The trees are coming into leaf

I love the staggered arrival of budburst in spring, the trees' foliage unfurling at different times, in different shapes and shades, like a ballet in which the dancers emerge singly or severally to fill the stage with a colourful tableau.

Shakespeare's lovely lines about spring
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim, / Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing are very fine but it was Larkin who really caught the poignancy of this annual drama.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The 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.



The image of the ageing heartwood invisibly recording the passing years is a powerful one that belies each spring's 'afresh' beginning. The scales of life are always finely balanced between birth and death and here the view encompasses, to those in the know, not only the background scattering of cows and calves newly released from winter confinement, but also the line of conifers on the horizon that marks Fishguard's out-of-town graveyard.

Larkin may have been a sexist, racist old bigot but he always unerringly put his finger on the poetic pulse.


For anyone interested in such things there's an excellent textual analysis of the poem here.

I'm posting late again and sadly behind with comments but I'm grateful for those I have received and will do my best to catch up, or not...