Laudator Temporis Acti

Eric Thomson writes:

I thought you'd like these two extracts on oak trees, written within eight years of each other:

Diary of the Reverend Francis Kilvert (Saturday, April 22nd 1876):

As we came down the lower slopes of the wooded hillside into the glades of the park the herds of deer were moving under the brown oaks and the brilliant green hawthorns, and we came upon the largest stateliest ash I ever saw and what seemed at first in the dusk to be a great ruined tower, but which proved to be the vast ruin of the king oak of Moccas Park, hollow and broken but still alive and vigorous in parts and actually pushing out new shoots and branches . That tree may be 2000 years old. It measured roughly 33 feet round by arm stretching.

I fear those old men of Moccas, those grey, gnarled, low-browed, knock-kneed, bowed, bent, huge, strange, long-armed, deformed, hunchbacked misshapen oak men that stand waiting and watching century after century biding God's time with both feet in the grave and yet tiring down and seeing out generation after generation, with such tales to tell, as when they whisper them to each other in the midsummer nights, make the silver birches weep and the poplars and aspens shiver and the long ears of the hares and rabbits stand on end. No human hand set these oaks. They are 'the trees which the Lord hath planted'. They look as if they had been at the beginning and making of the world, and they will probably see its end.

From 'Los Robles' in 'Las Orillas del Sar' (1884) by Galician poet Rosalía de Castro (1837-85):

Bajo el hacha implacable, ¡cuán presto
en tierra cayeron
encinas y robles!;
y a los rayos del alba risueña,
¡qué calva aparece
la cima del monte!

Los que ayer fueron bosques y selvas
de agreste espesura,
donde envueltas en dulce misterio
al rayar el día
flotaban las brumas,
y brotaba la fuente serena
entre flores y musgos oculta,
hoy son áridas lomas que ostentan
deformes y negras
sus hondas cisuras.

Beneath the implacable axe, how quickly the evergreens and the oaks fell to earth! And in the rays of the bright dawn, how bald now is the mountaintop!

What were yesterday woods and forests of rugged denseness, where enveloped in sweet mystery at break of day the mists floated and the spring rose serene, hidden among flowers and mosses, today are arid hillocks which, black and deformed, reveal their deep crevices.

---

Back in propria persona, those lines from Rosalía de Castro seem to me to be poetry of a high order, although my inadequate grasp of Spanish doesn't permit me to appreciate them fully. On the other hand, the following poem by Amy Levy (1861–1889), The Birch-Tree at Loschwitz, from A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889), p. 40, doesn't strike me as very distinguished verse, but it did attract my notice for its description of tree-hugging:

At Loschwitz above the city
  The air is sunny and chill;
The birch-trees and the pine-trees
  Grow thick upon the hill.

Lone and tall, with silver stem,
  A birch-tree stands apart;
The passionate wind of spring-time
  Stirs in its leafy heart.

I lean against the birch-tree,
  My arms around it twine;
It pulses, and leaps, and quivers,
  Like a human heart to mine.

One moment I stand, then sudden
  Let loose mine arms that cling:
O God! the lonely hillside,
  The passionate wind of spring!

Isaak Levitan, Birch Grove

Labels: arboricide