The Trees
by Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf,
Like something almost being said;
Their recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say.
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
What do I love about this poem?
First, its brevity. 12 concise lines that manage to speak about mortality, the speaker’s relationship to nature, and some ineffable sadness—the realization that emotions aren’t forever, but they never quite leave you either. “Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.”
Second, its musicality. I dare you to read this poem out loud. (Go on.)
Yes, there’s the rhyming, but in many ways that’s the least interesting formal constraint. (I had many people on my book tour ask me what makes something a poem if it doesn’t rhyme, and I wasn’t able to quote my friend Katie who said something like “No one knows what a poem is.”) There’s a move from a quietness, a softness that matches the slow ponderous observation of a Sad Poet, of a person in grief in springtime. That first stanza, the verbs are “to be” verbs—which just point out existence—and “relax and spread.” There’s an ease in this grief. It’s lush, it’s “greenness.”
Then the musicality kind of breaks itself with a rhetorical question, a questioning of the initial premise, the person wondering if they’re projecting, why it is this scene brings out grief rather than feelings of rebirth. The pace is off, the stresses aren’t what they once were. When you read it out loud, it doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue, that question. It requires pause. It clunks. That’s when they return to that initial pace, almost sing-songily: “Their yearly trick of looking new / Is written down in rings of grain.” (Iambic tetrameter or something close for those of you playing at home.)
In the final stanza, the rhythm maintains itself, one can hurry through the ending except the words are a mouthful, tongue twisters, their sounds hard to put together: “unresting castles thresh,” the words brush against and lean on one another, beautiful, but almost brusque “fullgrown thickness.” The final repetition of “sh” sounds (“afresh, afresh, afresh”), a quieting, but loud, isn’t it? It’s a sound nature makes a lot, but it feels like not quite what it means. The sound itself, repeated in the first and fourth lines of that last stanza, introduces a kind of tension between what’s being said—”Begin again”—and how it’s being said—statically, overemphatically (not once but thrice!)—all that repetition; and of course, they only “seem” to say it.
Finally, I love this poem because of its adverbs. I have met so many writing teachers who tell their students in a blanket statement not to use adverbs instead of taking the time to show them how to use them well. (I suspect sometimes it is because the writing teachers don’t know.) The adverb I love here is “almost.”
How are the trees coming into leaf? Not like something someone’s said. They don’t announce themselves. It’s “like something almost being said.” A hesitancy there, an unspoken something, they’re holding back despite being on display.
This is the movement of this poem, too, isn’t it? The poem almost says what it’s about, but never quite circles it. What or who is the speaker grieving? He tells us what he isn’t grieving (that trees appear young as we grow old), but he keeps the true subject of the poem private. He writes a poem, displaying his feeling, yet still plays it close to the vest. This “greenness is a kind of grief.”
“To a Mouse” (read the full poem here)
by Robert Burns
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,In proving foresight may be vain:The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ MenGang aft agley,An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,For promis’d joy!Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!The present only toucheth thee:But Och! I backward cast my e’e,On prospects drear!An’ forward tho’ I canna see,I guess an’ fear!
And this poem, in its Scottish dialect and ridiculous premise (having a good talk with a mouse). What is it about this poem I love?
First, it makes me laugh that Burns let us know before Oprah it’s best to stay in our lanes, even mice. But besides that. (I think this may actually be about not being alone, but let me have it my way. Please.)
Second, it is a fun poem to learn to read aloud. (If you’re Scottish, maybe you don’t have to teach yourself. Do you? It seems at least a bit performative, and of course, probably somewhat oldey-timey.) I would love to memorize this poem. Reading it out loud also helps if you’re having issues understanding the way the language is written.
What I maybe love best about this poem is that it code-switches. Burns plays dumb like a fox; this speaker is just a country bumpkin who’s accidentally torn up a mouse habitat with his plough, and is so bumpkin-like he decides he’s going to have a heart-to-heart with the mouse. Nothing to see here! No sleight of hand! No tricksy intellectual arguments! Bless his heart.
And he does. But the diction, and thus the register, shifts, in the second stanza to make a political statement. In highfalutin abstract language I might add: “I’m truly sorry man’s dominion / Has broken Nature’s social union …” Then he slips right back into his “natural” dialect (“thy wee-bit housie”!), forging ahead with the conceit and his argument. Really, this is a rhetorical poem, a political poem. While it can be read as a poem of environmentalism, man’s changing relationship to nature, it can also be (and often has been) read as a poem about eviction, what those in power do to those without. Here, Burns’ speaker shows such empathy (though the habitat is already destroyed, the mouse “turn’d out”). The mouse becomes a symbol for the farmer to think about how much he worries about his futures, that his fortune might be no better than the mouse’s. The conceit—talking to a mouse for a long time—is silly; the premise is dark. He’s able to sneak in the political, to get dark, because of the silliness, and the repetitive rhythm and rhyme of the Burns stanza. (Yup, dude has his own stanza.)
And in probably the most human move of all, after spending 7 stanzas empathizing with the mouse and worrying over it, Burns’ speaker lets the mouse know it has it better than him, though. Why? Because the mouse’s present is stressful, but it doesn’t have to, nor can it, worry about the future. Burns, a human, can and does. Despite the “best-laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men” being about worthless, he can “guess an’ fear!”
