Life & Wisdom Quote by James Stephens

Stephens casts gender as a weather system: woman as rooted abundance, man as mobile appetite. The image is lush but not neutral. A "branchy tree" implies fullness, fertility, shelter - a body that offers, a life that bears. A "singing wind" is charm without responsibility: music, movement, a presence you feel but can’t hold accountable. That pairing does more than romanticize difference; it sneaks in a power dynamic. The tree stands. The wind arrives, performs, and leaves.

The sting is in "carelessly". He doesn’t harvest with reverence; he takes "what he can find", as if her offerings are incidental, unguarded, almost public. Stephens is too good a poet to make the line purely accusatory; "singing" makes the wind alluring. The male figure isn’t a villain so much as a force of nature - which is exactly the subtextual trick. By naturalizing the act of taking, the poem flirts with excusing it. Desire becomes weather, not choice.

Context matters: Stephens, writing out of the Irish Literary Revival’s pastoral-symbolist mood, leans on mythic nature metaphors where land, woman, and nation often blur. That tradition routinely turns femininity into landscape - beautiful, enduring, available - while masculinity gets to be the roaming spirit that animates and exploits. The line works because it’s gorgeous and unsettling at once: it makes extraction sound like romance, then slips in the word that exposes the cost.