The Trees

26 Março 2020, 08:00 • Isabel Maria da Cunha Rosa Fernandes

Dear Students,

 

While you’re busy with the summary assignment (Raymond Williams, “Literature”), I would like to share with you the following poem by Philip Larkin (see below).

I hope it’s thought-provoking but that it may also act as a sign of hope for the future as well as a realistic awareness of death and its inevitability. Note, however, how powerful the final incitement is: “Begin afresh”… everyday!

Stay at home and take care!

I’ll keep in touch.

 

Isabel Fernandes

 

 

The Trees

 

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.