Eiseley agreed with these injunctions, however cruel they may sound,admitting that he would “like to nourish/the man-devouring trees back ofmy chair or leave the hemlock in my coffee cup.” Because he had withinhim “furies . . ./that only oak could contain,” he welcomed the prospecthe envisioned, thanks to the trees’ bidding, of being “locked in, with thisoffice as my tomb,/with the bones, the weapons, and the wood.” He wantedthe end they promised him, longed for a “burial that/recognizes man’s truenature,” a burial fitting for a man who has “slept beneath redwoods” andwhose very “thoughts are gnarled as the redwoods’ trunks.” In death, hewanted the office he had long inhabited sealed off and “vine leaves to veilmy eye sockets,/their giant ropes sustain/me upright in my chair” (1979,pp. 97–98). He ended the poem (and his own career as a writer) with a finaladmonition