A Green Thing in the Way?
James Harpur on Blake’s Double Vision and the Assault against Nature and the Poetic Imagination
How we see the world is how we treat it. This sounds simple, obvious, but that statement lies at the heart of all ecological concerns. Implied is the idea that no matter how much protest there is over pollution or deforestation (say), if those with power have a particular worldview, then that will prevail. William Blake put it well in a letter he wrote to the Reverend John Trusler on 23 August, 1799. He said: ‘everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees [my italics].’
In his letter, Blake was referring to his method of painting. But the relation of perception to action has a universal application, including our attitude to nature. Consider his words, ‘The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way’, in relation to the following two examples of environmental action.
In 1999, an ordinary-looking hawthorn tree in Co. Clare in the west of Ireland made international headlines. Road planners intent on building a bypass for Newmarket-on-Fergus were about to chop down the tree as part of their operations. But the builders had ignored the age-old and pervasive lore that the hawthorn is sacred to the Sí, the Good People, the fairies, and that any harm to it would bring unspecified but real ‘trouble’. When a well-known Irish storyteller named Eddie Lenihan heard of the proposed road and the destruction of the hawthorn, he researched its history and found out that by tradition it marked the boundary between the fairies of Munster and Connacht. Lenihan contacted the local newspaper and radio, putting forward the case that the felling of the tree would bring ‘trouble’, that in effect the road would become an accident black spot. He also published a letter in the Irish Times, which was seen and commented on by the New York Times. Soon the BBC and CNN became interested. In effect, Lenihan was forcing the planners (and the world) to look at a tree in two ways at once: as a physical beauty and as a totem, sacred to the fairies. The hawthorn was duly spared and still remains beside the bypass, which was shifted to accommodate it.
The second story involves another tree, a 300-year-old oak so well known to the locals of Leamington in Warwickshire that they named it: the Hunningham Oak. It was an oak planted at about the time Daniel Defoe was writing his Journal of a Plague Year in the early 1720s; an oak that had been a family member of the locality as far back as anyone could remember. An oak that was chopped down in September 2020 in the great cause of HS2. Nor was it sacrificed for the railway itself—no, merely a service road. The voices of the campaigners were loud, but the tree was not a hawthorn, and the country was not Ireland, and their cries were drowned out by the chainsaws. The stump remains in place, and it even has a blue plaque attached to it, a fitting commemoration, or perhaps a badge of shame?
Irish farmers routinely avoid cutting hawthorns in their fields; the trees stand there in magnificent isolation, flying small white flags of peace in May. To cut a hawthorn is to invite grief of some sort, and this idea, of the sacred nature of trees, has deep-seated roots in Western and other cultures throughout the world. In classical times, Greeks and Romans were well-versed in the story of Erysichthon, king of Thessaly. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Erysichthon is portrayed as a bullying impious man, who commits hubris by destroying the sacred grove of the goddess Ceres, including a magnificent oak tree. As Erysichthon’s slaves hesitate to fell this tree, he snatches the axe from one them and, deaf to the tree’s audible groans, he begins to chop away. Not sap, but ‘fluxit discusso cortice sanguis’—‘blood flows from the gashed bark’. One of his slaves can bear the butchery no longer and rushes forward to stop his master, who promptly cuts off his head. Even when the nymph of the tree (the hamadryad) warns the king of dire punishment, he continues his dark deed, until the tree is horizontal and its nymph lifeless.
The nymph’s warning to Erysichthon is duly realised. Ceres mobilises the goddess of hunger, Fama, who inflicts a terrible hunger on the king. He spends his whole fortune on food, but the more he eats, the hungrier he becomes. He even resorts to selling his own daughter for food, again to no avail. There can be only one outcome, a Grand-Guignol ending, and one of Ovid’s grisliest: tearing at his limbs and gnawing his own flesh, infelix minuendo corpus alebat: ‘The wretched man fed his body by eating it away.’
The myth of Erysichthon is a story about someone who, as Ovid tells us, numina divum sperneret, despises the gods, and nullos aris adolere odores, burns no incense at the altars. His impiety is punished by gruesome self-destruction; and it is a story and an outcome that could stand as a morality tale for our modern consumer society: the more we eat, consume, the hungrier we become.
Erysichthon saw the oak of Ceres merely as a ‘green thing that stands in the way’. What he and the Hunningham Oak planners lacked was the ability to see a tree with what William Blake called ‘Double Vision’, i.e. the ability to see things simultaneously in two ways, materially and spiritually as, for example, a tree and its hamadryad. Blake gives an example of Double Vision in a short poem (written in a letter of 1802 to Thomas Butts) in which he describes a thistle in terms of a grey-haired old man. It’s as if Blake saw through the outward surface of the thistle’s whiskery spikes, its drooping head and thin body, and Imagination re-shaped it into an old man. What he actually wrote is this:
double the vision my Eyes do see
And a double vision is always with me
With my inward Eye ‘tis an old Man grey
With my outward a Thistle across my way.
For Blake, Double Vision was not just what poets should practise, but everybody. His fear of, and rage against, the Single Vision, as he called it, of the Newtonians, i.e. of scientific reductionism and literalism, feels like a fight to the death. Until we cultivate or perhaps, better, restore, our Double Vision, we will continue to produce government agencies and planners who will always sacrifice beauty and nature on the altar of progress and technology. Man cannot live on bread alone; if we do not feed the soul, then we shall wander the world like zombies, or victims of spiritual concussion, wondering where we are, who we are, and what the point of anything is.
How do we cultivate Double Vision? Through exposing ourselves to and participating in acts of imagination. These do not have to be the traditional arts: gardening, decorating a house, cooking, the way we dress—imagination creates new worlds in all spheres of life. But the traditional arts are its corner stone, and not least poetry. I do not know how much modern children are exposed to enriching poems at school; but I still remember my first exposure, as a young schoolboy, to ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and its strange, scary world, to this day. Double Vision, in other words, is something that can be learned, and it can affect the way we see nature. For example, through the prism of a poem such as Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Binsey Poplars’, about the felling of poplar or aspen trees in the village of Binsey on the outskirts of Oxford in 1879:
My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
All felled, felled, are all felled;
Of a fresh and following folded rank
Not spared, not one
That dandled a sandalled
Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
Thomas Hardy’s ‘Throwing a Tree’, his elegy for a tree cut down or ‘thrown’ to use his word, in the New Forest in the south of England, also employs Double Vision. Hardy describes the two axemen as ‘executioners’, who do not walk but ‘stalk’ over the knolls with their tools of trade. The tree singled out for felling, or throwing, has a ‘death mark’ on its bark. The two executioners go about their business methodically; they are professionals, getting comfortable, taking their time with what is, for them, merely a ‘green thing in the way’; but not for Hardy, who subtly humanises the tree; the colour of the scattered wood chips on the green moss is a reminder of white flesh; the incision made by the foresters is a ‘gash’, i.e. a wound. The tree itself is a shivering ‘giant’, and is later called a ‘living mast’; and its fellow trees are called ‘neighbours’. The tree is part of a community.
Hardy increases the drama in the third stanza, making the men’s work seem like a botched execution:
The saw then begins, till the top of the tall giant shivers:
The shivers are seen to grow greater with each cut than before:
They edge out the saw, tug the rope; but the tree only quivers,
And kneeling and sawing again, they step back to try pulling once more.
Finally, ’The tree crashes downward: it shakes all its neighbours throughout, / And two hundred years’ steady growth has been ended in less than two hours.’
‘The Trees are Down’ by Charlotte Mew, who died in the same year as Thomas Hardy, 1928, at the age of 59, also employs Double Vision. This lament for plane trees cut down in Euston Square Gardens in London sets out its stall with an epigraph from the Book of Revelation: ‘—and he cried with a loud voice / Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees’. For Mew, the last plane tree to fall is not just a tree but a living icon of Spring: ‘When the men with the ‘Whoops’ and the ‘Whoas’ have carted the whole of the whispering loveliness away / Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.’ She connects the trees not only with her own humanity, but entwines them with other aspects of nature. She ends her poem with a deathly hush:
There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;
They must have heard the sparrows flying,
And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying—
But I, all day, I heard an angel crying:
‘Hurt not the trees.’
Our poets, Hopkins, Hardy and Mew, have put on the spectacles of Blake’s Double Vision and seen their trees as material objects but also, crucially, the place of the indwelling Christ (Hopkins); a giant that shivers and quivers (Hardy); and totems of Spring with beating hearts, who can hear the birds and insects (Mew). All three poets register the assault against the poetic imagination. Wordsworth described the latter in his poem about Tintern Abbey, when he said ‘we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul: / While with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things.’
The story of Erysichthon tells of one who did not see into the life of things, warning us that for those ‘who spurn the gods and do not burn incense at the altars’ there is a dire punishment for desecration: the soul, starved of the sacred, will become a vacuum that can never be filled. The goddess Fama hangs over the ‘Newtonian’ single-vision practitioners like a giant skeletal spectre.
And it’s a spectre that hangs over us all in the 21st century, more so than ever. The spectre of the endless compulsion to fill our spiritual emptiness with stuff, and still remain starving. To ravage the earth for precious resources, careless of the consequences, is symptomatic of a culture lacking spiritual vision and the poetic imagination. And it is, perhaps, the poetic imagination that remains our only long-term bulwark against the rapacious eyes and hands of human predators. Who cuts down a tree truly believing that it harbours a divinity or is part of a divine nexus of creation?
James Harpur has published ten books of poetry and won a number of prizes and awards, including the 1995 National Poetry Competition. His books include The White Silhouette; The Oratory of Light: Poems Inspired by St Columba and Iona; and his latest, The Gospel of Gargoyle (Eblana Press), a sequence of poems set on the rooftop of Notre-Dame Cathedral. He gives talks on myth, mysticism and the poetic imagination and nature.