Written in trochaic tetrameter quatrain form Philip Larkin’s Movement poem The Trees explores the poet’s own ambivalence where he oscillates between the sense of happiness or renewal of leaves to a tree and the sense of loss or pain grief and death that occurs before the leave grow to a tree. Through the change in seasons, the poet tries to remind his belief in the mortality of everything, even the trees, which always look young and afresh.
The poet tries to express that nothing is ever new and afresh rather it is the past that is always present in the absence or hidden in the memories. When he talks about the circles that are made inside the main stem of the trees that denote how old they are, he shows that the trees also die but they have their “yearly trick of looking new” which is “written down in the rings of green.” This idea represents the poets’ belief in the impressions of aging and that every object in this world whether humans or non-humans experiences the same that the plants and trees do. They experience, mortality death, suffering, happiness, and everything in one and the same life
Through the poem, the poet also tries to suggest that there is a cost always to be paid for anything new to happen whether it is rebirth, changing of seasons, or anything; and that is why people in this world cannot be totally happy or totally sad. There is always a kind of ambivalence in the state of happiness and in the state of sadness that all mortal creatures experience.
© Dr. Sanjeev Vishwakarma
Literary Latitude 