by Ann Wroe
At March in Cambridgeshire, as well as in several other churches crouched under the huge East Anglian sky, the double hammer-beams of the nave roof break out in flights of angels. They seem to have burst from the dense oak like starlings from the living tree; or perhaps they have struggled out slowly, like damselflies from their cases, tentative fingers here, a heaving wing tip there, their gleaming fibres drying into golden curls. For a little while they have hung from the beams among carved leaves and flowers, their robed bodies too soft yet, too damp, their wings wet quills that lie dark across their backs. Then, flickering carefully into gilded life, they stretch to fly.
Even the hawthorn can break out in light. This is the archetypal tree of the Downs, the lone straggler, apparently good for nothing. It is so spare that in Ravilious’s paintings it makes another abstraction in the landscape, alongside barbed wire. You cannot build with it, or make cupboards, barrels or bats. You cannot eat the fruit (though Clare saw a shepherd on a ‘rawky’ November morning pluck ‘a handful of awes from the half naked hedges’ to munch as he went on). You cannot climb it, for it is all scratches and thorns. In country lore the hawthorn is sometimes a magic tree, deflecting lightning; but often an evil one, its strong-scented blossoms bad luck if they are brought into the house. The hawthorn bows, bends, writhes, knots, and every inch of its struggle stays visible in the tree. But it endures. It ages, and is stripped bare to windward until it is nothing but sharp, grey, knitted bones. Yet on those bones lichen grows, bold splashes of gold leaf, drawing small birds to visit with care among the spines; against the sun, bare winter thorns may be garlanded with raindrops on every twig; and between the boughs the deep sky of late summer is set as sapphire glass.
The most crabbed and lonely of hawthorns still leafs on any twig it can, their deep-notched green the most vivid of early spring. (In medieval art these leaves sometimes crowned the Queen of Heaven.) It still flowers, pink, red and white, the flecked foam of May that Hopkins loved, each one stamen-speckled like the eggs of hedgerow birds. It still fruits, its hard berries engine-red – or, to prolong the suffering metaphor, withering to the colour of half-dried blood. Unlike rosehips and rowan they do not turn you with a start, as if fire broke from the hedge. They are modest and unshowy. In winter, curiously, the topmost twigs may sport a spiky white fungus that looks, from a distance, like improbable blossom; in May, a lovelier play of lacework, tall meadowsweet may grow through each tangled, stunted branch. The tree clings on, though its roots (sometimes exposed by rubbing livestock for two feet below the surface) are anchored only to crumbled chalk, a foothold in light.
Sheep find shelter here, the hollowed-out ground strewn with their dung and wool, and wool hangs white in the branches in confusion with old man’s beard. The walker may find shelter too, often the only chance for miles, for the hawthorn is a companionable tree, a fellow man who trudges before you or stops and salutes you, his hat long since blown into the next county and his arms mere sticks, pointing the way it went. There is seldom good grass under a hawthorn; it is clumpish and thin. But there is shade at least, like an old coat cast off. Downland shepherds like Dudeney used to pile branches of it against banks for shelter in winter, and would throw themselves into it backwards, as into a bed, to avoid the spikes. They called it ‘hawth’, a good name for a friend.
Jefferies thought these trees were shaped like candles in a draught, and some, indeed, are consecrated.30 Beside the chalk-and-flint track across Blackcap above Lewes, a lonely thorn has been turned into a memorial to John William Arnold, beloved Dad and Grandad, who died aged eighty-two in 2010; a small wooden plaque commemorates him, and the twigs have been hung with delicate silver bracelets and plastic flowers. Hawthorns, it is said by those who distrust them, may be propitiated with ‘something bright’. At Stanmer by a gatepost stands another thorn whose lower trunk, from long salutation, is worn smooth and copper-brown as an old walking cane: Joseph of Arimathea’s cane, perhaps, thrust into the ground to flower, clasped by the hand that smoothed perfumed oils on the body taken from the Cross. And it is the ravaged hawthorn of Glastonbury, not the lily or the rose, which in dead of winter puts out a second burst of flowers to greet the coming of light, Christ, the first-appearing.
Hence perhaps my affection for one old thorn on the scarp face of Firle Beacon, on the last bend of the principal track that climbs up from Firle itself, which as it comes into view among the battering winds lifts a gaunt hand to bless the walker, a salutation from a skeleton woven out of wire. On a closer approach it is not quite naked, but cinctured with fresh leaves; and not quite abandoned, but strewn about with purple orchids or, in April, cowslips in the grass.
The scrawniest trees thus have their visitations of light. On the banks of the Cuckmere south-east of Firle it is small willows, tossing and wrestling silver at the least indication of rain. Clare especially treasured the grey willow, ‘shining chilly in the sun as if the morning mist still lingered on its cool green’.31 No tree is better at picking up water-light from root to tip, every gleam mirrored and multiplied, each leaf a long, hollowed, silver nib to scribble words between water and air. ‘Swallow’ and ‘willow’ both express that flickering, zigzag sweep. Yet Hopkins noticed the same movement in chestnut trees, which ‘when the wind tossed them … plunged and crossed one another without losing their inscape’. And his greatest emotion was reserved for poplars or aspens, perhaps the showiest dancers in light, batting and reflecting it until they flashed all-over white, and the storm broke. A group stood at Binsey, near Oxford, on a still largely unspoiled stretch of river meadows now famous for a thatched pub, the Perch, and an unassuming row of cottages. (In my time at Oxford I only once went out to Binsey – it was a place of dream, and remains so still, a faded Victorian photograph incongruously visited by cars.) Walking there in his black soutane, coat and biretta, already mourning dress, in 1879, Hopkins suddenly saw that the aspens had been cut down. And since leaves condensed the light, as he had noticed of the whitebeam, this meant that their light, as well as their shade, had gone.
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one …
This stripping or shedding of leaf-light – whether brutal or natural, by man’s hands or by the season – meant, for Hopkins, the tree’s loss of itself.32 The fellers’ mere ‘ten or twelve/Strokes of havoc’, he wrote, had ‘unselved’ the landscape – but, before the landscape, the trees. He had met this among the elms at Roehampton one October, as he walked out from Manresa House after making his half-yearly renewal of vows, on a day of quickly melting frost: ‘in a few minutes a whole tree was flung of [leaves]; they lay masking and papering the ground at the foot. Then the tree seems to be looking down on its cast self, as blue sky on snow after a long fall, its losing, its doing …’
In leaf or not, some trees seem vested with unusual power. Beneath them, Jefferies said, ‘the heart feels nearer to that depth of life the far sky means’. There are two old oaks on Hampstead Heath, and one massy copper beech, which must always be saluted when I pass them: the copper beech for the pale stained-glass loveliness of its new leaves, and the oaks for the words, phrases, solutions and resolutions that have sprung from their crabbed branches over the years, thick as acorns. ‘Why’, Whitman asked,33
are there trees I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?
(I think they hang there winter and summer on those trees and always drop fruit as I pass;)
At his Timber Creek retreat near Camden, New Jersey he knew a tulip tree he called ‘the Apollo of the woods’, dreaming once that it strode out golden as the god when he was not around and sometimes, a divine favour, when he was. Thoreau made regular pilgrimages to some special black birch, hemlock or yellow birch with its sparkling silver grain, his ‘shrines’ as he called them; and might tramp t
en miles, even in deep snow, to ‘keep an appointment’ with a favourite beech, as if with a human philosopher. It was under a chosen clump of elms, gazing up through their branches at the sun as it rose, hoping that no curious passer-by would notice him, that Jefferies when young began the deep-breath meditations that led in 1883 to The Story of My Heart.
Since evergreens remained the same, however, shedding needles but not losing them entirely, perhaps they preserved a greater integrity: a truer self, as Hopkins would have said. Their pyramidal shape pointed skywards, making a spire as grass did, or imitating the reach of flame. They appeared layered with light, powdered and crystallised with it or, in season, snow. (That was the season, too, when Clare welcomed the evergreen garlands draped in Helpston church as ‘emblems of Eternity’.) Pines held their seed cones upright, taper-fashion; the blue boughs of spruce, in winter, were bristled and razored with ice. This was an effect that could outlast the thaw. Thoreau, just keeping his footing above Holden Wood in a March gale in 1858, watched ‘clear ethereal light’ coursing up and down within the pines and their swirling needles delicately frosted, though there was no frost that day. At the sight his spirit too was ‘a lit tree’, and he wished he might stay that way, preferably ‘planted on some eastern hill to glisten in the first rays of the dawn’. With pines he would frequently commune, rough woodsman with rough, rugged, prickling trees, finding them ‘sacred’ and ‘a revelation’. In his nearest woods he claimed that every light-honed needle was known to him; though not, after forty years, the mysterious essence of the trees that bore them.
The deep hush under conifers is not only the slippered rug of fallen needles but a resinous, amber-dropping presence that both embraces and intimidates. It was so beneath the great old cedar that shadowed the convent lawn at school. We never dared scratch our initials on that bark, as on the smooth grey trunks of the playground beeches; even to touch this tree was somehow to violate it, like opening the cedar-scented cupboard at my great-aunt’s house to finger, in silent covetousness, the little porcelain cups and silver-mounted pencils. We never played under the cedar tree, but sometimes processed and prayed. It may not be true, but is hardly strange, that when Martin Luther found a small frost-stiffened fir in the forest he decked it with candle-stars as a symbol of the coming of Christ; and it is not surprising that Rilke portrayed a fir tree waiting and listening beside the snow-pure forest path for that chance of becoming lichterheilig, sanctified by lights.34
All the worse, then, that after that transforming moment in the life of Christmas trees they are stripped bare and thrown into the street, where they wait to be reduced by the council to dust again.
Celebration over, they are cast out,
each one by the wall –
dried pale by central heating, tall
beauty lopped at the root,
and the hurt bound
with holly-paper tight wrapped round.
Where now the pride
of high-hung orbs and candle-shine,
Thick tinsel-trails of the divine
when first they came inside?
Only a tease of left-on silver threads
and, from the pavement, yet-uplifted heads.
The configuration of trees with stars might go deeper. It was Hopkins who discovered it, as he strove to describe the ‘inscape’ of living, growing things: the fundamental structure or essence that made each thing what it was, that gave it a thisness (Thoreau’s word) or a haecittas (his own, from Duns Scotus, his favourite philosopher).35 For Hopkins, since there was God in this, there had to be light too. ‘It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,’ he wrote – and explained to the ever-querulous Bridges that this meant not only ‘broad glares like sheet lightning’, but also ‘owing to its zigzag dints and creasings and network of small many cornered facets, a sort of fork lightning too’. The patterns in nature – feathering of frost on windows, fretting of leaves, ‘damasking’ of dead half-bitten grass strewn in a sheepfold – were expressions of light and, at the same time, expressions of the thing – the individuality, the self of it. He tried to pin down this idea in pencil drawings, too – exquisitely detailed renderings of how undergrowth tangled or waves broke, his long, solemn face rapt in concentration – but in his own hard opinion he failed.
For years he tried to discover the ordering principle in trees, their layering and gradations and the exact form of the clustering of their leaves. (He wrestled manfully with this sensual longing to look at Nature, a longing that must in the end be sinful, though he indulged the vanity of sending some of his drawings away to be photographed, in order to preserve them.) In 1863, aged nineteen and on holiday in Shanklin, he explained to his friend Baillie that he had done many sketches of things that astonished him: ‘The present fury is the ash, and perhaps barley and two shapes of growth in leaves and one in tree boughs …’ It was then that he also recorded his visit to the flowering and leafing Godshill Cross, and drew in his sketchbook the buds of the white lily. ‘He has made us bear his leaf,’ he was to write; ‘…we are so grafted on his wood.’
By the mid-1860s Hopkins had discovered that both the twigs and bursting buds of the ash made ‘quains’ or crystals, the three-dimensional shapes of stars.36 (Star-gazing in 1868, he had noted ‘Cassiopeia on end with her bright quains pointing to the right’.) With this in mind he investigated oaks, finding that the normal growth of the boughs was radiating, that the ‘scanty leaf-stars’ were organised ‘spoke-wise’, and that ‘the star knot is the chief thing: it is whorled, worked round, a little, and this is what keeps up the illusion of the tree.’ The narrower leaves, especially, gave ‘crisped and starry and catharine-wheel forms’. In September 1868 he drew an oak as empty space except for its outermost leaves, a nimbus of writhing stars.
He called this ‘the law of the oak leaves’. It was equally the mystery of the elm or ‘fretty’ hornbeam, the ‘starrily tasselled’ flowering limes or the moorland rocks he clambered over; quaining, once he had detected it, was everywhere in Nature. His mind did not impose it, he was sure, but simply picked up something already there: ‘and I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people [like those poor, drunken slum-dwellers to whom he was to preach of the Holy Ghost] and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called out everywhere again’. It might almost be heard as well as seen, as the wood-grass had seemed to cry out to Thoreau; the starry inscape was also the instress, and the stress the life, the declaration, of the thing. ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme’, he began at St Beuno’s in 1877,
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring …
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
‘All things’, he continued in a notebook, ‘are charged with love, are charged with God, and if we know how to touch them give off sparks and take fire … and tell of him.’
If Hopkins was walking with a companion, talking punningly and philosophically as he often was, he might miss this message, with the ear as well as the eye.37 He endeavoured not to. Quaining gave structure, in the spring of 1871, to ‘broken blots of snow in the dead bents of the hedge-banks’ and to the wilting wild daffodils in his hand, ‘[helping] the eye over another hitherto disordered field of things’. It was also, he thought, the ‘forepitch’ or ‘origin’ of big woolpack clouds, of ‘flying pieces’ and of tufts of cloud blown before the wind. A mere pond in the wood, too, thickly overhung with leaf-quains, became ‘fairyland’:
Rafts and rafts of flake-leaves light, dealt so, painted on the air,
Hang as still as hawk or hawkmoth, as the stars or as the angels there,
Like the thing that never knew the earth, never off roots
Rose.
And the ‘silver slips of young b
rake’ on the hills above St Beuno’s, as he wandered there with Mr Strappini, a fellow seminarian, rose against the light ‘trim and symmetrical and gloried from within’.
The fruit of such trees and briars might well contain light, too. Whitman, after all, imagined some he knew dropping inspiration. Ravilious, in his wood engravings, often gave his trees variety by freighting some with stars. They seemed worthier of bearing something higher, at any rate, than simple apples or blue sloes. Yet Hopkins had found in a ‘lush-kept plush-capped sloe’ the sudden rush of bittersweet grace; and apples had the distinction of being, in popular understanding, the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil of the Garden of Eden.38 They could therefore never quite be the ordinary produce of an ordinary tree. Just as Milton’s Tree of Life might have come from any orchard, ‘Loaden with fruit of fairest colors mixt,/ Ruddie and gold’, and with a mossy trunk up which Satan sinuously climbed, so any apple might still offer revelation. Some Eden-light might be left in them.
Traherne, amid the orchard-heavy Herefordshire hills, instinctively thought apples heavenly.39 God’s wonders were ‘like dangling Apples or like Golden Fruits’, the two equivalent; he classed cider with those other ‘diffusive Joys’, honey and wine. Palmer (who maintained he could happily live on ‘bread and butter and apples’ and, at Shoreham, mostly did) mistakenly thought Milton’s Paradise landscape was sown with apples everywhere. In consequence, he could not help gilding them with grace.
Standing close beneath the tree, he drew apples as carefully as he had pictured wheat, noting how they shone in the full sun as if they stored and increased it. ‘Apples universal bright,’ he noted; ‘Gen. effect in bright sun the whole tree apples & leaves very golden … boughs next in size to smallest twigs are I think of a crusty texture and a pale dead gold …’ The ‘last few sun-glows’, he wrote, ‘give the fruits their sweetness’. When he painted them, however, they seemed to grow heavy with light until they were branch-bending spheres of gold or brass or, in his Magic Apple Tree of around 1830, blazing scarlet lamps. (Even the blossom on his apple trees hung in whorls of white and pink paint so thick that blobs of it would break away from the paper.) These were not trees, but firework displays. They recalled the thought that in medieval times it was apples, rather than candles, that were used to make festive trees of lights.