March 23-26 (Days 29-32)
This is the eighth set of eleven posts I’m doing every four days during Lent as a sort of online devotional in offerings of beauty. These posts include poems, passages, songs, film clips, stories, and more for you to spend time with each day. They’re meant to help you think about being creative, observant, empathetic, and/or still. I will offer all of them with very little or no context.
March 23 (Day 29)
The Hardy Tree
Several years ago I took this picture of the Hardy Tree at St. Pancreas Old Church in London, England. The graveyard is interesting and worthy of visiting for many reasons: the grounds are considered one of the oldest sites of Christian worship in all of England; The Beatles were photographed here for stills inside The White Album; Charles Dickens lived nearby and visited the graveyard often, mentioning it in A Tale of Two Cities; a married Percy Bysshe Shelley used to meet his lover, Mary Godwin (later Shelley) there in secret…at the grave of her mother, the noted feminist Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft. But most mesmerizing to me was the Hardy Tree.
The ash tree is surrounded by several circles of tombstones that ended up there because part of a new railway in the 1860s passed through the church’s graveyard, which at the time contained about 10,000 graves. Most of these bodies were disinterred and reburied. This task was overseen by a young, promising architecture graduate named Thomas Hardy. When the thousands of remains were moved to another site some were outfitted with new markers, leaving behind some of the original tombstones. The story goes that Hardy couldn’t find it in his heart to discard them, so he ordered they be stacked upright in a circle around the tree, which later absorbed some of the stones.
The operations so upset Hardy that he wrote in his diaries of suffering from nervous exhaustions because of his time seeing through the gruesome job. His reaction prompted him to leave London and go back to his beloved, native Dorset where he decided to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. Less than seven years later he was able to give up architecture after the success of his 1874 novel Far From the Madding Crowd. Later he would write my favorite novels by him: The Woodlanders, Jude the Obscure, and Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Visiting this tree is a reminder that what may seem like an ending often becomes a whole new beginning.
In 2014, the year before I took this photograph, it was discovered that the Hardy Tree had become infected by a fungus; the old ash succumbed to its disease and toppled sometime during the Christmas weekend of 2022.
March 24 (Day 30)
I am looking at trees
they may be one of the things I will miss
most from the earth
though many of the ones I have seen
already I cannot remember
and though I seldom embrace the ones I see
and have never been able to speak with one
I listen to them tenderly
their names have never touched them
they have stood round my sleep
and when it was forbidden to climb them
they have carried me in their branches
— W.S. MERWIN,
from The Compass Flower, 1977
March 25 (Day 31)
March 26 (Day 32)
From THE WOODLANDERS
The holes were already dug, and they set to work. Winterbourne’s fingers were endowed with a gentle conjurer’s touch in spreading the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress under which the delicate fibers all laid themselves out in their proper directions for growth. He put most of these roots towards the south-west, for, he said, in forty years’ time, when some great gale is blowing from the quarter, the trees will require the strongest holdfast on that side to stand against it and not fall.
“How they sigh directly we put ‘em upright, though while they are lying down they don’t sigh at all,” said Marty.
“Do they?” said Giles. “I’ve never noticed it.”
She erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held up her finger, the soft musical breathing instantly set in which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled—probably longer after the two planters had been felled themselves.
“It seems to me,” the girl continued, “as if they sigh because they are very sorry to begin life in earnest—just as we be.”
THOMAS HARDY
Buy Lark Ascending-Winner of the Southern Book Prize