Frost's Christmas Trees
A Christmas Circular Letter
“Christmas Trees” is one Robert Frost’s poems that features within it a little play with two speakers.
“The city had withdrawn into itself”
It is winter just before Christmas and the speaker is getting ready to write his Christmas letters to friends, when a city fellow shows up looking to buy Christmas trees to sell. The country fellow sizes up the city fellow by saying, “there drove / A stranger to our yard, who looked the city.” The speaker can tell just by looking at the man that he is a city dweller.
The speaker soon learns why the city man is there. The latter is looking for Christmas trees, “He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees.” The speaker then describes his grove of fir trees: “My woods—the young fir balsams like a place / Where houses all are churches and have spires. /
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.”
The speaker makes it clear to the reader that that he had no intention of selling them, but he does not make that clear to the city merchant. The speaker does consider the advantage of selling some of them.
“There aren’t enough to be worthwhile”
While still appearing to be mulling over the possibility of selling them, the speaker thinks it very unlikely, but he agrees to let the man look over his grove. The speaker admits that he might have been doing this just to get a compliment about his property. So she says to the merchant, leading him on: “There aren’t enough to be worth while.” The merchant then says he like to look at them to see what they thinks.
The speaker then replies that it is fine for the man to look at them, “But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.” The speaker then describes his tree growth as “some in clumps too close.” The ones growing too close make them lopsided and would not make a useful decorative tree. But there were others that stand alone with “equal boughs / All round and round.”
The man then decides that there are a thousand trees that he would be interested in, and the speaker then wants to know the price.
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars”
After hearing the price, "A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars," the speaker lets the reader know that at the point he knew he never meant to sell them. The city merchant then drops out of the dialogue, leaving it a mystery exactly how the speaker said no and what the man’s response might have been. The speaker does say what he believed about haggling over price: “Never show surprise!”
The speaker then asserts that such a low price “seemed so small beside / The extent of pasture I should strip.” Laying his land bare for three cents a tree did not seem worth the effort. And he knew that the merchant would sell the trees for a dollar each.
“In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas”
The speaker then avers that he would be sending his Christmas letter to some of those city friends who would have to pay that dollar for his Christmas trees, and the speaker could not square that with his conscience. So in his letter he recounts the whole potential business transaction and concludes, “Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter. / I can’t help wishing I could send you one, / In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.”
Robert Frost
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