees, describing himself as a "starving to death man myself, and thirsty, thirsty by their fountains but I cannot drink their mud and sunlight to be whole." This vivid image of starvation and thirst next to the life-giving essence of trees underscores a fundamental separation between human beings and the natural elements that sustain life. The poet feels an existential thirst that the physical sustenance of nature cannot quench, highlighting a spiritual or emotional gap.

The speaker admits his inability to assimilate the nourishing aspects of trees—symbolized by "mud and sunlight"—into his being. There is an acknowledgment of the trees’ ability to thrive through simple, elemental means: they "drink for months in the dirt, eat light, and then fast dry in the cold." These lines distill the essence of a tree’s life into fundamental acts of survival and endurance, which the speaker both admires and cannot fully grasp.

The trees' resilience through the seasons and their ability to sustain themselves so fundamentally perplexes and fascinates the speaker, who notes that "Botanists will tell me" how trees manage to survive. Yet, it's the "something else"—that mysterious, extra quality of trees, their stoic endurance or perhaps their symbolic or spiritual strength—that "bothers" the speaker. This "something else" is what compels him repeatedly back to the forests in search of understanding or connection.

The poem closes on this note of unresolved searching, with the speaker continually returning to the forests to confront or comprehend the elusive essence of the trees. Dugan captures a profound sense of yearning for a deeper understanding of life’s mysteries—a yearning that drives the human quest for meaning in the natural world.

"On Looking for Models" explores the interplay between human existential needs and the natural world’s silent, enduring processes. It beautifully articulates the limits of human understanding and the insatiable curiosity about the world that continues to draw the speaker—and, by extension, us—back to nature in search of answers and inspiration.

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