Stanzas 1—4

In the first stanza of "The Forest," the speaker addresses an unnamed interlocutor ("you"), advising him or her to lie down and remember the forest because it is disappearing. In line 3, that statement is amended. The forest has already gone, but whatever details the person can recall will help to bring at least some aspect of it back. However, this will only be "a kind of life," not the life itself and not the kind of life for which the person had hoped. The speaker says in stanza 2, it might be called "'in the forest,'" the quotation marks suggesting it is not an immediate experience but one reconstructed, so to speak, from something else, perhaps from memory and language. The speaker emphasizes again, this time in italics, that the forest is gone, that it no longer exists, and then goes on to suggest that the...