The Heart of the Tree by Henry Cuyler Bunner
Quick answer: The Heart of the Tree by Henry Cuyler Bunner: stanza by stanza summary, poetic devices and workbook answers for the ICSE Treasure Trove nature poem.
One question, asked three times, answered three ways: that is the entire machinery of 'The Heart of the Tree', and it has kept the poem alive for well over a century. Henry Cuyler Bunner published it in 1893, decades before anyone spoke of environmentalism, yet the poem argues, stanza by stanza, that planting a single tree is an act of beauty, of generosity to the future, and finally of nation-building. ICSE students meet it in the Treasure Trove anthology, where it reliably produces questions on its refrain, its rhyme scheme and its civic final stanza.
Bunner (1855 to 1896) was a New Yorker, a poet, story writer and the long-serving editor of Puck, America's leading humour magazine of the day. He died at forty, and most of his light verse died with him; this poem survived because it found a subject bigger than its occasion. Since it is safely in the public domain, we can quote it directly, and its opening lines are the best introduction it could ask for.
The poem
What does he plant who plants a tree?
He plants a friend of sun and sky;
He plants the flag of breezes free;
The shaft of beauty, towering high;
Henry Cuyler Bunner, 'The Heart of the Tree' (1893)
The question the poem keeps asking
Each of the three nine-line stanzas opens with the same question, what does he plant who plants a tree, and closes by folding the question into an answer. This envelope structure is the poem's signature. The repetition is not decoration: it turns the poem into a kind of catechism, a call and response you might recite at a tree-planting ceremony, which is precisely how the poem has often been used. Arbor Day programmes in American schools recited it for generations, and its ceremonial shape explains why.
The three answers escalate deliberately. Stanza one answers in terms of nature and beauty; stanza two in terms of time and the generations to come; stanza three in terms of community and nation. Private pleasure, inherited future, public good: the poem widens its lens with each stanza, and any workbook answer that names this three-step escalation has grasped the essential design.
Stanza one: a friend of sun and sky
The opening stanza plants the tree in the sky rather than the soil. The planter, Bunner says, plants a friend of sun and sky, a flag of free breezes, a shaft of beauty towering high; he plants a home near heaven for the mother bird whose croon will fill the hushed twilight. The images all pull upward: flag, shaft, heaven, treble notes of birdsong described as heaven's harmony. The tree here is not timber or shade. It is pure vertical delight, a mast the natural world will rig with light and music.
For close reading, point to the flag metaphor: a flag stands for allegiance, and calling the tree a flag of breezes makes the planter a kind of patriot of the open air.
Stanza two: the harvest of a coming age
The second stanza turns from space to time. The planter now plants cool shade and tender rain, and the seed and bud of days to be; he plants the forest's heritage, the harvest of a coming age, and the joy that unborn eyes shall see. The key idea is deferred benefit. A sapling gives its planter almost nothing; the shade, the fruit and the woodland belong to people not yet born. Planting a tree is therefore a promise made to strangers, and the stanza quietly defines unselfishness without ever using the word.
This is the stanza examiners mine for meaning questions. The phrase about unborn eyes is the one to memorise: it compresses the whole argument, that the planter's real gift is to the future, into three words of monosyllabic plainness. If you connect this stanza to modern climate arguments about intergenerational duty, you are not stretching the poem; you are reading it exactly as it asks to be read.
Stanza three: the civic turn
The final stanza is the boldest and the most Victorian in spirit. The planter now plants sap and leaf and wood, but also love of home, loyalty, and far-sighted concern for the civic good. In the stanza's closing movement, the poem declares that a nation's growth from sea to sea stirs in the heart of the man who plants a tree, and the title finally pays off: the heart of the tree turns out to be the heart of the planter. The tree is the visible half of an invisible virtue.
Modern readers sometimes find the leap from sapling to nation abrupt, and it is worth being honest about the poem's period flavour: this is the civic optimism of 1890s America, where forestry, municipal parks and national expansion sat comfortably in one sentence. But the underlying claim, that small local acts of care are the raw material of public life, has not dated at all. The stanza simply says it in the confident brass of its era.
How it works: rhyme, metre and the turn of a refrain
Each stanza runs nine lines, rhyming ababbccaa, in a steady iambic tetrameter, four beats to the line. The scheme is worth a second look: the opening question rhyme returns at the stanza's end, sealing each stanza like an envelope, with a couplet tucked in the middle to vary the music. Because the first and last lines of every stanza are near-twins, the poem teaches, almost by itself, how a refrain can be varied rather than repeated: the question at the top becomes a statement at the bottom, the smallest possible grammatical turn.
Beyond structure, the poem's devices are classic anthology material: sustained anaphora on the phrase 'he plants', metaphor upon metaphor for the tree (friend, flag, shaft, home), alliteration in lines about the bud and blossom, and personification of the tree's world. None of it is difficult, which is why the poem works so well as a first lesson in spotting devices; everything is visible, and everything serves the argument.
Why it lasts, and what today's poet can steal
Bunner wrote comic verse for a living, and most of it vanished with the magazines that printed it. This poem lasted because it did what occasional poems rarely do: it attached a ceremony to a permanent human act. As long as people plant trees, someone will want words to say over the spade, and this poem got there first with a shape that is easy to recite and impossible to forget.
The stealable craft is the question-refrain architecture. Take a plain repeated question, what does she carry who carries a tiffin, what does he keep who keeps a promise, and answer it three times at three scales: personal, generational, public. The escalation does the emotional work for you, and the envelope rhyme, if you attempt it, gives the poem a satisfying click at each stanza's close. It is also a structure that scores well on creativity and structure, two of the five criteria Writory's judges mark every contest entry on.
Workbook corner: questions and clean answers
Treasure Trove workbook questions on this poem are stable across editions. These are the point-scoring cores.
What poets can take from this
- Learn the three-stanza escalation, nature, future, nation, as one phrase; it answers half the possible questions.
- Quote the flag and shaft metaphors from stanza one when asked about imagery; they are short and easy to remember.
- The phrase about unborn eyes is the single best quotation for theme questions.
- Say 'envelope stanza' when describing how the first and last lines rhyme; precise labels earn marks.
- Connect stanza two to intergenerational responsibility for a contemporary-relevance point.
Try it yourself
Choose one small generous act: filling a water bowl for street dogs, planting basil on a windowsill, teaching a child to whistle. Write three stanzas that each open with the same question about it, answering first for yourself, then for someone not yet born, then for your whole street or city.
Questions
What is the theme of The Heart of the Tree?
The poem argues that planting a tree is a threefold act of goodness: it creates natural beauty, it gifts shade, seed and harvest to future generations, and it expresses love of home and country. The deepest theme is unselfish foresight, doing work whose rewards belong to people you will never meet.
What is the rhyme scheme of The Heart of the Tree?
Each of the three stanzas has nine lines rhyming ababbccaa, written in a steady four-beat iambic line. The opening question and the closing line of every stanza share a rhyme, sealing the stanza like an envelope, with a rhyming couplet in the middle for variety.
What does the title The Heart of the Tree mean?
The title carries a double meaning. Literally it suggests the living core of the tree itself; figuratively, and this is the poem's real point, it refers to the heart of the person who plants it. The final stanza states that a nation's growth stirs in the heart of the planter, so the tree becomes the outward sign of an inner virtue.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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