In one of the most famous pieces of poetic shlock ever penned, Joyce Kilmer muses that he “shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” “Tree” is not merely the first syllable of treacle, however, and trees–despite poets’ best efforts to abet deforestation through publication–are almost always positive emblems when they appear in a poem–even while forests are often dark and terrible zones.
A.G. Bailey seems to suggest that if all Kilmer and others can see is arboreal loveliness, then they probably can’t see the forest for the trees. “Look well,” this poet says, and he means it. Bailey inverts the old chestnut about the innocent beauty of trees by the bold device of comparing the elm’s “wittol” (witless; also, a knowing but tolerant cuckold) root to a rat–a neat consonantal rhyme–a trick which has the dual effect of making us question our usual assumptions about trees and of exonerating, or at least complicating, the voracious lusts and appetites of the oft-benighted rodent.
In one of the most famous pieces of poetic shlock ever penned, Joyce Kilmer muses that he “shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree.” “Tree” is not merely the first syllable of treacle, however, and trees–despite poets’ best efforts to abet deforestation through publication–are almost always positive emblems when they appear in a poem–even while forests are often dark and terrible zones.
A.G. Bailey seems to suggest that if all Kilmer and others can see is arboreal loveliness, then they probably can’t see the forest for the trees. “Look well,” this poet says, and he means it. Bailey inverts the old chestnut about the innocent beauty of trees by the bold device of comparing the elm’s “wittol” (witless; also, a knowing but tolerant cuckold) root to a rat–a neat consonantal rhyme–a trick which has the dual effect of making us question our usual assumptions about trees and of exonerating, or at least complicating, the voracious lusts and appetites of the oft-benighted rodent.
Kilmer went halfway there when he wrote of the tree’s “hungry mouth,” but failed to pursue this trope as far as Bailey does; Kilmer’s tree-mouth is a baby’s–and what could embody innocent beauty more thoroughly than a baby?–“prest / Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast.” Bailey’s root has a “gimlet face”–it drills holes in the earth, rather than passively suckling, as it “tools for loot,” implying that this “slavering brute” is guilty of at least one of the seven deadly sins.
But the brilliance of Bailey’s sonnet doesn’t inhere in simple inversion. Bailey also wonders at the “wry design” that “transmutes” the brutal root into “green hosannas, tuned to trumpet fare / of sun-bedizened light, from claw to flute.” He doesn’t, therefore, deny the kernel of Kilmer’s poem (that trees are lovely), but he complicates it, rejecting naïve pseudo-Christian kitsch in favour of a far more vital pagan perspective that embraces both chthonic “inchoate energies” and the “glory they themselves have died / to fashion.” In so doing, he not only jolts us into questioning our assumptions about trees and rats, but by analogy–recall Kilmer’s baby/tree and ask yourself how guileless and sweet a clutching, gluttonous newborn really is–all forms of life. (The reader might be led by this re-visioning to see the branches and leaves of the Elm, like its “blind and pointed” roots, tunneling through air, greedily synthesizing sunlight into sugar–the same flip performed by Rodney Graham in his upside-down photographs of trees.) The celebration of beauty is made all the more significant by a wide-awake awareness that it is born of, and constantly attended by, not-so-pretty primal drives.
Bailey’s prosody is faithful to the compact complexity of his sonnet’s argument. What a dance of sound, semantics and syntax he enacts here. Note the deft handling of the demands of his rhyme-scheme, enjambing lines so that syntactic flow is never sacrificed to structural requirements. Look well and see the intricate patterns of assonance and alliteration within the lines. See how he strikes a balance between blunt monosyllables and airy polysyllabic words like “hosannas” and “sun-bedizened.” And note how Bailey smoothly brings back the imagery of the opening lines in the closing couplet, forming a cycle. Fools like Kilmer might write poems like “Trees,” but no fool could hope to forge a field of verbal force like “Elm.”