Symbol Analysis
There's probably a lot to miss about the world when you're dead and gone. Just ask our man Petit, who realizes too late that he was surrounded by a beautiful, rich, and complex world that he basically overlooked when he was alive. Instead, he focused on dull and predictable poetry and missed the forest (literally in this case) for the trees.
- Lines 13-14: In these lines, all the good stuff you'd expect to find in a nature documentary—woods, streams, meadows, happy chipmunks, dancing squirrels—are symbols of the rich variety and splendor of life that our speaker Petit has overlooked. Instead, the implication is that he spent his time on meaningless poetic forms and never was able to focus on the true meaning of his surroundings.