When we consider English poets of the last century or so, few – if any – have surely written about trees as extensively, and as well, about trees as Michael Hamburger. In his short poetry career, Edward Thomas wrote the occasional tree poem, of which only ‘Aspens’, accessible here, partially attempts to get ‘inside’ the trees:

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.

Then, of course, there’s Philip Larkin’s ‘The Trees’, read by Larkin here, which, despite its apparently wide appeal, is, to me, one of the least satisfying poems within his mature corpus – though that bar is high. As his best biographer, James Booth, notes, Larkin himself disparaged it as ‘very corny’ and even ‘awful tripe’.

One of Larkin’s great favourites, Hardy, wrote about trees solely in the context of chopping them down (‘Throwing a Tree’). Heaney wrote ‘The Wishing Tree’. But neither concerned themselves with the tree-ness of trees.

Hamburger devotes the whole of the first section – 15 poems – of possibly his richest collection, 1991’s Roots in the Air (Anvil Press) to trees, the first 10 of which each take a single species as their subject, e.g. ‘’Willow’, ‘Elm’, ‘Beech’, etc. ‘Fig’ opens thus:

London made this one: it germinated
On a compost heap, from a matrix
Desiccated and old –
Some fig-end chucked out as refuse;
From a flower-pot began its ascent into light,
A stowaway there, so strange, it was welcome
And planted out. Then dug up, transported
To a colder county, with gales from the North Sea,
Where, rooted in shingle, it took, and throve,
Put out great five-fingered leaves;
Barren, after ten years, but far from mature.

That punning ‘fig-end’ is irresistible; and no doubt Hamburger’s sympathy for the fig’s transplantation stems from his own at the age of nine.

In ‘Yew’, Hamburger addresses the size and long lives of individual trees and their propensity for growing in graveyards:

Too slowly for us it amasses
Its dense dark bulk.
Even without our blood
For food, where mature one stands
It’s beyond us, putting on
Half-inches towards its millennium,
Reaching down farther
Than our memories, our machines.

In ‘Oak’, a tree ‘alone looks compact, in a stillness hides / Black stumps of limbs that blight or blast bared; / And for death reserves its more durable substance.’ The poem’s ending is reminiscent of the writings of Roger Deakin, another Suffolk-dweller, who wrote extensively about trees, especially in Wildwood, and lived in an Elizabethan house with great, creaking beams:

How by oak-beams, worm-eaten,
This cottage stands, when brick and plaster have crumbled,
In casements of oak the leaded panes rest
Where new frames, new doors, mere deal, again and again have rotted.

Unsurprisingly, Hamburger also wrote, in the section’s last three poems, about the Great Storm, of 17 October 1987, and its aftermath. ‘A Massacre’ begins in an uncharacteristically Blakean vein,

It came like judgement, came like the blast
Of power that, turned against itself, brings home
Presumption to the unpresuming also,
To those who suffered power and those unborn.

Throughout Hamburger’s tree poems there is a deeply-felt admiration, both explicit and implicit, for the endurance of trees. ‘Afterlives’, documenting the extensive work undertaken in the storm’s wake, is positively Shakespearean in its register, ambition and rolling diction and its superb closing couplet:

Prostrate, the mulberry from half its roots,
Far less than half its wood of centuries,
Shoots again, grapples, twists
And on the old as on the new twigs bears
Fruit for the blackbirds, thrushes,
With luck a few for us;
Who now, more singly seeing, meet what remains,
Less than the tree it was and more than a tree
By the diminishment, the lying low,
Bedded on grass, with poppies and balsam lush
Where the shade was its greater prospering cast.

No wonder that in her film about Hamburger, Tacita Dean chose – with wonderful results – to focus on his gnarly face and hands as he talked about his garden’s various apple trees and their fruit.