Gratitude Monday: White orisons

Here in the District They Call Columbia, we’re at that point in Spring where the cherry trees have snowed their petals all over, and dogwood trees are only just beginning to think about blooming.

But we’re covered for tree-borne beauty, because the tulip magnolias are out, both the purple ones and the white ones.

I am so grateful to see them in my walks around the ‘hood. Not only because of the joy their flowers spark, but also because they and all their barky brethren are at work to clean our air and make our world literally more livable.

Trees also inspire poets—from Rabindranath Tagore to Robert Frost to Edna St. Vincent Millay. Pondering a tree through the seasons and its lifecycle slows you down. Individually and collectively they connect you to life in a completely different way—if you’re willing to take the time.

Siegfried Sassoon is one of the best-known of the poets of World War I. His experiences at the Western Front transformed him, moving from patriotic support to bitter, public opposition. Sassoon used poetic language and structure to convey the kinds of things that newspapers did not report: filth, vermin, rotting corpses; terror, incompetence, futility.

In “Tree and Sky”, written in 1915, Sassoon uses a tree as a symbol for his soul and invites angels to congregate therein and lead him to military triumphs. This was written early in his war; later poems tossed away this kind of imagery and their landscapes were considerably more bleak.

“Tree and Sky”

Let my soul, a shining tree,
Silver branches lift towards thee,
Where on a hallowed winter’s night
The clear-eyed angels may alight.

And if there should be tempests in
My spirit, let them surge like din
Of noble melodies at war;
With fervour of such blades of triumph as are
Flashed in white orisons of saints who go
On shafts of glory to the ecstasies they know.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu