Mar 2023 – flood and forest

Our theme related to two current local initiatives – to extend the Knaresborough Forest and to improve the quality of the River Nidd.

We met on World Water Day, to which our theme of ‘Trees and rivers’ was marginally relevant. It was the day after World Poetry Day, on which the National Trust announced they had commissioned a collection of poems about trees from the Poet Laureate. Simon Armitage’s ‘Plum tree among the skyscrapers’ celebrates the persistence of natural beauty with his characteristic wordplay. Helen Dunmore’s ‘City lilacs’ has a similar theme of flowering in a hostile urban environment, while the rustling of Edna St Vincent Millay’s ‘City trees’ competes with urban noise. ‘The sound of trees’ makes the poet (Robert Frost) restless to go where the trees cannot. The irregular end-rhyme scheme is interesting. In Seamus Heaney’s ‘Oracle’, conversely, a child wants to stay put in a magical hollow ‘listening’ tree. Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Rainbow Woods’ similarly offer secret space for children. In ‘The ash grove’, Edward Thomas seems to recall a memory of a safe place, perhaps while he endured the horror of the trenches. The poem also recalls the melancholy song of the same name.

In ‘Winter plums’ Clive James reflects ruefully on his mortality; a poem with telling similes and interesting formal features. Philip Larkin’s ‘The trees’ reflects on the cyclic quality of trees, unlike our linear lives; a poem that has echoes of Tennyson’s ‘In memoriam’. We also heard, from a 2012 The Guardian editorial, Dennis Potter’s poetic description of his heightened appreciation of spring blossom as he lay dying. ‘The plane tree outside Ward 28’ may be a figment of poet Helen Dunmore’s mind, induced by palliative drugs.

Another poem with irregular rhymes; Gerard Manley Hopkins laments the felling of ‘Binsey poplars’ with his usual verbal magic. Very topical, as wilful tree-felling in Plymouth is in the news. However, Chris Short would like to take an axe to any ‘Sycamore’. Another poem written in response to our 2021 challenge was Ken Gambles’ ‘Hawthorns’, which has since been published in Dream Catcher. Follow the links to read both on this site.

John Betjeman’s ‘Youth and age on Beaulieu River’ featuring willows overhanging the water provides a nice segue into the other half of our theme – rivers. In this poem with a complex rhyme scheme, Age ruefully observes Youth through binoculars.

‘By St Thomas Water’ lies the churchyard in Charles Causley’s home town of Launceston; two children conjure the dead and give themselves a fright.

Two poems described the Frost Fairs when the Thames froze over in the 17^th /18^th centuries; John Gay’s ‘The frozen river’ and an anonymous poem ‘Behold the wonder of this present age’ which was probably from a broadsheet. A similar one is engraved on a mural beneath Southwark Bridge.

The first stanza of ‘The fire sermon’ from TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ quotes ‘Sweet Thames run softly’, the refrain of Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion. Perhaps the reference is ironic as the nymphs have departed from Spenser’s idyllic scene. Ewan MacColl’s ‘Sweet Thames, flow softly’ uses that invocation as a refrain. The charming verses naming many locations on London’s waterfront were splendidly sung by Dave, with the rest of us joining in the chorus.

In ‘Low water’, from Ted Hughes’ collection ‘River’, as the poet stands in the river fishing his imagination gets very overheated.

Emily Dickinson’s ‘My River runs to thee’ also personifies a river, and in this case also the receiving sea.

What to make of ‘The River of Rivers in Connecticut’ by Wallace Stevens? We understand that that it is part of a specific locality, yet it has mysterious symbolism and the baffling property of flowing nowhere.

Finally, we persuaded Ken Gambles to reprise ‘Poet Noralot’- his response to last September’s ‘Poet Laureate for a day’ challenge – so that a recording could be made and placed on this site.