| In March, as catkins and leaf-buds were bursting out all around, we considered the poetry of trees. There were some old chestnuts in the arboretum, along with quite a few lesser-known species. Among the latter was the New Zealand poet Robin Hyde’s ‘Half moon’ – to paraphrase, if you go down to the woods today, you might get involved in pagan rituals. ‘The apple tree’ by another New Zealander, James K Baxter, charmingly pictures Adam and Eve lying together like a newly-baked plaited loaf. Among the former were Robert Frost’s ‘Stopping by woods on a snowy evening’; Larkin’s ‘The trees’, with its melancholy take on spring; and Housman’s ‘Loveliest of trees the cherry now’ another memento mori. In Edward Thomas’s ‘Cherry trees’, by contrast, the young men will not see another spring, let alone fifty more. In the same poet’s ‘Lights out’, the forest is explicitly a metaphor for sleep – “Death’s second self”* as Shakespeare has it in his Sonnet 73, with its haunting “bare ruined choirs”. Keats in his sonnet ‘On sitting down to read King Lear once again’ also uses the forest as an apparent metaphor for death, or life’s difficult journey to that inevitable destination. Lawrence Ferlinghetti died in Feb 2021. His ‘Sometime during eternity…’ refers to the Tree of the Crucifixion, in splendidly hip 1950s style. ‘The tree’ by R S Thomas also speaks of the Easter story and seemingly what he regards as degraded modern communication through radio aerials. The same poet’s ‘Man and Tree’ likens an aged man to an old oak. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘Spring and Fall’, addressed ‘to a young child’, is also about mortality. Simple in form, it contains a number of original words. In Canto 2 of Tennyson’s ‘In memoriam’, the poet seems to want to embrace his dead friend’s buried bones like the graveyard yew. In ‘Japanese maple’ Clive James hopes to see the tree’s autumn flame once before his own flame dies. Seamus Heaney’s ‘The wishing tree’, although yet another poem about death, is a joyous and playful firework. But Sylvia Plath’s ‘Winter trees’ evoke disturbing feelings about pregancy in the poet, expressed in striking images, and D H Lawrence’s – ‘Bare almond trees’ seems to consider those winter trees as metallic signal transmitters. And in total contrast, Walt Whitman’s ‘I saw in Lousiana a live-oak growing’ is a celebration of life – his own, as much as that of the tree. Concerning formal aspects, we encountered several ABBA rhyme schemes; famously in ‘In memoriam’, which sustains the scheme for 723 stanzas, but also the Larkin and the quatrains of the Keats sonnet. The Heaney has ABB and the James ABABB. The Hopkins has basically rhyming couplets but with an extra pivot line in the central stanza. The Frost has a particularly intricate rhyme scheme, basically AABA, but successive stanzas use the preceding B as their A. I note that several of tonight’s poets died young. By contrast, one lived almost to 102 and Clive James survived to 80 after a protracted – and poetically productive – terminal illness. Three others also died in their 80s – which? The evening ended with a challenge to write a poem about trees. * Re-reading this, I think ‘Death’s second self’ is night rather than sleep. |
Thanks again Chris for a comprehensive and informative summary