My Little Almond Tree

I have a Korean pop song in my head, or a part of one, and it won’t go away. It’s not Gangnam Style. It’s something much older, the music of the generation now reaching late middle age, that they call ‘Trot’. It goes like this:

꽃피는 동백섬에                          Flowers are blooming on Camellia Isle
봄이 왔건만                                   Spring has arrived, but
형재 던나 부산항에               My brother has just left from Busan Harbour
갈매기가 슬패 운네                     A seagull cries sadly

(From ‘Come back to Busan harbour’ by Jo Yong-Pil)

After which it launches into a melodramatic chorus, whose lyrics I can never recall… Korean listeners might surmise that the singer’s brother had left to fight in the war (during the most desperate part of the war, when the North was winning, Busan was the South’s last redoubt) or perhaps on military service. But the sadness also has a classical element to it: the singer’s sadness is all the worse because spring is blooming around her.

This is a trope of much great poetry. For me, the very best is Edward Thomas’s ‘In Memoriam, Easter 1915’, which I blogged about a couple of years ago. But here is another, same poet, same theme, similar imagery:

The Cherry Trees

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

… and same quietly devastating impact, I think. These two Thomas poems have brought me close to tears on more than one occasion (once when I was using it in a tutorial). It brings home – quite literally home – the impact of the war on the towns and villages of England in such a vivid, and such a sad way. And again, there is spring, and natural rebirth, while men lie dead and women heartbroken. There is no need to analyse it any further: it is sad because it is true – this really happened. What makes the poem even more poignant, was that Edward Thomas died in the war too

I can’t help thinking of this poem quite often at the moment because the cherry blossom is out here in Korea – everywhere, in fact, still beautiful between concrete and telegraph poles, and just this week starting to wither. There’s a lot more of this pink blossom here than home in England. A few years ago, I lived in Durham in England, near the council buildings and the hospital, where the roads are lined with horse chestnut trees, which have I think the strangest kind of blossom, clumped in tittle towers pointing straight upwards. There’s a poem in there somewhere, I think, but perhaps I would have to fight in a war to write a good one…

Recently, I have come across another poem about blossom, this one by a Russian poet. Alexey K. Tolstoy saw some service in the Crimean War, though his experiences were cut short through contracting typhoid – not uncommon during that conflict. I don’t know if his experiences in the war affected this poem at all, but here is one more poem where spring comes with rebirth and rejuvenation, but the poet’s feelings run in another direction…

My Little Almond Tree

My little almond tree
Is gay with gleaming bloom,
My heart unwillingly
Puts forth its buds of gloom.

The bloom will leave the tree, 
The fruit, unbidden, grow.
And the green boughs will be
By bitter loads brought low.

Alexey Tolstoy, trans. B. Deutsch and A. Yarmolinsky

Tolstoy’s take on the gulf between nature and man is a little different. Man is fated – cannot help but – follow the same cycles as nature. As the almond tree blossoms and brings forth fruit, so too does Tolstoy; but where the almond tree – and from the sound of it, Tolstoy refers to a real almond tree that he owns – is unconscious, and perhaps because of this, ‘gay’ and ‘gleaming’, Tolstoy grows reluctantly, his fruit bitter, his foliage heavy.

I have an inkling that Tolstoy’s gloom was inspired not by war, but by work – the burdens of the very public life he had, as a high-ranking civil servant, and a poet and playwright embroiled in arguments about aesthetics, politics, the fate of the nation, the very meaning of life… but who knows – he could have been sad about a woman. We just don’t know. It is interesting however, that he projects a kind of unconscious joy onto nature, and contrasts this with his own conscious misery…

In fact, he wasn’t always negative about human emotions. One quote that jumps out from his wikipedia page is the following: ‘What I believe in is that God gave us the power of emotion so we could go further than our mind leads us. As a leading force, human emotion is preferable to thought, just as music is more perfect than a spoken word.’ Those are the sentiments of a poet, all right… and many poets would agree, I think, that in poetry emotion must lead thought. Nevertheless, Alexey was, like his cousin Leo, an interesting thinker – a feeling thinker, too.

He was also, so it is said, an innovative poet, though it is difficult to know whether this comes through the translation.

And he was right about almond trees being gay and gleaming. I have a fondness for apple blossom too… and walnut trees – there’s one in a certain car-park by the Tyne in Northumberland, un-noticed by most of the people who pass by. I could start blathering about hawthorn and blackthorn too, but before we know it spring will be over, and we will start to feel gloomy about summer.

Photo credits:

Blossom and Sunlight: Me, on my phone

Dongbaek flower: http://kr.newtopic.org/%ED%99%94%EC%A0%9C/%EB%8F%99%EB%B0%B1%EA%BD%83/

Horse Chestnut blossom: public domain pictures

Almond Blossom: Just a casual dabbing of mine from my old art class. Just kidding, it’s Vincent Van Gough.

 

The Child on the Cliffs

Mother, the root of this little yellow flower
Among the stones has the taste of quinine.
Things are strange to-day on the cliff. The sun shines so bright,
And the grasshopper works at his sewing-machine
So hard. Here’s one on my hand, mother, look;
I lie so still. There’s one on your book.

But I have something to tell more strange. So leave
Your book to the grasshopper, mother dear,—
Like a green knight in a dazzling market-place,—
And listen now. Can you hear what I heart
Far out? Now and then the foam there curls
And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s.

Fishes and gulls ring no bells. There cannot be
A chapel or church between here and Devon,
With fishes or gulls ringing its bell,—hark!—
Somewhere under the sea or up in heaven.
“It’s the bell, my son, out in the bay
On the buoy. It does sound sweet to-day.”

Sweeter I never heard, mother, no, not in all Wales.
I should like to be lying under that foam,
Dead, but able to hear the sound of the bell,
And certain that you would often come
And rest, listening happily.
I should be happy if that could be.

Edward Thomas

If the title of today’s poem sounds a little ominous, well, it is. But not all that ominous – the child doesn’t give in to the irrational desire to jump. Talking about irrational desires though, there’s a few things I want to get off my chest before we talk about this lovely poem by Edward Thomas.

First, this connection between cliffs and jumping off them – you made it too, right? When we go to high cliffs of the kind we see in this poem, part of us thinks, how beautiful, but the other part thinks, what would it be like to jump off, or almost thinks, you know what, I’d like to give that a try – not because I’m feeling suicidal or whatever, just because, you know, it might be fun, even with the certain pain, and probable death – it’s an irrational impulse after all.

As a child – even as a teenager – I felt this impulse more keenly. To jump off a bridge, just for kicks, or in front of an oncoming train (never a bus though, or lorry). These weren’t morbid obsessions, of course, just fleeting, irrational thoughts. A friend of mine confessed to me once that when unemployed and wandering local parks, he would see a mother pushing a pram, and have the strange irrational impulse to stamp his foot into it. Not out of any desire to inflict pain, just… for no reason whatsoever. What can we make of such impulses? Are they junk of consciousness, misdirected, not quite sublimated instincts barging into our otherwise ordered thoughts?

And what relationship do these irrational impulses bear to those other excess functions of consciousness- our imagination and our capacity to appreciate beauty? That question, finally, brings us to the poem, a short dramatic monologue which involves all three.

It starts with a strange flower that tastes of quinine – that’s the substance that gives tonic water its flavour. After tasting the flower the boy seems to notice a lot of things – strange things- he hasn’t before. I wondered if this were an intoxicating flower, and thus responsible for the altered perceptions of the boy. Then I thought, after all, the root of his altered perception lies elsewhere, and his noticing of the taste of the flower is just the first in a series of perceptions, and isn’t necessarily responsible for them. We can at least say that it initiates his strange thoughts, and this is significant: for Thomas always tied thought to perception of nature…

I like that grasshopper. It’s cute and it’s meant to be. It ‘works at his sewing machine’, it is like a ‘green knight in a dazzling market place’: this imagery is childlike, showing the boy’s imagination is still partly in childhood, with its fairy stories and anthropomorphic animals. Partly in childhood, I say, but not wholly, as there are stirrings of stranger thoughts, that the boy himself doesn’t quite understand. What’s next? ‘the foam there curls / And stretches a white arm out like a girl’s’. Quite a sensuous image that – the boy’s childlike world is stirring with the beginning of romantic longing here, as well as, the beginning of an aesthetic appreciation of nature.

The boy has called his mother’s attention to these things because he feels they are strange and significant, but the main thing he wanted to tell her about was the bell he hears. Again the child’s queries are phrased childishly – ‘fish and gulls ring no bells’, he says, but then they take an unexpectedly morbid turn. Although if you know Edward Thomas’s poetry, you would have half-expected death to get a mention somewhere. And, actually, to the child, these thoughts aren’t morbid at all – he is unselfconsciously expressing his love for his mother, and his wish to be happily dead – though he doesn’t quite know what it means.

I thought this an interesting contrast to the last poem we looked at, Eliot’s Animula. Both deal with childhood, in some degree, and the growth of the young towards adulthood – ‘the heavy burden of the growing soul’. But while Eliot looks at the whole of a life, Thomas focuses, characteristically, on a single, significant moment. Thomas’s poetry lacks the religious overtones of Eliot’s, but for both the human soul – or consciousness – is an unavoidably complex, troubling thing. Eliot’s poem was, beneath the beauty, didactic – he had a point to make about life and death, and our attitude towards it. In Thomas’s poem there is no lesson – it simply shows us the beauty and strangeness of life, and death too, of course… He is, in his way, just as heavy as Eliot.

***

This was the last in a series of posts about Eliot poems and some comparable poems from other poets. First time visitors to the blog might be interested in these previous posts – on Conversation Galante, All Night Under the Moon, What the Thunder Said ( from The Wasteland), BriggFlatts part II, Hadrian’s short poem and Animula.

‘I built myself a house of glass’

I built myself a house of glass:

It took me years to make it:

And I was proud. But now, alas!

Would God someone would break it.

 

But it looks too magnificent.

No neighbour casts a stone

From where he dwells, in tenement

Or palace of glass, alone.

 

Edward Thomas

 

In the notes to the latest Faber and Faber edition of Edward Thomas’s poems, the editor quotes childhood memoir for a quote with some relevance to the poem:

I discovered the joy of throwing stones over into the depths of a great garden and hearing the glass-house break.

For Thomas then, the idea of breaking glass evokes childhood, the feeling of being an adventurous young boy in a grand world. I don’t think I ever deliberately broke glass when I was young, though I certainly smashed a pane of glass or two by accident – with a football rather than a stone. Mind, I did use to go to the local park with a friend of mine and we’d bash a golf ball about with a couple of his dad’s golf clubs. One day, he teed a series of balls across from the local tennis centre, which had recently put its prices up, out of the range of youngsters like ourselves, and he aimed them at the high windows of the building, breaking a couple before we scarpered into the nearby woods. I know what some of you are thinking: I should have stopped him – but it honestly never crossed my mind. If I heard of kids doing this to a local building nowadays, I’d probably mutter ‘mindless thuggery’ or something of the kind; and yet, thinking back on it, it’s a vaguely happy memory, and I don’t feel particularly bad about it.

Funny that. But little, you may think, to do with the poem, which seems to have its roots in the old English proverb ‘people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones’. This is itself a close cousin, I suppose, of the Biblical injunction ‘Let he who is without sin be the first to cast a stone’, Jesus’ words to a group of men ready to condemn an adulterous woman. This is an essentially moral injunction, both an implicit condemnation of the men’s hypocrisy and a reminder to the men that the right to condemn a man’s soul belongs to God and not to man. The English proverb is more ambiguous, still a warning about hypocrisy, but less a moral imperative and more a social one – a reminder to those with their own vulnerabilities that in criticising other’s faults one is risking damage to oneself – either materially, or to one’s pride.

And pride, certainly, is the subject of this poem. Thomas laments having allowed his pride to grow to such an extent that he is insulated not only from the criticisms of other men, but from their warmth and from their company. This is one interpretation, at least, of this epigrammatic poem. It seems to express a yearning for the uninhibited feelings of his youth, free from the strain of reputation and responsibility.

So perhaps that pricey tennis centre should have felt thankful towards my golf ball driving, window shattering friend, that his well-aimed pot shots should have reminded the well-heeled tennis players inside that there was a community of people outside their air-conditioned tennis courts and saloons… or perhaps not. But if you think I’m projecting an unnecessary class connotation on the idea of glass houses, look again at those last two lines – what does Thomas mean by talking about neighbours both in tenements and ‘palaces of glass’? There is an interesting essay here, that reflects on these class implications in the poem and their relation to a fable Thomas once wrote in prose.

In Memoriam (Easter 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

Edward Thomas, 1915

This poem shouldn’t need too much commentary. It is the saddest of war poems, by one of the greatest poets of the 20^th Century, Edward Thomas, a great nature poet, and a poet of the Great War – and one of those who died fighting in it. It is – I don’t know – quietly devastating. The sense of loss is given an added bitterness because Easter is a commemoration of the resurrection of Jesus, sacrificed for man’s sins, while Spring and the appearance of flowers in the woods herald the rebirth of the year after the deathly cold and barrenness of winter; but the flowers here only remind us of the terrible, permanent absence of men fallen in battle.