Sunday 1 September 2013

Larkin’s ‘The Trees’: A Schism of Being and Becoming


An especial attraction, perhaps even virtue, of ‘The Trees’, is that certain of its purported themes – death, existence, becoming – may be seen in either secular or Christian terms, whether express nods to humanism and doctrine or simply chance echoes of the two. Whatever Larkin’s stylistic agenda here, ‘The Trees’, at the very least, meditates evocatively on growth, flourishing and mortality, be his intent philosophical or purely literary. If, though, ‘The Trees’ does intimate something conceptual as well as poetic, perhaps it is the collision of Nature’s unbounded metaphysics with Man’s limited experience. That conflict of timelessness and of our interim Being, though not implicit from the outset, emerges as the poem develops.

The poem’s opening, “The trees are coming into life/Like something almost said”, is a declaration of life, a natural process asserted rather than simply undergone. That initial richness, though, is tempered by the “grief” of the “greenness”, as if Nature is somehow conscious of its coming deterioration even amid that formative vitality, a melancholy recognition that abundance must submit to effect and change. Self-arbitrating Nature, and, in the second stanza, Man’s view of such phenomena – of Nature possessing motivation or intellect – shapes the “conflict” I described earlier. The opening stanza attributes agency as well as aesthetics to Nature, the impression that the trees can somehow emote at their lifespan, dwell on the prospect of fate.

Having, at the poem’s beginning, so lyrically sounded the birth pangs of the trees, Larkin seeks to objectify Man’s own view of them, imagining our resentment even when met with their colour and grace. Their annual conjuring feat of “looking new” affronts the reality that “we grow old”, as if their implacable beauty denotes some sleight of hand. It is to the trees that Larkin’s Christian motif “born again” is accorded, Nature enjoying perpetual renewal when Man, at best, is afforded ‘mere’ experience, and the innate transience it evokes. The doors of Man’s perception are purely ajar, whilst Nature’s verve is cyclical, recalling the peculiar dogma of Yeats’ “ever-singing leaves” that, like Larkin’s trees, are impervious to the laws of age and decay. The trees’ life and youth must be hard won if to be sanctioned, laboured if to be moral in the eyes of Man’s decline, rather than practice the nefariousness “trick” implies.

In the final stanza, the trees compound Larkin’s seeming exasperation at their resilience, as he describes the “threshing” of the “unresting castles”, Nature’s seamless fortress indomitable in its vigour and texture. If May is Larkin’s cruellest month, when the trees announce their own cessation, then their plight is only temporary, spurring themselves on to “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh”. Pervasive within ‘Trees’, if only tacitly, is an oddly Christian narrative of development, existence, passing away, and a metaphysics addressing new life. A paradox, though, is that it is Nature, rather than Man, which enjoys this rebirth, whilst we are to accept mortality. For all our instinctual adulation of Nature – Larkin recognising Nature’s self-expression at the moment of regeneration – there is an almost pained observation of its revival, its rallying cry somehow at the expense of our death. The “trick” seems to us a dubious metaphysics, Nature’s assured self-sufficiency attesting to a mysterious resolve that lies beyond our apprehension, an energy we cannot rationalise and which “appears” underhand. Whilst the trees “die too”, they, in contrast to Man, persist, enjoying as much an aesthetic as an existential renaissance, that rebirth almost as wilful as it is natural. Nature’s metaphysics is the envy of Man, its “restless castles” the sublime guarantor of rebirth.

For us, the Christian promise of renewal is an enchanted hypothesis, and yet, for Nature, an immutable given. If that is so, the poem evinces a reluctant rather than willing humanism, casting the eternal not as a gift but the atemporal as a cold intellectualism. Man is everywhere governed by the strictures of experience when Nature’s resurrection is confirmed, Larkin’s trees teasing and inexorable, the exquisite both an instrument of mockery and an object of awe.