Aspens

A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees

William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-1793)

The Romantics arose much earlier in England than in France, in response to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment, and their legacy has been immense for later, even modern artists. We still very much have a Romantic turn of mind when it comes to Nature. A century on from them, Edward Thomas wrote this beautiful poem called “Aspens”, a tree whose small bright green leaves give the impression of shimmering, or trembling, in a gentle breeze (hence its French name, le tremble). An Old English name for it was cwicbeam, literally "quick-tree". Thomas, like many of his generation, and those before like John Clare, and Thomas Hardy, found Mankind’s insensitivity towards our natural world, and the rapid disappearance of age-old communities, difficult to bear. The poet sees the trees as living, participating in the local community of inn and smithy, and as a natural embodiment of his own grieving for its loss, grief over “lightless pane”, “footless road”, “silent smithy”, “silent inn”. Both tree and poet “unreasonably grieve[s]” in the eyes of the world. But “we cannot other than an aspen be...”. The poets have a duty to speak, whether the world listens or not, because they see metaphorically the deeper dimensions to reality. Thomas’s poem expresses the universal feeling of loss with great delicacy. In this respect too it is “Romantic”, as the Romantics hearkened back to an idyll, but in another it is twentieth century, Modernist, in its broken rhythms. 

All day and night, save winter, every weather,

Above the inn, the smithy, and the shop,

The aspens at the cross-roads talk together

Of rain, until their last leaves fall from the top.

Out of the blacksmith's cavern comes the ringing

Of hammer, shoe, and anvil; out of the inn

The clink, the hum, the roar, the random singing—

The sounds that for these fifty years have been.

The whisper of the aspens is not drowned,

And over lightless pane and footless road,

Empty as sky, with every other sound

Not ceasing, calls their ghosts from their abode,

A silent smithy, a silent inn, nor fails

In the bare moonlight or the thick-furred gloom,

In tempest or the night of nightingales,

To turn the cross-roads to a ghostly room.

And it would be the same were no house near.

Over all sorts of weather, men, and times,

Aspens must shake their leaves and men may hear

But need not listen, more than to my rhymes.

Whatever wind blows, while they and I have leaves

We cannot other than an aspen be

That ceaselessly, unreasonably grieves,

Or so men think who like a different tree.