'The Principle Is Growth'

I remember learning as a kid the word dendrology while reading about maple trees (we had seven in our front yard – all are gone, one carried away by a tornado) in a field guide: the study of trees. From the Greek for “tree.” A close synonym is silvics, this time from the Latin. I started seeing dendron- and its cognates everywhere. In anatomy, dendrites are the short, branching fibers found at the end of neurons. The adjective forms are dendroid and dendritic – metaphorical but also fractal-like, structures replicated at various scales. This branching seems like a reliably constant structural feature in nature and human culture. Think of ferns, coral and epithelial tissue in the small intestine. 

I hadn’t heard of the poet James Hayford (1913-93) until I read an essay about him, “Outbound to Alewife: The Least Known Major American Poet,” by X.J. Kennedy in the Winter 1993 issue of Harvard Review. Hayford was a protégé of Robert Frost. His poem “The Principle is Growth” was published in 1961 in The Massachusetts Review:

 

“Of moving immobility

 The model is a tree.

 Compliance, fixity,

 The tree has both.

 The principle is growth.

 The essence is to live,

 To stay put and yet give

 To sway and still not snap?

 And what it takes is blood or sap.”

 

An essay in tree anatomy and physiology becomes a fable of natural and human adaptability and resilience. Branches move in the wind without breaking while photosynthesis turns the tree into a sugar factory. Poets at least since Ovid have known about transformation: “The principle is growth.” Kennedy writes of Hayford:

 

“The Romantic view of the poet as a self-reflecting mirror seems quite alien to Hayford, for whom a poem is an expression of some truth he has come upon, stated as deliberately as a craftsman builds a wall. Like a mason laying brick, he finds that ‘Rhymes keep our corners firm.’ Not for him, those big lines swollen with spiritual noise, about which J. V. Cunningham chided his contemporaries. And unromantically, Hayford distances the maker from the thing made.”