The trees are down

Yesterday I went home and faced a tragedy. The glorious big fig tree in front on our flat is gone. The rest of the trees in the street are still standing, but for some reason they took this one out (I think the roots have actually been interfering with some electrical work). I walked down the street just as they were carving up it's last remains with a chainsaw. Devastating. I wish I'd known it was going so I could have said my farewell and prepared myself. Last night I lay in bed with no leaves outside my window, no longer nestled into the canopy of a tree, just up there bare against the sky. And now we face the western sun of summer without it's shade. So, in honour of this momentous event, I thought I'd give you one of the more famous poems about the falling of trees. It's perhaps a little pantheistic, and takes a verse out of context (and is a pretext for a prooftext, or whatever Carson said, if ever there was one) but it suits how I felt about my tree.

The Trees are Down

-and he cried with a loud voice: Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees - (Revelation)

They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.

For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches

                         as they fall,

The crash of the trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,

With the 'Whoops' and the 'Whoas', the loud common talk, the loud

                        common laughs of the men, above it all.

I remember one evening of a long past Spring

Turning in at a gate, getting out of a cart, and finding a large dead rat

                        in the mud of the drive.

I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,

But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.

The week's work here is as good as done. There is just one bough

       On the roped bole, in the fine grey rain,

              Green and high

              And lonely against the sky.

                         (Down now! -)

              And but for that,

              If an old dead rat

Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought

                         of him again.

It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;

These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem:

When the men with the 'Whoops' and the 'Whoas' have carted the

                        whole of the whispering loveliness away

Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.

It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the

                        planes;

Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,

              In the March wind, the May breeze,

In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from the

                         great seas.

              There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;

              They must have heard the sparrows flying,

And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying -

               But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:

                        'Hurt not the trees.'

Charlotte Mew 1869-1928

Pictures from frenchduck.com and fecielo.com.