O p e n i n g s2 7(of growth in the case of autumn, and language in the case of the
poem). But it is held back from such distasteful excess by some
inner restraint.
A later English writer, Philip Larkin, also writes about natural
growth in his poem ‘The Trees’:
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said...This is a daringly upfront kind of image for the usually downbeat
Larkin. It sees the burgeoning leaves as like words almost at the
point of articulation. Yet there is a sense in which the image undoes
itself. When the trees come fully into leaf, it will no longer hold
true. It is not as though the trees are murmuring now and will be
shouting then. We might think of a tree striving to come into
blossom as akin to someone trying to say something. But we are
unlikely to imagine a tree in full leaf as an articulate statement. So
the simile is true now, but will cease to apply later, when the whole
process is complete. One of the striking aspects of the lines is the
way they make us see a tree, with its pattern of twigs, leaves and
branches, as a visual image of the invisible roots of language. It is as
though the processes underlying our speech are X- rayed, material-
ised, projected into visual terms.
An even more celebrated Larkin poem, ‘The Whitsun Weddings’,
begins like this:
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One- twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three- quarters- empty train pull out...