WHEN GREAT TREES FALL.

 Maya Angelou wrote "When Great Trees Fall" in response to the death of her friend, the renowned writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin. The poem's speaker compares the loss of "great souls" such as Baldwin to the fall of "great trees," the impact of which can be felt in every direction. After a death like this, the poem implies, it can be hard for people to carry on; they may feel they have lost not only an important person, but everything this person stood for as well. Yet the "spaces" such people leave behind won't stay empty forever, and the poem suggests that the living ultimately find comfort in remembering how these "great souls" managed to improve the world. Though the poem was written specifically for Baldwin, it speaks more generally to the experience of losing someone important and the ways in which even the most poignant grief eventually gives way to acceptance.

The speaker uses the image of a giant "tree fall[ing]" to explain just how far and wide this particular death is felt. The speaker says that when this "tree[] fall[s], / rocks on distant hills shudder" and "lions hunker down / in tall grasses." In other words, this death shakes those as immovable as "rocks" and as fearless as "lions." Indeed, "even elephants / lumber after safety," suggesting that even the mightiest people feel powerless after a loss of this magnitude.

And at first, the speaker continues, the pain of such a loss seems to erase all the good the dead once brought into the world. When "great souls die," those who were "dependent upon their / nurture" seem to wither away. "Minds" that were "formed / and informed" by the person's "radiance" seem to return to "ignorance." The world itself can suddenly feel "sterile" and hostile.

Still, the speaker offers hope for the bereaved, assuring them that after some time has passed, they'll take comfort in knowing that the person they've lost made the world a better place. Though it happens "slowly and always / irregularly," the speaker says that eventually "peace blooms" and "a kind of / soothing electric vibration" replaces the emptiness of loss. Though the bereaved will "never / be the same," they will take heart in the fact that their loved ones once "existed." The poem suggests, then, that although grief may feel all-consuming at first, survivors can eventually find acceptance and peace by remembering the contributions of the "great souls" they lost.