`Poems or People Are Rarely so Lovely'

With Michael Gilleland, proprietor of Laudator Temporis Acti, I share a fondness for trees and old books. On Monday he paired them and posted a passage from Specimen Days in which Whitman lauds the yellow poplar or tulip tree. Last September I wrote about the tulip after Mike recommended Donald Culross Peattie’s delightful A Natural History of North American Trees. I’ll return the favor by sharing with him a poem by Howard Nemerov, “Trees,” from Mirrors and Windows (1958):

“To be a giant and keep quiet about it,
To stay in one’s own place;
To stand for the constant presence of process
And always to seem the same;
To be steady as a rock and always trembling,
Having the hard appearance of death
With the soft, fluent nature of growth,
One’s Being deceptively armored,
One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable;
To be so tough, and take the light so well,
Freely providing forbidden knowledge
Of so many things about heaven and earth
For which we should otherwise have no word –
Poems or people are rarely so lovely,
And even when they have great qualities
They tend to tell you rather than exemplify
What they believe themselves to be about,
While from the moving silence of trees,
Whether in storm or calm, in leaf and naked,
Night or day, we draw conclusions of our own,
Sustaining and unnoticed as our breath,
And perilous also -- though there has never been
A critical tree -- about the nature of things.”

Trees as moral exemplars: Nemerov was a deceptively philosophical poet, one who didn’t throw around abstruse terminology or genuflect before Heidegger. Nor was he a nature mystic. Rather, he honored the real world by paying attention to its details as it organizes, unravels and organizes again. Nemerov saw verbs where others see nouns. Hence: “One’s Being deceptively armored,/One’s Becoming deceptively vulnerable.”

Nemerov had the chutzpah to title his poem “Trees,” surely knowing he risked censure for associating with Joyce Kilmer’s much-memorized, much-maligned “Trees” (1914). In the line “Poems or people are rarely so lovely,” he even dares to echo Kilmer’s “I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree.” Kilmer was an American poet, editor, journalist and Roman Catholic lecturer. During World War I, he enlisted in the fabled “Fighting 69th.” During the Second Battle of the Marne, on July 30, 1918, he was killed by a German machine gunner. Nemerov served throughout World War II as a pilot in the Royal Canadian unit of the U.S. Army Air Corps.

I learned “Trees” from Alfalfa, who sang it in the 1936 Our Gang episode “Arbor Day,” but it took Guy Davenport in his essay “Trees” (collected in The Geography of the Imagination), to convincingly render Kilmer and his poem the justice they deserved:

“`Trees’ is, if you look, very much of its time. Trees were favorite symbols for Yeats, Frost, and even the young Pound. The nature of chlorophyll had just been discovered, and Tarzan of the Apes – set in a tree world – had just been published. Trees were everywhere in art of the period, and it was understood that they belonged to the region of ideas, to Santayana’s Realm of Beauty.”

Gilleland is the rare sort of blogger who encourages one to think like this, to celebrate creation by observing, across time and space, its infinite weave of connections. Davenport said it like this in another essay from The Geography of the Imagination, “That Faire Field of Enna”:

“Art is the attention we pay to the wholeness of the world. Ancient intuition went foraging after consistency. Religion, science, and art are alike rooted in the faith that the world is of a piece, that something is common to all its diversity, and that if we knew enough we could see and give a name to its harmony.”