As another ominous war fills our screens, and poets in safer places question their perhaps trivial obsession with words, politicians have weighed in on just that: whether broadcasters have a moral duty to call insurgents terrorists. The BBC, drowning in graphic footage, say ‘show don’t tell’: let viewers judge. They don’t, always, but nine days earlier there had indeed been widespread outrage – at the at the felling of a single tree.
‘Murder!’ cried some. ‘An act of criminal damage’ said police. Less clear was what kind of emotional or economic fix could have seen such an act through. Was it a dare? An attempt to thwart an outdoor wedding? Anti-environmental terrorism? Hundreds of older, more significant trees are felled every day for contentious infrastructure, but this sycamore, planted 180 years ago by a prescient landowner in a curvy hollow by Hadrian’s Wall – a UNESCO World Heritage site – had starred in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and been the Woodland Trust’s 2016 English Tree of the Year. In 2020 this tree, as the subject of Zoe Mitchell’s ‘Sycamore Gap’, had been a Guardian Poem of the Week.
Our primal affinity with trees means they are favoured backdrops for the same life events where poems – such as Joyce Kilmer’s much-parodied ‘I think that I shall never see/ a poem lovely as a tree’ – loom. A skilled craftsman, using tropes whose days were numbered by 1913, Kilmer conjures a species complete with ‘breasts’, ‘arms’, ‘hair’ and ‘bosom’, concluding ‘Poems are made by fools like me/ but only God can make a tree.’ Possibly, but its piety and male gaze saw it published in ‘Poetry’ that year alongside Ford Madox Ford and Ezra Pound.
Trees often share human suffering. Some of our starkest battlefield images are not of soldiers but the spectral, depleted ranks of trees. In 1803 Wordsworth’s ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ (another Poem of the Week) offered the Haitian leader comfort in ‘Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies’ – a faith which L’Ouverture’s own words from prison echoed: ‘In overthrowing me you have cut down […] only the trunk of the tree of liberty: it will spring up again from the roots.’ Arborists believe a new sycamore will regrow from the stump. For it to thrive and for future generations to see it, our ‘air, earth and skies’, brutalised since Wordsworth wrote by war and human short-termism, will need more help.
Pennine Platform 