"Sap check'd with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd and bareness everywhere...."
Shakespeare, Sonnets, V
Number 57
I've been reading some Emerson and Thoreau lately, specifically Thoreau's essay, "Walking" and Emerson's famous "Nature," both bound together in a handsome paperback edition (Beacon Press, 1991) with charming wood engravings by Thomas W. Nason.
In "Nature," Emerson writes "The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right."
Number 56
Detail from a 2015 water colour by Malgorzata Wolak Dault
A Tree
A tree is a ladder
A tree is a comb
A leafy balloon
Or a parasol
A tree is many
A tree is one
A key to a door
Under the stars
(M.W.D., Sunday January 10, 2021)
Number 55
In his Specimen Days (1882), poet Walt Whitman announces, in "The Lesson of a Tree," that he is about to talk about "his favourite poplar." What he proceeds to say could apply, however, to any tree anywhere:
"How strong, vital, enduring! how doubly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing.”
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