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Poems About Trees

Edited by Harry Thomas
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Hardcover
$20.00 US
4.43"W x 6.49"H x 0.75"D   | 8 oz | 24 per carton
On sale Oct 01, 2019 | 256 Pages | 9781101908150
A unique anthology of poems—from around the world and through the ages—that celebrate trees. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET.
 
For thousands of years humans have variously worshipped trees, made use of them, admired them, and destroyed them—and poets have long chronicled the relationship. Poets from Homer and Virgil to Wordsworth, Whitman, and Thoreau, from Su Tung P'o and Basho to Czeslaw Milosz and W. S. Merwin have celebrated sacred groves, wild woodlands, and bountiful orchards, and the results include some of our most beloved poems.
Whether showing their subjects being planted or felled, cherished or lamented, towering in forests or flowering in backyards, the poems collected here pay lyrical tribute to these majestic beings with whom we share the earth.
 
Includes:

• “Birches" by Robert Frost
• “The Camperdown Elm” by Marianne Moore
• “Binsey Poplars” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• “Sequoia" by Zbigniew Herbert
• “The Lemon Trees" by Eugenio Montale
• “The Apples" by Yves Bonnefoy
• “The Plum Tree" by Bertolt Brecht
• “The Almond Tree" by D.H. Lawrence
• “The Loveliest of Trees" by A.E. Housman
 
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
PREFACE by Stanley Plumly
 
Harry Thomas has arranged his anthology of tree poems as much around complex attitudes toward trees as dramatic evocations of their arboreal being: ranging from the ‘‘gladness’’ of the fact of them to their natural, named, and significant presences to – sadly but beautifully – their ‘‘gladness gone.’’ Which is to say Thomas’ selection is emotional as well as analytical, political as well as philosophical, as it moves from celebration to meditation, from the reality and imagination of what trees are to a deepening awareness of what their loss means.
 
The range of poets is equally rich in variety, nationality, and history. Though the overall emphasis may be Anglo-American and the living moment especially contemporaneous, the individual poems develop in perspective from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Georgics to examples from Matsuo Basho, and Yosa Buson to any number of international figures such as Eugenio Montale, Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht, Giorgio Bassani and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, in first-rate translations by Lee Gerlach, Robert Hass, Edwin Morgan, Jamie McKendrick and Paul Muldoon. Indeed, ‘‘From all these trees,/in the salads, the soup, everywhere,/cherry blossoms fall’’ – writes the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho in the Hass version.
 
The mixture of tradition, innovation, and generation is as exciting as it is informing. You cannot assemble a tree anthology of poems without such classics as Wordsworth’s ‘‘Nutting’’ or Housman’s ‘‘Loveliest of Trees’’ or Whitman’s ‘‘I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing’’ or Marianne Moore’s ‘‘The Camperdown Elm.’’ You cannot test the quality of the originality of the poetry without Montale’s ‘‘The Lemon Trees’’ or Seamus Heaney’s ‘‘The Birch Grove’’ or Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘‘The Apple Orchard’’ (translated by Seamus Heaney.) You cannot include the present without pairing such poems as Mary Oliver’s ‘‘The Black Walnut Tree’’ with Ellen Bryant Voigt’s ‘‘Landscape, Dense with Trees’ or Judith Wright’s lyrical ‘‘Train Journey’’ with her massive meditation ‘‘The Cedars’’ or James Wright’s elegiac ‘‘To a Blossoming Pear Tree’’ with Marvin Bell’s lovely lament ‘‘These-Green-Going-to- Yellow.’’
 
In terms of tone and poetic temperament, Thomas has effectively exercised his editorial rights to choices that are not only carefully crafted but open-ended in form and ambition; he values discipline and understatement but at the same time admires ‘‘tree’’ poems that think with their hearts, that enlarge the view with vision. David Ferry’s ‘‘Everybody’s Tree’’ is just that kind of contemporary visionary poem that at some one hundred associative, narrative lines, structured in moments like paragraphs, develops around both personal history and the larger caring time of local community, in a voice at once filled with losses and empathy for those losses. And no poet could be more empathic and expansive than Keats-contemporary John Clare in his ‘‘sweetest anthem’’ ‘‘To a Fallen Elm’’ – its wide, searching lines of direct address may come close to anger but they also abide with love.
 
There is so much to admire here in this beautifully focused gathering of poems, both in the familiar and as discovery. Some of my own favorites are Wordsworth’s ‘‘Yew Trees,’’ W. C. Williams’ ‘‘Burning the Christmas Greens,’’ Jorie Graham’s ‘‘Tree Surgeons,’’ Robert Graves’s ‘‘Not Dead,’’ Gerald Stern’s ‘‘The Cemetery of Orange Trees in Crete,’’ James Dickey’s ‘‘In the Tree House at Night,’’ and on and on. Because Thomas has arranged his selections around centers of both generosity and gravity he never loses sight of the essential thing: that trees are the great flowers of our world – life-givers, life-enhancers, life-poetry. They literally stand at the line between life and death. How many kinds of trees are there, how many purposes, how many differences among the domestic and the wild, the old growth and the new, the abrupt edges and the farmer’s field?
 
We love trees for a reason, we cut them down for other reasons, we kill them at our peril. The Ojebway believe that cutting down living trees is like the wounding and killing of animals. The pointless downing of trees is probably worse. For many decades my family’s business was the harvesting of trees, a business that would often take my father and his crews out into the Shenandoah for days at a time. This was in the Forties, during and after the war. As a small boy I’d sometimes go out with the men for a couple of days, if for nothing else than the feeling of being among the looming hardwoods – the big white oaks and scarlet and silver maples and shagbark hickories and massive black walnuts. Just to try to look straight up among them would be to lose your balance, yet their very presences changed the sky and lifted it all somehow.
 
The man-made cutting and trimming was one thing. The other was the natural competition for sunlight and rain and space among the trees themselves, so that there was an inevitable wear and tear and rot and fall that would leave the forest floor covered with ruins, all mixed up in layers of branch and root and debris. Such places in the woods always struck me as sad yet also sacred places, since, when I was old enough to really think about it, they were in-between places where the trees had decided the difference between the past and the future.
Preface by Stanley Plumly
Introduction by Harry Thomas
 
Gladness
Homer, from The Odyssey                     
William Wordsworth, Nutting
Edward Thomas, The Ash Grove
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ash-Boughs
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woods, A Prose Sonnet
Henry David Thoreau, from Journal, December 20, 1851
Walt Whitman, Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone
James Dickey, Trees and Cattle
Yves Bonnefoy, Lightning
Judith Wright, Train Journey
Les Murray, Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn    
Stanley Plumly, White Oaks Ascending
 
Toward an Alphabet of Trees
 D. H. Lawrence, Letter from Town: The Almond Tree
Yves Bonnefoy, The Apples
Edward Thomas, The Aspens
A. E. Housman, Loveliest of Trees
Basho, “From all these trees”
Richard Eberhart, The Horse Chestnut Tree
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Coco-de-Mer
Antonio Machado, To a Dried-up Elm
Les Murray, Eucalyptus in Exile
Gail Perez, The Fig Tree
Howard Nemerov, Ginkgoes in Fall
Eugenio Montale, The Lemon Trees
John Clare, The Maple Tree
Walt Whitman, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
Shu Ting, To the Oak
Lorentzos Mavilis, The Olive Tree
Geoffrey Brock, The Royal Palms of South Florida
Su Tung P’o, The Purple Peach Tree
H. D., Pear Tree
James Galvin, Limber Pines
Bertolt Brecht, The Plum-Tree
Odysseus Elytis, The Mad Pomegranate Tree
Louis Simpson, The Redwoods
W. C. Williams, Young Sycamore
William Stafford, The Tulip Tree
Denise Levertov, The Willows of Massachusetts
William Wordsworth, Yew Trees
 
Planting and Preserving
 Virgil, from The Georgics
Thomas Hardy, The Pine Planters
Giorgio Bassani, The Racial Laws
Marianne Moore, The Camperdown Elm
Mary Oliver, The Black Walnut Tree
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Landscape, Dense with Trees
Patrick Kavanagh, Beech Tree
Seamus Heaney, Planting the Alder
Dana Gioia, Planting a Sequoia
Jean Giono, from The Man Who Planted Trees
 
Grove, Woods, Orchard, Forest
 Homer, from The Odyssey
Seamus Heaney, The Birch Grove
Buson, “Not a leaf stirring”
James Wright, A Small Grove in Torre del Banco
Robert Graves, Not Dead
Paul Valery, The Friendly Wood
W. H. Auden, Woods
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Apple Orchard
H. D., Orchard 
William Carlos Williams, Wild Orchard
Richard Wilbur, Young Orchard
Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking
Yehuda Amichai, Orchard
Edward Thomas, The Green Roads
Yves Bonnefoy, Hopkins Forest
Les Murray, The Gum Forest
Robert Frost, Spring Pools
 
From Trees
 Walt Whitman, Orange Buds by Mail from Florida
Thomas Hardy, Logs on the Hearth
William Cullen Bryant, Tree-Burial
Robert Frost, An Encounter
Robert Frost, The Wood-Pile
William Carlos Williams, Burning the Christmas Greens
James Dickey, In the Tree House at Night
Seamus Heaney, In the Beech
George MacBeth, To Preserve Figs
John Haines, The Tree That Became a House
Gary Snyder, Pine Needles
Stanley Plumly, The Tree
Jorie Graham, Tree Surgeons
 
Gladness Gone
 From the Book of Joel 1:11-12
William Cowper, The Poplar-Field
Thomas Hardy, Throwing a Tree
Henry David Thoreau, from Journal, December 30, 1851
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Binsey Poplars
Ciaran Carson, At Binsey
Vasko Popa, The Poplar and the Passer-by
Charlotte Mew, The Trees Are Down
Seamus Heaney, Clearances, VIII
John Clare, To a Fallen Elm
C. K. Williams, Elms
Stanley Plumly, Panegyric for the Plane Tree Fallen on Fifth Avenue
Pablo Neruda, Ode to a Fallen Chestnut
Anonymous, Lament for the Woodlands
Louise Erdrich, I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, “Still pressing through these weeping solitudes”
Stanley Kunitz, The War Against the Trees
John Bight, Mangroves
Nancy Willard, When There Were Trees
Gary Snyder, “The groves are down”
 
Lyrics, Meditations
 D. H. Lawrence, Trees in the Garden
Robert Frost, Birches
Judith Wright, The Cedars
Alan Dugan, On Trees
John Ashbery, Some Trees
Robert Frost, Tree at My Window
Jules Supervielle, Suppose No Tree Stood Near My Window
Paul Zimmer, Winter Trees
Czeslaw Milosz, Into the Tree
D. H. Lawrence, Under the Oak
Lee Gerlach, Ghazal
Marvin Bell, These Green-Going-to-Yellow
James Merrill, Christmas Tree
Howard Nemerov, Leaving the Trees
W. D. Snodgrass, An Elm Tree
Michael Collier, My Father as a Maple Tree
William Meredith, Tree Marriage
Gerald Stern, The Cemetery of Orange Trees in Crete
Denise Levertov, In California during the Gulf War
Vladimir Souloukhin, Willow
Zbigniew Herbert, Sequoia
Jim Powell, Sempervirens in Winter
Philip Larkin, The Trees
James Wright, To a Blossoming Pear Tree
William Carlos Williams, The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
David Ferry, Everybody’s Tree

About

A unique anthology of poems—from around the world and through the ages—that celebrate trees. AN EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY POCKET POET.
 
For thousands of years humans have variously worshipped trees, made use of them, admired them, and destroyed them—and poets have long chronicled the relationship. Poets from Homer and Virgil to Wordsworth, Whitman, and Thoreau, from Su Tung P'o and Basho to Czeslaw Milosz and W. S. Merwin have celebrated sacred groves, wild woodlands, and bountiful orchards, and the results include some of our most beloved poems.
Whether showing their subjects being planted or felled, cherished or lamented, towering in forests or flowering in backyards, the poems collected here pay lyrical tribute to these majestic beings with whom we share the earth.
 
Includes:

• “Birches" by Robert Frost
• “The Camperdown Elm” by Marianne Moore
• “Binsey Poplars” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
• “Sequoia" by Zbigniew Herbert
• “The Lemon Trees" by Eugenio Montale
• “The Apples" by Yves Bonnefoy
• “The Plum Tree" by Bertolt Brecht
• “The Almond Tree" by D.H. Lawrence
• “The Loveliest of Trees" by A.E. Housman
 
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Excerpt

PREFACE by Stanley Plumly
 
Harry Thomas has arranged his anthology of tree poems as much around complex attitudes toward trees as dramatic evocations of their arboreal being: ranging from the ‘‘gladness’’ of the fact of them to their natural, named, and significant presences to – sadly but beautifully – their ‘‘gladness gone.’’ Which is to say Thomas’ selection is emotional as well as analytical, political as well as philosophical, as it moves from celebration to meditation, from the reality and imagination of what trees are to a deepening awareness of what their loss means.
 
The range of poets is equally rich in variety, nationality, and history. Though the overall emphasis may be Anglo-American and the living moment especially contemporaneous, the individual poems develop in perspective from Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Georgics to examples from Matsuo Basho, and Yosa Buson to any number of international figures such as Eugenio Montale, Czeslaw Milosz, Bertolt Brecht, Giorgio Bassani and Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, in first-rate translations by Lee Gerlach, Robert Hass, Edwin Morgan, Jamie McKendrick and Paul Muldoon. Indeed, ‘‘From all these trees,/in the salads, the soup, everywhere,/cherry blossoms fall’’ – writes the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho in the Hass version.
 
The mixture of tradition, innovation, and generation is as exciting as it is informing. You cannot assemble a tree anthology of poems without such classics as Wordsworth’s ‘‘Nutting’’ or Housman’s ‘‘Loveliest of Trees’’ or Whitman’s ‘‘I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing’’ or Marianne Moore’s ‘‘The Camperdown Elm.’’ You cannot test the quality of the originality of the poetry without Montale’s ‘‘The Lemon Trees’’ or Seamus Heaney’s ‘‘The Birch Grove’’ or Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘‘The Apple Orchard’’ (translated by Seamus Heaney.) You cannot include the present without pairing such poems as Mary Oliver’s ‘‘The Black Walnut Tree’’ with Ellen Bryant Voigt’s ‘‘Landscape, Dense with Trees’ or Judith Wright’s lyrical ‘‘Train Journey’’ with her massive meditation ‘‘The Cedars’’ or James Wright’s elegiac ‘‘To a Blossoming Pear Tree’’ with Marvin Bell’s lovely lament ‘‘These-Green-Going-to- Yellow.’’
 
In terms of tone and poetic temperament, Thomas has effectively exercised his editorial rights to choices that are not only carefully crafted but open-ended in form and ambition; he values discipline and understatement but at the same time admires ‘‘tree’’ poems that think with their hearts, that enlarge the view with vision. David Ferry’s ‘‘Everybody’s Tree’’ is just that kind of contemporary visionary poem that at some one hundred associative, narrative lines, structured in moments like paragraphs, develops around both personal history and the larger caring time of local community, in a voice at once filled with losses and empathy for those losses. And no poet could be more empathic and expansive than Keats-contemporary John Clare in his ‘‘sweetest anthem’’ ‘‘To a Fallen Elm’’ – its wide, searching lines of direct address may come close to anger but they also abide with love.
 
There is so much to admire here in this beautifully focused gathering of poems, both in the familiar and as discovery. Some of my own favorites are Wordsworth’s ‘‘Yew Trees,’’ W. C. Williams’ ‘‘Burning the Christmas Greens,’’ Jorie Graham’s ‘‘Tree Surgeons,’’ Robert Graves’s ‘‘Not Dead,’’ Gerald Stern’s ‘‘The Cemetery of Orange Trees in Crete,’’ James Dickey’s ‘‘In the Tree House at Night,’’ and on and on. Because Thomas has arranged his selections around centers of both generosity and gravity he never loses sight of the essential thing: that trees are the great flowers of our world – life-givers, life-enhancers, life-poetry. They literally stand at the line between life and death. How many kinds of trees are there, how many purposes, how many differences among the domestic and the wild, the old growth and the new, the abrupt edges and the farmer’s field?
 
We love trees for a reason, we cut them down for other reasons, we kill them at our peril. The Ojebway believe that cutting down living trees is like the wounding and killing of animals. The pointless downing of trees is probably worse. For many decades my family’s business was the harvesting of trees, a business that would often take my father and his crews out into the Shenandoah for days at a time. This was in the Forties, during and after the war. As a small boy I’d sometimes go out with the men for a couple of days, if for nothing else than the feeling of being among the looming hardwoods – the big white oaks and scarlet and silver maples and shagbark hickories and massive black walnuts. Just to try to look straight up among them would be to lose your balance, yet their very presences changed the sky and lifted it all somehow.
 
The man-made cutting and trimming was one thing. The other was the natural competition for sunlight and rain and space among the trees themselves, so that there was an inevitable wear and tear and rot and fall that would leave the forest floor covered with ruins, all mixed up in layers of branch and root and debris. Such places in the woods always struck me as sad yet also sacred places, since, when I was old enough to really think about it, they were in-between places where the trees had decided the difference between the past and the future.

Table of Contents

Preface by Stanley Plumly
Introduction by Harry Thomas
 
Gladness
Homer, from The Odyssey                     
William Wordsworth, Nutting
Edward Thomas, The Ash Grove
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ash-Boughs
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Woods, A Prose Sonnet
Henry David Thoreau, from Journal, December 20, 1851
Walt Whitman, Roots and Leaves Themselves Alone
James Dickey, Trees and Cattle
Yves Bonnefoy, Lightning
Judith Wright, Train Journey
Les Murray, Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn    
Stanley Plumly, White Oaks Ascending
 
Toward an Alphabet of Trees
 D. H. Lawrence, Letter from Town: The Almond Tree
Yves Bonnefoy, The Apples
Edward Thomas, The Aspens
A. E. Housman, Loveliest of Trees
Basho, “From all these trees”
Richard Eberhart, The Horse Chestnut Tree
Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, Coco-de-Mer
Antonio Machado, To a Dried-up Elm
Les Murray, Eucalyptus in Exile
Gail Perez, The Fig Tree
Howard Nemerov, Ginkgoes in Fall
Eugenio Montale, The Lemon Trees
John Clare, The Maple Tree
Walt Whitman, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing
Shu Ting, To the Oak
Lorentzos Mavilis, The Olive Tree
Geoffrey Brock, The Royal Palms of South Florida
Su Tung P’o, The Purple Peach Tree
H. D., Pear Tree
James Galvin, Limber Pines
Bertolt Brecht, The Plum-Tree
Odysseus Elytis, The Mad Pomegranate Tree
Louis Simpson, The Redwoods
W. C. Williams, Young Sycamore
William Stafford, The Tulip Tree
Denise Levertov, The Willows of Massachusetts
William Wordsworth, Yew Trees
 
Planting and Preserving
 Virgil, from The Georgics
Thomas Hardy, The Pine Planters
Giorgio Bassani, The Racial Laws
Marianne Moore, The Camperdown Elm
Mary Oliver, The Black Walnut Tree
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Landscape, Dense with Trees
Patrick Kavanagh, Beech Tree
Seamus Heaney, Planting the Alder
Dana Gioia, Planting a Sequoia
Jean Giono, from The Man Who Planted Trees
 
Grove, Woods, Orchard, Forest
 Homer, from The Odyssey
Seamus Heaney, The Birch Grove
Buson, “Not a leaf stirring”
James Wright, A Small Grove in Torre del Banco
Robert Graves, Not Dead
Paul Valery, The Friendly Wood
W. H. Auden, Woods
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Apple Orchard
H. D., Orchard 
William Carlos Williams, Wild Orchard
Richard Wilbur, Young Orchard
Robert Frost, After Apple-Picking
Yehuda Amichai, Orchard
Edward Thomas, The Green Roads
Yves Bonnefoy, Hopkins Forest
Les Murray, The Gum Forest
Robert Frost, Spring Pools
 
From Trees
 Walt Whitman, Orange Buds by Mail from Florida
Thomas Hardy, Logs on the Hearth
William Cullen Bryant, Tree-Burial
Robert Frost, An Encounter
Robert Frost, The Wood-Pile
William Carlos Williams, Burning the Christmas Greens
James Dickey, In the Tree House at Night
Seamus Heaney, In the Beech
George MacBeth, To Preserve Figs
John Haines, The Tree That Became a House
Gary Snyder, Pine Needles
Stanley Plumly, The Tree
Jorie Graham, Tree Surgeons
 
Gladness Gone
 From the Book of Joel 1:11-12
William Cowper, The Poplar-Field
Thomas Hardy, Throwing a Tree
Henry David Thoreau, from Journal, December 30, 1851
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Binsey Poplars
Ciaran Carson, At Binsey
Vasko Popa, The Poplar and the Passer-by
Charlotte Mew, The Trees Are Down
Seamus Heaney, Clearances, VIII
John Clare, To a Fallen Elm
C. K. Williams, Elms
Stanley Plumly, Panegyric for the Plane Tree Fallen on Fifth Avenue
Pablo Neruda, Ode to a Fallen Chestnut
Anonymous, Lament for the Woodlands
Louise Erdrich, I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, “Still pressing through these weeping solitudes”
Stanley Kunitz, The War Against the Trees
John Bight, Mangroves
Nancy Willard, When There Were Trees
Gary Snyder, “The groves are down”
 
Lyrics, Meditations
 D. H. Lawrence, Trees in the Garden
Robert Frost, Birches
Judith Wright, The Cedars
Alan Dugan, On Trees
John Ashbery, Some Trees
Robert Frost, Tree at My Window
Jules Supervielle, Suppose No Tree Stood Near My Window
Paul Zimmer, Winter Trees
Czeslaw Milosz, Into the Tree
D. H. Lawrence, Under the Oak
Lee Gerlach, Ghazal
Marvin Bell, These Green-Going-to-Yellow
James Merrill, Christmas Tree
Howard Nemerov, Leaving the Trees
W. D. Snodgrass, An Elm Tree
Michael Collier, My Father as a Maple Tree
William Meredith, Tree Marriage
Gerald Stern, The Cemetery of Orange Trees in Crete
Denise Levertov, In California during the Gulf War
Vladimir Souloukhin, Willow
Zbigniew Herbert, Sequoia
Jim Powell, Sempervirens in Winter
Philip Larkin, The Trees
James Wright, To a Blossoming Pear Tree
William Carlos Williams, The Widow’s Lament in Springtime
David Ferry, Everybody’s Tree