Larkin's trees
green grief
Over at A Poetry Notebook, Jem has a nice discussion of Larkin’s ‘The Trees’, a poem he always thinks about at this time of year. It’s one I know by heart too, though it never occurs to me until later in April. Jem feels ambivalent about the poem.
Larkin, of course, disliked the poem.
Elsewhere, he describes it as a “sixteen-year old’s poem about spring” and wonders whether it was possible to “write this sort of poem today?” Elsewhere again he says the first verse is “all right, the rest crap, especially the last line”.
And Jem half agrees…
But it is true that the rest of ‘The Trees’ doesn’t trip off the tongue as easily as the first verse/stanza. There is a kind of rupture, which is deeper than just a break between verses.
And
The ambivalence goes deeper still. The first stanza won’t be so easily forgotten. Like something almost being said is too strong, too leading an image. Even if we forget that early draft, the comparison which the poem originally sets up isn’t between arboreal and human lifespans, but between silence and speech. I can never read the rest of the poem without wondering what that something is. Why is greenness a kind of grief? Whose grief? We’re never told. We can guess.
I have always loved this poem and found Larkin’s dismissal of it startling when I read his letters. (He complains about writing something so mediocre on Thomas Hardy’s birthday, and perhaps one can understand that, when measured against Hardy’s best work, it feels disappointing.) The greenness of grief seems obvious to me, first, as an invocation of Eliot, something of a silent bête noire throughout Larkin, as the poem is presumably “set” as April turns to May; but it also invokes the sense of tears at renewals, such as the “happy funerals” in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. That poem contains a sister image to “something almost being said” in “someone running up to bowl”. Life is an attempt, which seems to come so easily, so naturally, to the tree, but not to us. The rings of grief have no parallel in ‘Whitsun’, which actually leaves out the wedding rings, but perhaps relates to the rain at the end.
what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give
This is part of the ongoing theme of “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” in Larkin, which sometimes takes the form of new lambs and sometimes of the memory of “the strength and pain of being young which cannot come again.” Somehow the trees do find a way of being young each year, though it hurts, like growing pains and the pains of seeing the past “smaller and clearer as the years go by”. Perhaps Jem’s ambivalent feelings about the poem reflect Larkin’s (to my mind) very successful invocation of these pains and “griefs” as “almost” not merely gloomy.
Here is an essay I wrote about Larkin and the strength and pain of being young, one of my favorite pieces of my own work.
