This is from The
Rambling Sailor, published the year my mom was born, 1929. Mew had killed
herself by drinking Lysol the year before. I share with her her visceral reaction to the cutting down of trees I've known. Although I can't say it makes me suicidal. Other things maybe. (See also Hopkins response to cut-down trees: Binsey Poplars.)
The
Trees Are Down
-and he cried with a loud voice:
-and he cried with a loud voice:
Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees --
(Revelation.)
They are cutting
down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.
For days there has
been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,
The crash of trunks,
the rustle of trodden leaves,
With the "Whoops"
and the "Whoas," the loud common talk, and the loud common
laughs
of the men, above it all.
I remember one
evening of a long past Spring
Turning in at a
gate, getting out of the cart, and finding a large dead rat in the
mud of the drive.
I remember thinking:
alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,
But at least, in
May, that even a rat should be alive.
The week's work here
is as good as done. There is just one bough
On roped bole, in
the fine grey rain,
Green and high
And lonely against the sky.
(Down now!--)
And but for that
If an old dead rat
Did once, for a
moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.
It is not for a
moment the Spring is unmade to-day;
These were great
trees, it was in them from root to stem;
When the men with
the "Whoops" and the "Whoas" have carted the
whole of the whispering
loveliness away
Half the Spring, for
me, will have gone with them.
It is going now, and
my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;
Half my life it has
beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,
In the March wind, the May breeze,
In the great gales
that came over to them across the roofs from the great seas.
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small
creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying --
But I, all day, I heard the angels crying
"Hurt not the trees."
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