A Verb Agreement - Analysis

Pruning as a test of what poetry is worth

Les Murray’s poem sets up a quietly comic but serious question: what does it mean to value a poet’s body and work in a world of real, falling wood? After a windstorm, the first man aloft in the broad silky-oak is not a hired arborist but Andrew Lansdown the poet, introduced with affectionate specificity: bearded and supple, nimbly working where the speaker couldn’t clamber. The poem’s central tension arrives immediately: the task is practical and dangerous, yet it’s framed through the lens of verse, as though the tree-work and the line-work are suddenly the same job.

The speaker’s admiration is unmistakable, but it’s threaded with protectiveness. Calling Lansdown the poet in the middle of the physical scene is not just a label; it makes the climb feel like a risk to something larger than one person—an art, a voice, a whole inward kingdom that the poem will return to in the final line.

Meter as a safety rail, and as a joke that isn’t a joke

The poem’s brightest trick is how it uses grammar and prosody to talk about bodily hazard. When Lansdown asks for a chainsaw, the speaker refuses: I couldn’t let him hazard an iamb or a dactyl. On the surface, it’s a playful pun—danger translated into the terms of poetic feet. But the line keeps deepening: the real fear is far worse his perched body, which the speaker calls a body of value and verses. That phrase welds the human body to the body of work; harm to one would be harm to the other.

The image that clinches the refusal—showering rubies—shows the imagination running ahead into catastrophe. Wood chips become “rubies,” beauty becomes shrapnel. Even an imagist so spry shouldn’t be tempted by that kind of vividness. The poem implies that poetic seeing can be dangerous here: it glamorizes what could kill you.

From suspended danger to “God-spared” relief

A clear turn comes when the speaker’s caution reshapes the scene’s outcome. Instead of the chainsaw, Lansdown hawked with a handsaw, working west-and-southerly—a detail that makes the cutting feel like navigating weather and balance, not just removing limbs. The speaker watches from below, amid scattered choppings, while Lansdown remains above, both literally and in the poem’s hierarchy of value.

The relief is stated in the poem’s most compressed, doctrine-like line: God-spared from caesuras or endstoppings. Murray turns poetic pauses into near-death threats: a caesura is suddenly a break in a body, and an endstopping hints at an ending that would be final. The tone here is grateful but not sentimental; it’s grateful in a startled way, as if the speaker realizes only afterward how close the scene could have come to an irreversible stop.

The tree’s October “Scala” and the poem’s new scale of value

After the immediate danger, the poem widens its lens into seasonal time. The tree has twice since become a Scala of ginger balconies, a word that suggests both a staircase and a musical scale. That double sense matters: the tree is an architecture you ascend, and also a kind of music the year plays. Calling it a palladium—a protective talisman—recasts the earlier scene: pruning wasn’t merely cleanup but a kind of guardianship, preserving a living emblem that returns every October.

Even the birds are described in a way that keeps mixing the bodily with the linguistic. They have skin heads like the thumb and they interrogate its bloom with dulcet commentary. Their feeding becomes talk; their presence becomes critique. The bloom sobers under this attention, as though the tree’s extravagance must be tested by appetite and observation before it can count as real.

The kingdom within Andrew

The closing comparison—bat-nipped gold or greening out blue, the tree glories—finally ties the whole scene back to the poet. The silky-oak’s changing colors and partial damage don’t cancel its radiance; they make it more earthly and more earned. And then Murray lands the last, startling valuation: it glories like the kingdom within Andrew. The poem suggests that a poet’s inner life is not a private ornament but a living, weathered thing—capable of storm-damage, pruning, seasonal return, and sudden brilliance. What was at stake in refusing the chainsaw wasn’t just safety; it was preserving that inward ecology so it can keep flowering into the world.