{"id":69523,"date":"2014-04-10T16:58:04","date_gmt":"2014-04-10T20:58:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=69523"},"modified":"2014-04-10T17:54:27","modified_gmt":"2014-04-10T21:54:27","slug":"philip-larkins-the-trees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/04\/10\/philip-larkins-the-trees\/","title":{"rendered":"Philip Larkin\u2019s \u201cThe Trees\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"daffodils\"<\/a>

Photo: 4028mdk09, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p><\/div>\n

It is spring now, and very hard not to feel in clich\u00e9s. Especially with daffodils everywhere\u2014and very cheap they are, too. \u201cTelephone flowers,\u201d a friend of mine calls them. I buy them by the armful; don\u2019t you?<\/p>\n

When I was thirteen, I wrote my first and last piece of fiction. It was about an old woman in a nursing home suffering from dementia and planning her garden through the winter. It was called \u201cLiving Time.\u201d Even by thirteen-year-old standards, it was mawkish and I knew it. Because\u2014the silliness of that act of ventriloquism aside\u2014what new is there to say about spring? <\/p>\n

Being hard on one\u2019s own young self is not very fair, and it is also an act of cheap egotism; one would never indulge the same lack of generosity toward other children trying to express things, things that feel real and new to them. If these things have passed into clich\u00e9, it only means they have been true many times, and that is no sin.<\/p>\n

Philip Larkin said, \u201cDeprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.\u201d But then he wrote this.<\/p>\n

\n

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.<\/p>\n

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old?
No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.<\/p>\n

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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