By the oak tree v2
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by the oak tree v1
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Let's go back to where I stood
Back to where I remember
by the oak tree out in the countryside
by the outskirts of my deserted desires
Let me revisit my thoughts and feelings
I might have been mistaken
about what you might have wanted from the get-go
Timing might be at fault, not striving for overtime
taboo vows are slowing it down
So let me go back anyway
Let me warn amateurs stepping into our place
sketching names on tender oak tree trunks
Be careful what you wish for
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Let's go back, hover over my then peaceful past
How you reverse acceleratd the presence to show me
Why the paused future will never awaken the same
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Though you have made up your mind about me
for rushing into your perfectly painted stroked walls
There's nothing I can do to renovate the scratches & colors now
Nothing but stare and make the best of it
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Now let me go back to where I stopped you
In that deserted corner to look at my face
Check the pulse of this tombstone in my chest
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Let me show you webbed designs done while waiting for an answer
Let me show you the home page
etched in my memory just like the oak tree
a little piece of history, thanks to you
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Let me show you what's been done
guide you back to line one
to where I stood
where I remember
by the oak tree out in the countryside
5a
Well, how about you tell me your side of the story
get into the groove and riminess
=
feb 08 2023
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lyrics & vocals by azdi404
music credit: It was a Secret by Gaxillic
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by the oak tree v1
let's go back to where I stood
back to where I remember
by the oak tree out in the countryside
by the outskirts of my deserted desires
let me revisit my thoughts and feelings
I might have been mistaken
about what you might have wanted from the get-go
timing might be at fault
not striving for overtime
about taboo vows slowing it down
let me go back anyway
let me warn armatures stepping into our place
sketching names on tender oak tree trunks
be careful what you wish for
let's go back
hover over my then peaceful past
how you reverse accelerated the presence to show you
why the paused future will never awaken the same
Though you have made up your mind about me
for rushing into your perfect paint-stroked walls
nothing I can do to renovate the scratches & colors now
Nothing but stare and make the best of it
let me go back to where I stopped you
in that deserted corner to look at my face
check the pulse of this tombstone in my chest
let's keep this going
I still have a couple more things to say
let me show you webbed designs
done while waiting for an answer
let me show you the home page
etched in my memory, just like the oak tree
a little piece of history, thanks to you
let me show you what's been done
guide you back to line one
to where I stood
where I remember
by the oak tree
out in the countryside
well, how about you tell me your side of the story
get into the groove and reminisce
=
feb 08 2023
========
lyrics & vocals by azdi404
music credit:
Folk Travel Vlog | A Folk Story by Alex-Productions |
• Folk Travel Vlog ...
Music promoted by http://onsound.eu/
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“By the Oak Tree” is a meditation on memory, regret, and the persistence of emotional landscapes long after love has decayed. The oak tree—ancient, rooted, enduring—functions as both literal setting and psychic monument, anchoring the speaker’s recollection of a failed relationship.
Where earlier works like “Holes in Our Passion” and “Disease & Void” dissected passion’s corrosion and aftermath, “By the Oak Tree” returns to the site of its origin. It reads like a pilgrimage to the birthplace of attachment—an effort to understand what went wrong, and whether memory itself can be rewritten.
Let’s examine the poem through its themes, symbolism, and structural movement.
I. Thematic Overview
1. Return as Ritual of Reckoning
The poem opens and closes with the refrain:
“Let’s go back to where I stood
Back to where I remember
By the oak tree out in the countryside”
This circular framing creates a ritualistic movement—returning not to relive, but to re-examine. The oak becomes a psychic altar to which the speaker returns to confront both memory and mistake. The repetition of “let’s go back” reads like an incantation: each utterance an attempt to reverse time’s erosion or gain clarity through revisiting.
The tone is retrospective, melancholic, but also resigned—an acceptance that while one can return to the place, one cannot restore the emotional conditions that once existed there.
2. Memory, Revision, and Responsibility
“I might have been mistaken
About what you might have wanted from the get-go”
Here, the poem’s reflective honesty emerges. The speaker is not idealizing the past but interrogating it. Love, once remembered as fate, now appears as miscommunication—a mutual misunderstanding blurred by desire and projection.
The lines that follow—
“Timing might be at fault, not striving for overtime / Taboo vows are slowing it down”—
introduce the notion that external forces (timing, moral or social constraints) also conspired against the relationship. But the act of revisiting—of speaking these lines aloud—becomes a form of quiet accountability.
3. The Oak Tree as Symbol
The oak tree is the poem’s gravitational center. In literature, oak trees often symbolize strength, endurance, and memory—their longevity linking human emotion to the vastness of natural time. But here, the oak’s permanence contrasts with human frailty and impermanence.
“Sketching names on tender oak tree trunks
Be careful what you wish for”
The carved names—lovers’ initials etched in bark—represent the illusion of permanence. What was once a gesture of love becomes a cautionary inscription. The tree, silent and unyielding, bears witness to human transience and folly.
4. Temporal Dislocation
The poem’s middle section bends time, layering past, present, and future:
“How you reverse accelerate the presence to show me
Why the paused future will never awaken the same”
This paradoxical phrasing—reverse accelerate and paused future—captures the poem’s central anxiety: time cannot truly move backward, but emotion often does. The mind replays moments endlessly, “accelerating” their presence even as the future remains inert. The speaker’s awareness of this futility—of being “paused” inside an old emotional loop—gives the poem its haunting tone.
5. Loss and Emotional Fossilization
“There’s nothing I can do to renovate the scratches & colors now
Nothing but stare and make the best of it”
This line equates emotional ruin with aesthetic decay—love imagined as a once-beautiful painting now marred and irreparable. The speaker’s helplessness reflects mature grief: no longer rage or denial, but quiet observation. The attempt to “renovate” becomes a metaphor for how memory tries—and fails—to restore what time and human frailty have undone.
II. Literary and Symbolic Devices
1. Repetition as Structure
The repeated phrase “Let me go back” serves as both motif and refrain. Each repetition carries different emotional weight—first curiosity, then caution, then sorrow, and finally acceptance. The structure thus mimics the cyclical nature of memory: no matter how one revisits the past, the outcome remains unchanged.
2. Architectural and Technological Metaphors
“Let me show you webbed designs done while waiting for an answer
Let me show you the home page
Etched in my memory just like the oak tree”
Here, digital language (“webbed designs,” “home page”) collides with organic imagery (“etched in my memory,” “oak tree”). This juxtaposition symbolizes the modern struggle to preserve human emotion in the age of artificial memory—the internet of the heart, where connection and archiving replace direct experience. The oak becomes a living “hard drive,” nature’s database of emotion.
3. The Tombstone Image
“Check the pulse of this tombstone in my chest”
A striking metaphor: the heart as tombstone. It evokes emotional death—the pulse is there, but it beats beneath stone. This crystallizes the poem’s emotional state: still alive, but sealed off by grief and memory. It’s one of the most resonant lines in your oeuvre, uniting the physical and metaphysical in a single image.
III. Tone and Emotional Progression
The poem moves from recollection → reflection → resignation → invitation.
By the end, after reliving the memory’s pain, the speaker extends an olive branch:
“Well, how about you tell me your side of the story
Get into the groove and riminess”
This shift from monologue to dialogue—however tentative—suggests the first breath of release. The act of asking for the beloved’s story implies a willingness to share emotional authorship, to see beyond one’s own wound. It’s a quiet but profound evolution.
IV. Comparative Context
Within your body of work, “By the Oak Tree” functions as a kind of epilogue to “Disease & Void.”
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In “Disease & Void”, the speaker is consumed by infection and emptiness.
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In “By the Oak Tree,” that infection has cooled into reflection. The tone is no longer fevered but elegiac.
It also subtly echoes Thomas Hardy’s “The Self-Unseeing” and T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” where revisiting the past becomes an act of spiritual archaeology—an attempt to inhabit “the still point of the turning world,” where memory and time briefly converge.
V. Closing Interpretation
“By the Oak Tree” is a poem of reckoning and reluctant peace.
It transforms nostalgia into reflection, pain into observation, and memory into art. The oak tree—both monument and mirror—embodies endurance amid decay, standing firm where human promises have failed.
The poem’s final gesture, inviting the other’s “side of the story,” does not erase grief but reframes it as shared humanity. What began as a soliloquy ends as conversation, suggesting that healing may lie not in erasing the past, but in revisiting it with understanding rather than longing.
Would you like me to create a line-by-line interpretive commentary for “By the Oak Tree”—tracing how each stanza builds its emotional architecture and how the symbols (tree, tombstone, homepage) interlock across the text?
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