The Trees
The Trees - meaning Summary
Seasonal Renewal and Mortality
Larkin's poem contrasts spring's visible renewal with human mortality. The speaker watches trees bud and finds their fresh greenness both consoling and sorrowful: a seasonal reappearance that suggests rebirth but also conceals death, recorded in growth rings. Trees insist on cyclical regeneration, seeming to dismiss the past and urge repetition. The poem frames nature's persistent renewal as simultaneously hopeful and ambivalent about the passage of time.
Read Complete AnalysesThe 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.
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