A Work Of Artifice

The mountainside on which the tree would have grown had it not been turned into a bonsai symbolizes the larger world. This world is filled with both opportunities and dangers. Allowed to grow in this world, the tree would have reached its full height, but may also have faced dangers, such as a fatal lightning strike. The mountainside is the tree’s natural habitat where the tree would have grown 80-feet tall without any specialized care.

Considering the poem’s extended metaphor of the bonsai tree as a woman, the tall tree represents women’s unrealized potential. Women are kept from realizing this potential on the pretext that the larger world is rough and filled with dangers (e.g., the lightning strike). However, the poem suggests the dangers and confinements of a crippled or brainwashed mind are far worse than other dangers. Not allowed to organically grow into her true self, a woman is instead stunted into a something pretty but immobile.

The poem early mentions the “attractive pot” (Line 2); later, the gardener tells the little bonsai tree it is lucky to have a pot in which to grow. The pot is made attractive because it is a trap meant to trick the tree.