We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit
Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun,
Without paying so heavily for it
That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one.
(From Madeleine in Church)
Given that my recent sequence includes references to the spiritual poetry of Táhirih, who wrote her mystical verse in 19th Century Persia, it seemed useful to republish this sequence on another woman poet. Though she was not a believer she struggled with deep spiritual issues in places. (We’ll also be coming up against the issue of the death of trees again soon!)
The critical consensus seems to be that by far the most significant body of her work is to be found in her use of the dramatic monologue. Even though that is probably true, I am still going to deal with her approach to nature first, partly because one of her poems about trees was the first of hers to make such a deep impression on me and also because the reason for its special attraction and power was so obvious to me. For that reason this poem will be the main focus of this post.
I have already referred in a previous post to her conviction (Copus – Page 331) that ‘– in the natural world at least – after death comes renewal.’ Death also comes strongly into the picture in another way. The nature poem of hers that impacts on me the most powerfully, and it may be one of her greatest poems, is The Trees Are Down.
There are two main sets of reasons why this resonates so strongly. One relates to the two poems by other poets that have haunted my imagination since I read them. The other relates to the value I place on trees and my experience of a loss in that context.
First the tradition
I was probably still at primary school when I read the first poem on this theme. That’s what the memory feels like anyway. In the front room of our family home there was a tall book case with glass doors on its upper section. Amongst many other books, mostly novels of the Rider Haggard variety, there were two books of poems: Lyra Heroica and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. I wasn’t particularly interested in boys on burning decks or Horatios at bridges – I think tales about my father and the First World War had well and truly scuppered Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori for me even by that stage (see my poem Unfinished Business later this week for my own take) – so the Golden Treasury tended to win every time. I still remember the sight and feel of the dull red and slightly roughened cover as I strained to slide it off its high shelf. The poem that concerns us now was CXLIII – The Poplar Field by William Cowper. (OK – so I checked the number on Google – my memory’s not that good). That he had serious mental health problems and attempted suicide three times was not known to me then, but whether the poem’s underlying melancholy resonated in some way with the background of grief in our home I can’t say for sure.
Anyway, this is the poem in full:
The lilting music of his lyric’s form is perhaps too cosy for the liking of a modern ear, but the strong sense of our mortality triggered by his remembered connection with the trees still gives the poem power, I think, to move us.
Much later – how much later I’m not quite sure, but almost certainly before I left secondary school – came my encounter with a second poem of even greater power. Even though I cannot remember when I first read it, I’m sure that I knew of the poet while I was still at school. My mother was a devout Roman Catholic and knew of him as a Jesuit priest, so I’m sure I scouted the library fairly early for a copy of his poems. My own copy of Poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins was bought in 1963, when I was studying English Literature at university.
We’re dealing with poplars again, though in a more demanding style – it’s also more freely flowing, a sign of things to come with Mew.
Hopkins conveys his sadness, discomfort and frustration as well as the beauty in his freer form. He also had his battles with depression, which he described in one poem as ‘[p]itched past pitch of grief.’ Even now, after all these years of knowing this poem, my heart hurts as I read it. That’s partly because I also experienced the loss of a dearly loved tree, an experience that hurts me still, along with other losses, but also because of the prescience of some of its most powerful lines, such as ‘O if we but knew what we do/When we delve or hew —/Hack and rack the growing green!’
I will be re-publishing two poems, one Oak in Winter and the other On the Death of Trees, as this sequence moves towards it end, just as a way of indicating how much this theme matters to me and possibly why. Some time back the so-called ‘light’ pollarding of the long line of lime trees down a road near our house disturbed me greatly, even after the workmen explained it would not seriously harm the trees: how much worse I would have felt if they had cut them completely down I can only imagine. The trees have recovered up to a point but I miss the thick branches stretching across the footpath and over the road. Running parallel on the grass is a line of poplars, still intact, thank goodness, apart from one storm casualty that crashed down on a neighbouring fence. No one was harmed.
The Trees Are Down
Now, though it’s time to look at the poem Mew wrote that got me hooked, and I didn’t just have to imagine how it felt anymore (the exceptionally long lines dictated the use of a smaller font – a problem type-setters found it hard to solve in her lifetime without using strange page sizes).
Not poplars this time but plane trees, of which there were, and still are, many in London. They were planted in numbers at a time when their ability to shed their bark meant that the dark discoloration from the soot-laden atmosphere of the coal-burning city would be conveniently discarded and replaced so their beauty was never compromised for long.
The poem deals with (Copus – page 330)
. . . . a topic about which she had already written in prose form – the felling of trees to make way for new buildings – and once again, it has been occasioned by a recent memory. In the green, open-space of Endsleigh Gardens, very near the Gordon Street house, a number of mature London planes had been cut down in preparation for a large building that would serve as the new headquarters for the Quaker movement.:
The poem, I hope, speaks powerfully for itself.
I just want to focus on the particularly moving final lines. I am strongly attracted to her capacity for deep empathy, rooted I believe in her early experiences of death and her lifelong acquaintance with serious mental health problems in her family. Those lines capture a beautiful example.
This is not that tired old trope of the pathetic fallacy, where the poet, usually a man, projects their feelings onto the landscape. That’s always seemed more than a touch narcissistic to me. This is something different. Yes, she is intensely sad to see the trees killed. The ‘grate of the saw’ wounded her as much as the growling sound of our modern tree-felling machines offends me now. What she is doing though is projecting herself into the trees as they lie dying.
She is doing for trees essentially the same thing as Shakespeare did for the beetle when he wrote:[1]
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.
Or the snail ‘whose tender horns being hit,/Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain.’[2] However, it’s not pain that Mew attributes to the trees but connectedness.
And I do not experience this as a sentimental projection. All the evidence that has accrued over recent decades demonstrates that trees are tuned into their surroundings with a sensitivity that was previously discounted, even unimaginable perhaps except by poets like Mew. To imagine them hearing, even when they are cut off from the soil and dying, for me is a metaphoric representation of this sensitivity. If this seems improbable to you I can only suggest that you immerse yourself in Richard Powers’ The Overstorey, if novels are your thing, or Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard, if you prefer a more straightforwardly scientific approach.
The elastic nature of her lines, and the freedom with which she exploits it, adds to the power of the poem. Even the longest lines rhyme with far shorter ones so the music is never lost. And she does not resort to what I experience as the gratuitous obscurity of much modern poetry, which is not to say that everything she writes is crystal clear as we will see when I move on next time to her dramatic monologues. But I feel her poems are obscure only when the experience she is trying to convey is hard to decode, but she doesn’t write as though all life is ferociously encrypted.
There will be more on Mew in September. This is for two reasons. As always the footfall on my blog drops in August, and seems to have done so slightly earlier this year. As I want to share with as many people as possible the power of Mew’s poetry, it seems best to delay the rest of this sequence till the footfall picks up again. Also, though, I think I need more time to reflect if I am to do her poems justice.
Anyway, next time I’ll take a look at how her empathy empowers her poems about people rather than trees.