Philip Larkin, The Trees

Spring is here!—So here’s a poem by Larkin, short, beautiful, masterfully crafted, a little funny, not least because it shows its craft. If you get it, that’s how you know you’re middle-aged: Young people don’t notice such things, because they have nothing inside of them yearning to come out by such comparisons—they’re out there trying to grab with both hands—the recent buds; old people no longer care—the unresting castles.

What are the techniques the coming together of which you could call your articulation of mortality, how does your soul move when you become aware?

Likeness & metaphor are the first, because that's how you become aware of your awareness of the world around you. The trees are alive, they grow, that’s their major motion, the way in which they change yet become more themselves. You compare yourself to them. But life as such can be understood as that which is greater than speech & prompts speech. Every beautiful achievement in that sense is less impressive than its occasion. What is missing here is completion. Too soon & too late circumscribe it, however. Likeness & metaphor are ways of pointing to being, too.

Questions & answers are next, because they bring you to face yourself on that basis. Now, we get two sentences instead of just one. There is such a thing as cyclical time, as with the seasons, & then there is linear time, as with mortality. Both are true, but they are not apart from each other. Trees, spring are metaphors for life; but they could not be such if they were not mortal, too. Reason, indeed, science, shows itself here directly, since trees are obviously connected to nature. What an ugly thing! Tree rings. A tree cut. Dissected, if you will. Death. The illusions of beauty are dispelled by this ugly truth we cannot help learning, being what we are; yet there is something to be said also for the good it reveals—life, while it is life, overgrowing its limits.

Then we go back to metaphor & likeness (onomatopoeia) on a different level, having learned what it is to have an intimation of mortality. Some things are said, some things are suggested: The movement & sound of the trees point to the air, i.e. to that which is invisible, but which suggests & also commands life.