Round.

Behr, Stoat on a Branch, n/d

For a dreamer of words, what calm there is in the word round. How peacefully it makes one's mouth, lips, and the being of breath become round. Because this too should be spoken by a philosopher who believes in the poetic substance of speech.

Needless to say, all the poet really sees is a tree in a meadow; he is not thinking of a legendary Yggdrasill that would concentrate the entire cosmos, uniting heaven and earth, within itself. But the imagination of round being follows its own law: since, as the poet says, the walnut tree is "proudly rounded," it can feast upon "heaven's great dome." The world is round around the round being.

And from verse to verse, the poem grows, increases its being. The tree is alive, reflective, straining toward God.

One day it will see God

And so, to be sure,

It develops its being in roundness

And holds out ripe arms to Him.

Tree that perhaps

Thinks innerly

Tree that dominates self

Slowly giving itself

The form that eliminates

Hazards of wind!

Gaston Bachelard, from The Poetics of Space