Poetry Blog No 158 To a Liquid Amber Tree

TO A LIQUID AMBER TREE

This poem is somewhat in the form of an ode as used by the English Romantics. That is to say it is in a regular stanza form and starts with a specific object or set of images and evolves from them to a more general feeling-filled philosophic tone.

Each line is an Iambic pentameter- 5 times unstressed, stressed syllables (Through summer rain and sun your season's worth), that is the same as Shakespeare's Sonnets and plays and the odes of Keats. There are 10 lines in each stanza with a rhyming scheme ABAB CDCD EE. This means that as well as the overall arc of the development and meaning of the poem there is also a smaller development in each stanza. The first four lines introduce some meanings and images, the next four develop them and the final last two rhyming lines come to a sort of "conclusion".

The subject of the poem could be called in a general way "time", especially as it lives in human experience.
PS The Liquid Amber Tree is also known as American Sweetgum.

TO A LIQUID AMBER TREE

Through summer rain and sun your season's worth

Was in the flourishing of green life, bringing

Leaf-mantle's shade, rich on the morning earth,

Wide-fingered branches sheltering the singing,

Light-winged inhabitants of air. But since

Eternal time soft-turns till autumn's caught

The dawning sun in misty breath that hints

At grey-eyed winter's sharp and frosty thought

You have transformed your sun-born plenitude

To constellations of wild stars, flame-hued.

As golden as a harvest moon arising

Through eastern night's autumnal, misty skies,

As yellow as a candle flame aspiring

To cheer with single light night-wintered eyes,

As red as soon-descending solar face

Farewelling day through scattered westward cloud,

Are these your leaves, still hanging in their place,

But changing to a multi-coloured crowd.

Like youthful memories made jewels by years,

Soon shed as silently as secret tears.

Such is the raiment of the days, once green

With expectations of arising powers:

A prospect of accomplishment that's seen

To fade to golden failings with the hours

That flee in multitudes as fleeting days

And pass too swiftly through the flying years.

Forever to the future passing, plays

Hard time's relentless march, and in our ears

All that once was of hope and purposed reason

Is melody now lost in fading's season.

The gold-red leaves are shed and flutter down,

Lie brittle now before the winter's birth;

And from remembered glory die to brown,

And vanish in the all-absorbing earth.

Bare branches are a skeleton of tree,

The seeming death of life's green flame, imploring

Repeal of winter's temporal decree,

And trembling in the freezing wind's rough warring.

And in the season of the early frost

The memory of bursting life seems lost.

But deep is life and time has phoenix wings,

And every dying is a being born,

And all that's lost is secret gain and brings,

Like night, a never-lived-before, new dawn.

So winters bring new buds of spring, allow

The sole bird of the fire-death to soar,

Declaring life in ever-fuller power,

Its new-born glory greater than before...

And thus in time time's endless purpose shows;

And thus in time time's tree forever grows.