Ode on a Silver Birch in St James' Park

Name: Ode on a Silver Birch in St James' Park
Author: Herbert Trench

Herbert Trench's ode finds the speaker in St James' Park in young April, leading his Muse to a silver birch on a grassy mound, a tree he loves, with London's sound surrounding it like a shore. He walks past a lake where broods of ducks and a swan drift, then hears a rose-grey pigeon wooing his mate in the branches. Passing pale saplings and a glade of golden flowers, he finds the birch standing alone, enthralled by the sun and deaf to his step. He asks what buried god conceived her and imagines she might reveal the Mind that shaped them both, since the same hymn seems to have drawn tree and poet from the dark. She ignores the city's clangour and the wisdom of the dead, caring only for light. He wishes he could show her man rising toward the sun. Human glories, loves and towers, brief yet perfect, must like her find beauty in besieging the dark, and the height of ecstasy, the touch of infinity, is blind.

By Herbert Trench · First published 1901 · Genre: Nature poetry, Ode, Lyric poetry · 898 words

First lines

1. Muse, I will show thee, on a grassy mound / Moving with tufted shadows, albeit bare / Herself, for yet young April primes the air / And bloom snow-laden boughs, the tree I love. / London doth compass it with shores of sound / And thrills the buds when there's no breath above / To shake its fountain beauty. Thus I came / Along the courtly mere of thicket isles, / And Spring entoil'd me in a hundred wiles, / Bringing the heart content without a name. / Broods, russet-plumed and emerald, steer'd on / With arrowy wake adown the placid tide / And in that gloomy pool there rode enskied, / Aloof, the stately languor of a swan. / But now the lake sets hither with a breeze / And crooks the peel'd bole of its planes. -- Ah, there / Thou shall find audience -- yon's my shadowy love! -- / O'er head a rose-grey pigeon beat his wings / About his 'lighted mate, and wooed the bough / And passion born of sight of mortal things / In warmth of living, moved and moves me now / As from the careless height that sways above / Floateth his voice, the soul of greening trees.

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Genres

Nature poetry — The poem centers on a silver birch, spring, light, water, birds and trees, and its emotional force comes from the speaker's response to the natural world.
Ode — It is addressed directly to the tree as a figure of beauty and wisdom, and its formal structure of numbered stanzas with exalted apostrophe follows the classical and Romantic ode tradition.
Lyric poetry — It expresses a single speaker's intense inner feeling, memory and longing in musical, emotionally charged verse rather than narrating events.
Romantic poetry — It shares the Romantic preoccupations of nature as a source of spiritual insight, the poet's sympathetic communion with an object in nature, and the imagination's power to 'divine' hidden meaning, echoing Keats and Shelley.

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Ode on a Silver Birch in St James' Park is listed on Textopian as a poem by Herbert Trench, dated 1901 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Herbert Trench
Date: 1901 CE
Language: English
Genres: Nature poetry, Ode, Lyric poetry, Romantic poetry, Aestheticism
Length: 898 words
Structure: 1 section, 5 paragraphs
Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)

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