Let’s write a poem

Your lovely poem and photo suggest Trees by Real Poet Joyce Kilmer, but how about these poetic lines on the importance of the legal thicket of due process from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons:

ROPER: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
THOMAS MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
ROPER: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
MORE: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you–where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast–man’s laws, not God’s–and if you cut them down–and you’re just the man to do it–d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes. I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

Midwinter spring is its own season
Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,
Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.
When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,
The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,
In windless cold that is the heart’s heat,
Reflecting in a watery mirror
A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.
And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,
Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire
In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing
The soul’s sap quivers. There is no earth smell
Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time
But not in time’s covenant. Now the hedgerow
Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom
Of snow, a bloom more sudden
Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,
Not in the scheme of generation.
Where is the summer, the unimaginable Zero summer?

[…]

Well, I’m torn. Should I cite Ogden Nash’s Song Of The Open Road, or Robert Frost’s The Road Less Traveled, or JRR Tolkien’s ‘In the willow-meads of Tasarinan’?

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren were clearly not botanists. The function of roots is to take in water & nutrients; distinctly mouth-like, in other words

Ran across this recently, by Emily Dickinson:

The Heart asks Pleasure—first—
And then—Excuse from Pain—
And then—those little Anodynes
That deaden suffering—

And then—to go to sleep—
And then—if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die—

Flawed coroners of evil,
Imperfect heralds of good,
The trees ask nothing,
Disclose nothing,
Believe nothing.

They have seen much,
Forgotten little.

Seismographs of nature’s cruelty,
Registers of its cyclic complaints,
They mutely witness
The planet’s decay.

With luck, they will be standing
After the last human departs.

I was thinking recently about triolets, so how about this?

I scan the trees and I see aisles.
They urge me on to come what may.
The journey might be many miles …
I scan the trees and I see aisles,
A stringent grid of ranks and files:
Perhaps tomorrow, not today
I scan the trees and I see aisles:
They urge me on to come what may.

Ingrid R.,
thanks.

From Goethe:

Ãœber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh’,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest du auch.

I don’t have a copy of the book, so I’m unable to quote their comments, but they attacked the ludicrously mixed metaphors, such as the tree’s roots being its “hungry mouth” while its branches are its arms, its leaves are hair – quite a bizarre assemblage of mixed parts!

There’s no mixed metaphor. The roots are like a mouth; that’s one metaphor. The branches are like arms; that’s a separate metaphor. The leaves are like hair; that’s yet another separate metaphor.

The combined effect of presenting the tree as something with its mouth in the dirt while its arms and hair are oriented to the sky may suggest an image of something contorted, perhaps even grotesquely contorted, but even if that is a fault, the fault is not one of mixing metaphors.

“Aram nemus vult” (Pound)