(for poem in your pocket day)
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
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.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say.
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
2 comments:
Philip Larkin's The Trees:
"Yet still the unresting castles thresh ..."
Why "castles" why "thresh" What is the significance of this pairing?
JJ
The castles are the big institutions that keep growing the wheat which after a winter has begun to mature and need harvesting again just like the year before.
So the castles and the threshing are the automatic renewal and growth and harvesting of spring.
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