Green Thoughts, Green Shades: Remembering Homer with Trees

Before Andrew Marvell describes the mind “Annihilating all that’s made | to a green Thought in a green Shade” in “The Garden” (1681), he likens it to an ocean wherein each kind does “streight its own resemblance find.” Any assertion of direct copying implied by “streight” is immediately undone by the less confident, “resemblance,” which underlines the mind’s gift for noticing similarities, rather than exact imitations. The ocean, with its reflective, refractive, and transparent surface, symbolizes the imagination’s capacity to creatively construct likenesses. The poem aurally reflects this image in the stanza’s similar, but not the same, rhymes (“mind-find-kind,” “made-shade”) which become a musical mirror for visual resemblances.² In this watery world, our ear might hear a flicker of an aquatic “strait” even in the assured “streight.” Marvell imagines the mind as at once an oceanic similarity-machine, a glimmering landscape of multiple visual and aural reflections, and also singularly green: in a systolic and diastolic pattern, the mind creates resemblances and then renders them to naught, leaving only a “green thought in a green shade.” Creation elicits loss, therefore. The present tense promotion of “annihilating” interweaves the death of things “made”—including poetry’s destruction (poetry etymologically stems from the Greek ποιέω—poieō—I make)—with the growth of a green thought. Undulating in seasonal tides, the cycles of death and regrowth visible in green plant worlds represent this coexistence of annihilation and creation.

Alice Oswald, the contemporary English poet, shares Marvell’s attention to water, greenness, and the creative gift of similarity. In her second Oxford Professor of Poetry lecture, “Interview with Water,” Oswald states that “water is never the same as itself,” making the sea’s pattern of imperfect reflections an image for similes, like Marvell’s oceanic mind of resemblances.³ Simile is also green for Oswald: in the same lecture, Oswald explains that rather than reducing one thing to another, simile “proliferates,” allowing comparisons to grow away from the initial object by “sprout[ing]” new meaning.⁴ Such leafy similarity recalls the second line of Philip Larkin’s “The Trees,” in which trees come into “leaf | like something almost being said,” where the liquid alliteration laces leaves and likenesses together, asserting that this sprouting is almost creative speech.⁵ Larkin foregrounds the simultaneity of creativity and loss, too, ending the first stanza with “their greenness is a kind of grief,” rhyming the almost-speaking leaf with “grief.” For Oswald, coupling creativity and loss around watery plants appears in her own poetry too, for example, in “A Short Story of Falling.”⁶

Delicately measured into iambic pentameter couplets, the poem uses rhyme like Marvell and Larkin, to create internal reflections binding watery and arboreal worlds together. Cycles of uplift and descent define this “story” of metamorphosis, as Oswald compares the evaporation, condensation, and precipitation of water to a plant’s budding and falling. In her recent volume, Nobody, the ocean “inked itself into leaves and fell back down again as water,” where the reflexive verb “inked itself” invests the water with agency and metaliterary resonances earlier felt in “A Short Story of Falling.”⁷ Seemingly able to write, transform, fall, and ascend again, the water/plant image not only represents the simile but also the creativity of “inked stories.”

Oswald’s cyclical, leafy “story” diverges from Marvell and Larkin by being a central mode through which she constructs a relationship with the Homeric epic. The lecture, “Interview with Water,” in which she imagines how similes sprout poems, claims to use “water as a way of reading Homer” and Nobody is a response to Homer’s Odyssey.⁸ Αlthough “water is in [its] thinking,” the presiding color of Nobody is green since the Odyssey is, according to Oswald, an “unbelievably growing, living, leaf-like poem.”⁹ She worked in a plant nursery while writing Nobody and a greenhouse’s energy constitutes “exactly what it’s like to read the Odyssey.”¹⁰ Not only is Homeric poetry leaf-like itself but it also contains uniquely animated plant presences: in an essay on the Iliad, Oswald claims the trees on Calypso’s island retain “some of their own spirit” and even writes that:

Homer’s work is read through and with water, the “simile” element, which resembles the sprouting growth of plants; correspondingly, Homeric poetry is a leaf, containing real leaves. Since the plant/water pairing coalesces creation and loss into a circular pattern, the livingness of Homeric poetry comes to coexist with a recognition of its annihilation: poetry’s life and afterlife are held in one image. For Oswald, responding to Homer in the present—following Homer’s model by attempting to “put a tree into a poem”—the livingness of Homeric poetry can only be approached through acknowledgment of what is different, what has been lost.¹² Her Homeric responses exist not as equivalences but as Marvellian “resemblances,” similes which can creatively find points of contact with ancientness, but which must recognize “annihilat[ion]” too. The sprouting, creative “green thought” must not be substituted for the absence intrinsic to the “green shade.”

In one of her later Professor of Poetry lectures, titled “A Lament for the Earth,” Oswald considered plants’ cycle of loss and regrowth as symbolic of poetry’s creative, but elegiac potential. The rings of bark in trees “express a kind of future perfect or continuous past, which, like bereavement, leaves you breathing but stranded stock still.”¹³ Like Larkin’s apprehension of “grief” in leafy greenness, Oswald connects trees’ nonlinear temporalities and their transformation of seasonal death into bark spirals to the experience of bereavement. The tree’s “future perfect” tense pairs growth and loss, the tidal oscillation of life and death experienced in one breath, and in a self-reflexive way too, the “green shade” of writing with the past. More broadly, for Oswald who thinks with Homer, the tree becomes an image for the discipline of creative classical reception. Perhaps, beyond this, the tree’s life cycle articulates the transition from oral composition to a literary text, since the written page is composed of dead tree matter (another green shade), living speech substituted for a lasting text.¹⁴ Although off-by-heart recitation is Oswald’s personal performance manifesto, her collections ultimately exist written on the page, unlike the fluid growth of original oral Homeric performance.

Unsettling the assumption of a dead past and a living present, Oswald underlines the vitality of ancient oral poetry and the potentially ossified, inert, deathliness of a written present; this switch is particularly pertinent in our current environmental crisis of widespread ecological loss, ravaged green spaces, and landscapes haunted by extinction. In “A Lament for the Earth,” Oswald describes ecological death in asyndetic starkness, connecting Demeter’s planet-destroying grief in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter to contemporary fears: “famine, crop failure, aborted seed, confused seasons, dead bodies left lying thin.”¹⁵ Oswald asks what the valency of ancient poetry, and our relationship with it creatively and/or critically, might be as we recognize contemporary environmental damage. As the writers of a recent post-humanist volume Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene explain, “ghostly forms of past histories” abound in landscapes that are haunted by the violence of modernity.¹⁶ Oswald’s responses to Homer through ghostly plants juxtapose the loss of ancient orality with a wider “lament for the earth,” investigating how poetry (ancient and modern) can provide modes of contemplating the grief involved in our present moment of ecological loss.

What follows, therefore, is an exploration of not only how water might be “in my thinking now” but how thinking “green” is at the heart of Homeric poetry and contemporary responses to it. Attuned to how leaves, like water, resemble the simile and assertive of how receptions of ancient poems operate from oceanic resemblances, not direct equivalences, Oswald also employs the future-perfect tense of trees to suggest how later receptions must recognize annihilation and growth at once, the green thought and the green shade. The environmental concerns of Oswald’s oeuvre are elucidated, I hope to show, by comparative readings of another contemporary poet, the American writer Jorie Graham. Exhorting readers to be responsive to and responsible for the environment, Graham’s formally ambitious, well-wrought lyrics find a balance between tenderness and urgency. She aims to slow down the human reflex to master, by concentrating our attention on the “flux and reflux of the natural world.”¹⁷ Unlike Oswald, Graham constructs neither a sustained nor an explicit response to Homer in her poetry. However, two poems, “Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay: Penelope at Her Loom” and “Ravel and Unravel,” liken Penelope’s weaving and un-weaving of her tapestry in the Odyssey and the poet’s own creative process. Moreover, “Self-Portrait” glances out toward the natural world outside:

Anthropomorphized with “limbs” and “hands,” the trees are plangent mirrors for Penelope, weaving their own creative rhythms, “beating then touching then suddenly still.”¹⁹ Graham combines trees, a Homeric figure, and a reflection on poiesis, just as Oswald does. However, these references are an exception in Graham’s largely un-Homeric poems.²⁰ Nonetheless, like Oswald, Graham adopts the water/plant pairing to express creation and bereavement, both personally and environmentally.

I will begin by briefly scanning the green thoughts and green shades immanent in Homeric poetry, hoping to reveal how heroes and trees are consistently interleaved, in the similes and beyond them. Turning to the modern poets, I will look first at Oswald’s “excavation of the Iliad,” Memorial, which opens as an epitaph for fallen soldiers and oscillates antiphonally between roughly translated similes and imagined biographies of the dead, comparing the collection’s trees with those of Oswald’s early volume Woods, etc.²¹ Bringing Jorie Graham’s Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts into the conversation, I argue trees’ destruction and regrowth “remember” Homer, making present the past, like a poetic lament.²² I will then turn to how the Odyssey actualizes the possibility of life after loss, since, as Alex Purves puts it, Odysseus must re-enter the world where “the wind blows the leaves to the ground and the tree replenishes them again” (referring to the famous leaf simile in Iliad book 6) to achieve his return home.²³ Trees grow evergreen beside the unstable sea in the Odyssey and their enduring livingness becomes a rooting force against mortal transience. Looking at Oswald’s Nobody and Graham’s Sea Change, two especially green and watery volumes, I will show how these works reiterate the tidal oscillations of tree-time but branch out from the Odyssey rather than the Iliad, positioning plants as promises of hopeful survival in spite of loss.

This Finest Single Thing the Chian Said

In one fragment, the Greek lyric poet Simonides presents a leaf simile in the Iliad (book 6, lines 145–9) as the finest thing composed by Homer.²⁴ According to Simonides, Homer’s articulation of the correspondence between human generations and plant life cycles is metonymic of the poet’s unique skill. The Iliad’s trees often appear within similes, the rhetorical figure which “sprouts” another “poem floating above the main one,” as Oswald explains.²⁵ In book 16, for example, the rush of Greek and Trojan soldiers is likened to the East and West winds shaking a forest (lines 765–9), transporting us from the battlefield to a distant space. The heterotopic simile world is not free from violence, though, and the trees are often being felled, representing soldiers harmed in battle. Simone Weil’s essay on the Iliad, or “the Poem of Force,” describes the “world of peace” beyond Troy as similarly “felt as pain,” citing Homer’s depictions of woodcutters hacking trees as evidence of the poem’s totalizing, “petrifactive,” transforming force.²⁶ Victims of this force include: Alcathous’ death at the hands of Idomeneus, stood like a tall and leafy tree in Iliad book 13, line 438; Simoesius dies like a poplar tree felled to make the wheel rim for a “very beautiful chariot” in the Iliad book 4, lines 482–7; and Sarpedon dies like an oak, poplar, or pine felled in the mountains to be part of a ship’s timber, in book 16, lines 482–5, a phrase which “makes streight resemblance,” to the death of Asius who dies like an oak that τέκτονες [builders] cut to make a νήιον [ship] in book 13, lines 390–1. The similes are ambivalent, providing an “other” space of respite from war’s violence, and also accentuating the prevalence of destruction in the natural world.²⁷ Yet, these latter two similes present felling as the prelude to creative metamorphosis. Rather than underlining violence’s futility, the similes translate trees into practical or aesthetic objects: trees become beautiful wheels or ship hulls. The similes pose the potential of an “afterlife,” even if death renders the body into an object. Such interrelation in Homer’s similes between organisms and objects uncannily presages postmodern theories of New Materialism, exemplified by Jane Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things which argues for a recognition of objects’ inherent creativity and agency.²⁸ Bennett warns of the risks of disconnecting human experience from the “knotted world of vibrant matter,” a web of equally and interdependent vital parts.²⁹ The tree similes connect human and plant life and seem to suggest that destruction can lead to life in another form.

The porous human/plant world is visible beyond similes too when heroes are described using arboreal language: Thetis uses the word “ἔρνει” which means “sapling” to describe Achilles (book 18, line 56) and Hecuba addresses her son Hector as a “φίλον θάλος” [dear shoot] (book 22, line 87).³⁰ Not only an expression of maternal affection, the plant parallel also applies to the tender delicacy of youthful skin, described as “λειριόεις” [lily-like].³¹ Tree/hero likeness is touchingly explored in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, where Aphrodite reveals that her son Aeneas will be raised by mountain nymphs; when these nymphs are born, fir or oak trees, “ἐλάται ἠὲ δρύες” grow up from the earth at the same time (line 264).³² These guardian trees live for a long time, like the nymphs, before they wither away together: “τῶν δέ θ᾿ ὁμοῦ ψυχὴ λείπει φάος ἠελίοιο” [simultaneously the nymphs’ souls depart from the sunlight] (line 272). Existing in an interstitial divine and mortal space, the trees are symbiotically tied to the nymphs, and each is alike the companion to and nurturer of heroes.

The Odyssey, Homer’s watery but still arboreal epic, grows densely with narrative-determining trees that exist mostly outside of the simile world. Rather than appearing at moments of violent deaths, like in the Iliad, trees represent ingenuity, recognition, and the promise of survival. The evergreen olive tree, symbolic of Athene (Odysseus’ guardian goddess) emanates a protective, nurturing force—like the oaks in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite—over the protagonist throughout. Difficult to uproot, long-lived, and favoring coastal terrain, the olive tree represents Odysseus’ personality and perseverance. Amid the slippery and deciduous world of buffering tides and threatening magic, an olive tree remains rooted in Odysseus’ marital bed on Ithaca, embodying his return to Penelope which motors the poem’s narrative. The olive tree’s still-growing longevity, although enclosed in the bed, emblematizes survival through grief, life beyond war, and the promise of restoration (not just a ghostly afterlife) even through suffering. This nurturing olive appears earlier when Odysseus washes up on Phaeacia’s shores and is sheltered by “ὁ μὲν φυλίης, ὁ δ᾽ ἐλαίης” [thorn and olive] (book 5, line 477) growing intertwined.³³ In book 13, too, there stands on Ithaca a “λιμένος τανύφυλλος ἐλαίη” [a harbor with a long-leaved olive tree] (line 102), and Odysseus, asleep, is set down “παρὰ πυθμέν᾽ ἐλαίης” [beside the olive’s trunk] (line 122).³⁴

The living olive tree not only symbolizes Odysseus’ nostos but enables it: exemplifying Bennett’s “vibrant matter,” the Odyssey’s trees, even as objects, direct the narrative.³⁵ In book 9, Odysseus finds a “ῥόπααλον … χλωρὸν ἐλαίνεον” [staff of green olivewood] (lines 319–20) with which he blinds the Cyclops, thus escaping from Polyphemus’ cave and in book 5, Calypso gifts him an axe with a handle of “περικαλλὲς ἐλάινον” [beautiful olive wood] (line 236), where this adjective, “περικαλλές,” recalls the simile’s description of a wheel rim constructed from the felled oak at Simoesius’ death in the Iliad.³⁶ The olive axe is then used by Odysseus to build a raft, the description of which presages his narration of the olive marriage bed’s construction in book 23. The raft is made from firs and poplars, but like the olive bed the timber is cut, smoothed, and judged suitable for floating.³⁷ Carol Dougherty’s monograph, The Raft of Odysseus, notes how the similarity between these two arboreal passages and their shared vocabulary, particularly the repeated “ποιέω” (I make), makes raft and bed parallel.³⁸ This verb of making, alongside the detailed description of Odysseus’ skilled craftsmanship, likens the raft/bed-building to the creation of the poem itself. The story, once mobile and watery like the raft, is coming to its close, and peripatetic routes are substituted for domestic roots, as raft becomes bed.³⁹ The raft carried Odysseus to the Phaeacians and thus allowed him to narrate his island travels (between books 8 and 12) to the Phaeacian audience but also to us. Made from trees, the raft enables Odysseus to have and to tell the poem’s narrative, and the marriage bed allows that story to end. The still-growing olive bed lets closure coexist with continuation, bringing the hero out of his past wanderings into a stable present tense.

Trees define Odysseus’ reintegration home in another sense: in book 24, Odysseus leans against a pear tree in his father’s orchard and ponders how to reveal himself to his parent. After Odysseus declares himself to be Laertes’ son, his father asks for proof and Odysseus then chooses to narrate the order of his father’s orchard’s trees. Son reminds father that “it was through these very trees that we passed, and you named them and told me of each one” (line 339).⁴⁰ The Iliadic catalog of ships sailing to Troy and the lists of warriors killed like felled trees, become a living catalog of growing trees in the Odyssey. The hero lists thirteen pear trees, ten apple trees, forty fig trees, and fifty vines (lines 336–45). Like a performing poet, Odysseus must remember the trees and narrate them in order, confirming his identity as son, father, and husband, and thus establishing his return on Ithaca. Literally and symbolically, then, trees affect and direct the Odyssey’s narrative, symbolizing the ever-growing, resourceful hero, but also rooting the plot’s nostos in the safe harbor of Ithaca at the epic’s close.

Fall, | the Trees Go Elsewhere

Odysseus’s tree memories in book 24 do significant narrative work, enabling a key anagnorisis between father and son, and allowing the Odyssey to reach its conclusion. Remembering those trees is a helpful pivot for the modern tree memories of Alice Oswald and Jorie Graham. Their poetry’s sprouting similarity and oceanic resemblance to Homer exemplifies what Astrid Erll terms “ever-renewed Homeric memories,” whereby the creative modern response coexists with the “death” and ghostliness of antiquity.⁴¹ Sprouting green thoughts combined with annihilated green shades not only resemble arboreal life cycles but are explicitly explored through tree images in Oswald and Graham, making the tree a potential heuristic for thinking about how contemporary writers might relate to Homeric poetry in modernity.

In the second poem of Jorie Graham’s debut collection, Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, the speaker describes the tree outside her window containing “memory banks”; plants are hybrids, vessels of presence and pastness, of concreteness and ephemerality, which the phrase “memory banks” embodies.⁴² My title for this section, “fall | the trees go elsewhere” (19) comes from Graham’s poem “For My Father Looking For My Uncle” which links grief to seasonal tree cycles. The key stanza begins “my father buried his brother’s ashes here” (19), and so situates trees and death in one landscape, infusing the American word for autumn, “fall,” with a tinge of mortality, and even bringing “ash trees” to mind in “ashes.” The trees’ agency, though, transforms death not into an end but merely a movement elsewhere. The poem’s following line exploits another English homonym, as with “fall,” to coalesce trees and departure: the plants are “leaving behind, with us, their heavier plumage” (19), punning leaves as leaf and leaves as left. Twice more in Hybrids, Graham explores this paronomasia, writing in “Now The Sturdy Wind” that “leaves would otherwise remain” (62), as the speaker repeats on successive lines that “everything goes”—a self-defeating statement since the phrase’s reiteration conflicts with the disappearance it conveys. The pun in “leaves” generates an oscillation between stasis and motion, continuity and change. The same letters can grow into different meanings, language appearing strikingly leaf-like: there is something itself arboreal in how “leaves” can denote both plants and also be a verb of departure.⁴³ Highlighting the promise of regrowth amidst annihilation (everything goes), “Now The Sturdy Wind” forces a gale on the tree: the leaves are turning, seeking “in every seed | to be windborne, reborn” (62). Graham’s play with homophones, “borne” and “born,” interleaves the euphemistic image of seasonal death—to be “borne” elsewhere—and the promise of leaf regrowth, “reborn”; this confrontation between falling/regrowing leaves and the wind closely resembles the famous tree simile in the Iliad, to which I will soon turn, where human generations are likened to leaves re-budding after a wind tears them down.

The “leaves” homonym reappears in Hybrids, fusing creation and destruction, to echo Iliadic tree similes in another sense: “Tree Surgeons” depicts tree-cutting, the frequent vehicle in similes about the deaths of heroes. An elm tree is split in two, “like one who leaves, and the other who remains” (22), a split hybrid of lively plant and departing ghost. In “Mirrors”—a title which recalls Oswald’s reflective, oceanic similes—trees are “histories | where only present tense survives” (42). Rather than language being leaf-like, plants are this time imagined using linguistic semantics, as in “tense.” Elsewhere in Hybrids, weeds are “present tense” (62) and tulips “change tense” (12) while “the human tree” is “clothed with its nouns” (4); human and tree bodies are likened, and a tree’s leaves are “nouns.” Trees, like poems, are “memory banks” and “histories | where only present tense survives,” and both forms bring history into the present, leaving, remaining, falling, and creating.

Alice Oswald’s Memorial is from its title alone, a self-conscious “memory bank.” In the preface, Oswald aims to retrieve the Iliad’s enargeia (“unbearable reality”) by stripping away seven-eighths of its narrative, “as you might lift the roof off a church in order to remember what you’re worshipping.”⁴⁴ What is left is a “series of memories and similes laid side by side,” where the translated similes are repeated twice and the “memories” are “recollections” derived from Greek lament poetry (2). Oswald peppers the preface with the vocabulary of remembering, both as creative methodology (Memorial attempts to “remember” Homer) and also as content, stripping the poem down to memories and similes, which are laid like soldiers in graves to be remembered. Memory is static and past-looking (memories are “laid” in the volume’s “cemetery” (2)) but also creative and forward-focused, and integrally linked to trees. Dense with translated plant similes and attentive to moments in Homer where heroes are described in arboreal language, Memorial imitates Homer’s “real” poetic trees and makes plants an image for its own methodology of creative remembering. Not only the similes but Oswald’s biographies too are steeped in a green, leafy world, embedding human life in non-human spaces: one soldier Protesilaus leaves behind his homeland where “grass gives growth to everything” (13); a later parent’s grief is “made of earth” (39); corn stalks “shake their green heads” (14); and even arrows are “flint-leaved” (32). The greenest moment in Memorial, though, is Oswald’s translation of the leaf simile from book 6 of the Iliad. Arriving late in the volume, this is the first of ten final similes not to be repeated (as the others are) and follows the biography of Hector, the most famous hero remembered in Memorial. Oswald disconnects the simile from its original context, bestowing it with an almost aphoristic weight:

In Homer, the simile is spoken by Glaucus who meets his enemy, Diomedes, on the battlefield. It transpires that the soldiers share a bond of intergenerational friendship. Glaucus reminds Diomedes of generational cycles, using this simile, before they exchange armor—a gesture of alliance—and part ways. Oswald’s translation is dynamic, deploying vital present tense verbs, “blows,” “breathes” while mentioning the metapoetic “history of leaves” which recalls Graham’s trees as present tense histories. “Write” catalyzes this self-reflective reading, suggesting that “history of leaves” also represents the history of soldiers “leaving” life. Such metaliterary resonances might even imply “leaves” are a book’s “leaves” (pages), and “lineage” is the poem’s own line-ends.

Oswald appends to Homer’s simile the juxtaposition of “ghosts” and “dead bodies” (words missing in the Greek) with the assonantal phrase, “breathes new leaf.” The assonance aurally enacts how spring renews leaves as “ea” spreads across the words, like the reviving breath. A reader’s voice recreates this renewing “ea” sound, tying voice to wind and to spring, and implies that poetic reperformance resembles destructive but then restorative seasonal cycles. Where Graham’s autumnal tree moves elsewhere, Oswald too interweaves endings with continuations. Her simile has a ring composition structure, as Homer’s does, beginning “like leaves” and ending “than the leaves,” and uses repetition (“thousands,” “remember”) to represent the regeneration described. In Homer, the simile opens and closes with “γενεή” and “ἀνδρῶν” [generations of men] and uses the polyptoton of “φύλλων” and “φύλλα” [leaves] alongside the aural echo of “ὕλη” [wood] and “ὥρη” [season], to make the poem a site of reiteration and regrowth. Like a tree’s rings of bark, this simile as expressed in Memorial becomes both a document of loss and a corroboration of survival.

Other similes from Memorial creatively remember Homer’s original by acknowledging loss and embracing regrowth, one also confronting trees with a destructive wind (Iliad book 7, lines 765–71). The simile describes the deaths of Coon and Iphidamas:

Anthropomorphizing trees with “arms,” Oswald underlines human and tree similarity, before sprouting away from Homer by adding that the sound is a “word from another world.” The “w” alliteration and internal half-rhyme of “word” and “world” fill the line with creative breath, like the renewing breath of spring in the earlier simile. The half-rhyme glances toward how words might contain worlds, suggesting that poetry can hold the multiple and the universal. This suggestion of the universal risks highlighting a force of impersonality operating in the Iliad: Georgina Paul argues that Oswald’s nature similes “confront the world of human mourning with an impersonal force in which human individuality matters not a jot.”⁴⁵ Rather than eclipsing individual importance, though, Memorial highlights a shared value between the natural world and human life, where each matters as much as the other. Appreciating this entanglement through poetry can invest our own mortal lives with trees’ cyclical, restorative temporality.

An earlier simile interweaves alliterative “w” words, restoring a death simile from Iliad book 17, lines 53–5 with poetic breath:

Once more a tree behaves like a poem: it metamorphically “became a wave | became a whip”; it possesses incantatory power, like a word from another world (“wand” suggesting branch and magical instrument); it can “speak in tongues”; and is even a “dictionary.” Although tempestuous uprootings kill the tree, the plant’s connection to a poem’s power makes the translated, sprouting simile an afterlife for the tree. Perhaps the olive wand can no longer speak in tongues, but Memorial can. Alliterative, repetitive, incantatory (became, became, became) the lines inscribe iterative regrowth into depictions of loss.

Poetry as a plant, and as a ghost, chimes with Graham’s title and the imagery of haunting appears throughout Memorial.⁴⁶ To return to Oswald’s translation of the Glaucus leaf simile, she further changes Homer by referring to leaves as “ghosts” which the wind blows “to the ground.” Earlier in Memorial, slaughtered Thracian soldiers also become “ghosts” (34), affirming the plant/human equivalence. Tree ghosts encapsulate how poetry as a memory bank can create a spectral afterlife for the past in the present, making history “present tense.”⁴⁷ The idea that ancient texts might “haunt” the present was famously asserted by Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, who used Odyssey book 11 to construct a reception model where classical texts are “ghosts” revivified by a reader’s blood.⁴⁸ In comparison, Oswald’s poetry explores the entanglement of human and plants in Homer and makes “green shades” her own model. This thinking is visible before Memorial in her collection Woods etc., which, as with Graham's poetry, does not overtly respond to Homeric epic but “intertextually,” if not intentionally, remembers Homer. One poem, “Tree Ghosts,” is subtitled “a ballad with footnotes | (in which each letter commemorates a cut-down tree),” which echoes and inverts Memorial’s epitaph-like commemoration of Homeric heroes, likened to trees.⁴⁹ The felled trees of heterotopic Homeric simile are principally mourned, rather than human lives. The alphabetic footnotes read:

The boundary between life and death is consistently blurred in these footnotes, as alliterative half-rhyme unites “copse” and “corpse,” “grove” and “grave.” Upper case letters demonstrate how the poem contains the alphabetic tree ghosts in its very words, as the sibilant “s is the still growing ghost” forms the poem’s music into this “still growing ghost.” The echo of “you” in “yew,” heightened by the anthropomorphized tree with a “windpipe” (recalling Memorial’s “wind-dictionary”), morphs the addressed reader into a tree ghost too. Our own voice becomes a “still growing” ghost, and an instrument to revivify the dead through remembering, just as in Memorial. Hybrid plant ghosts, or green shades, express in Oswald and Graham’s work, therefore, the ability of poetry to acknowledge (without attempting to undo) loss while simultaneously demonstrating creativity. Imagining trees as alphabets, nouns, words, and pages and correspondingly configuring similes as sprouting and lines as leafy, both writers liken trees and poetry, revealing their art’s restorative, yet ghostly, power.

The Permanent is Ebbing

The final part of these green thoughts returns, cyclically, to the juxtaposition of leaves and oceans in Marvell’s “The Garden” and also in Oswald’s lecture “Interview with Water” where Homeric similes possess water’s reflective gift as well as trees’ creative growth. As in Memorial where the olive wand “became a wave” or in Falling Awake where the falling rain turns into a leaf, aquatic and arboreal worlds are unexpectedly conjoined. Homer’s Odyssey contrasts trees’ rootedness, their role as protective sites of anchorage and return, with the sea’s erosive, vacillating force. In this last section, I look at how Oswald and Graham’s coupling of sea and tree might respond to the Odyssey. Trees’ seasonal changes symbolize how poetic remembering acknowledges grief, but the tree also embodies poetry’s future orientation, its rootedness in the present, and hope for the future.

The title, “the permanent is ebbing” comes from Jorie Graham’s collection Sea Change which from its opening positions trees as a “sustained” cast of “characters,” whose integrity, a wind, “stronger than anyone expected,” threatens.⁵⁰ Amid protean climates, changing seas, and ecological crisis, trees articulate, and thus provide structure for, what is shapeless and unpredictable.⁵¹ In “Embodies,” global warming is “embodied” by a tree flowering in autumn not spring, “the mistake occurs, the plum tree blossoms” (6), and then in “This,” Graham writes:

Trees define what is a mistake and what is correct, clearly indicating the changing climate. In the second quotation, Graham insists, after self-aposiopesis, that the trees’ branches are not empty, but expressive, and the line-break and indentation mirror a tree stretching into space even amid ebbing permanence. In “Sea Change,” the ocean “lacks in | telligence” (4), whereas in “This,” the wind moves through a tree’s “wide tall limbs in | telligently | in its nervous ceaselessness” (8). The fracturing of intelligence by the enjambement in both instances draws these moments together, and thus the sea’s incomprehensibility contrasts with the trees’ ceaseless coherence. The contrast between formless sea and structuring trees recurs in “Positive Feedback Loop,” where Graham depicts “seas bounded by Greenland” (42), evoking plants’ bounding greenness, and in “Guantánamo,” where an addressee must “think tree that will hold you up” (11) as comfort amid darkening waters. In a landscape of sea changes, trees become structures for endurance, as they were for Odysseus.

The collection’s later poems more explicitly evoke the Odyssey: Graham titles one “Underworld,” another “Root End,” before “No Long Way Round,” which recalls the hero’s katabasis in book 11, and his journey’s end in a rooted bed. These poems continue the collection’s tree drama: “Root End” suggests that in each plant at core is a “thing | by | heart” (49) and in “Undated Lullaby,” an acacia tree is an “almost | perfect | circle” (51), creating an attempt at wholeness in spite of dissolution. Finally, the volume’s last poem, “No Long Way Round” asserts the value of storytelling (one needs to “tell | your story” (55)) despite sea changes:

Written in 2008, the poem likely refers to the Iraq War, yet the poplars becoming anchors for memory, when read beside the Odyssey-suggestive titles and the restoration of intimacy and life beginning again after war, recall Homer’s epic. The wild constancy of tree growth in both Homer and Graham expresses rootedness amid unsteadiness, and even Graham’s branching lines, which often grow up from unexpected places on the page—described by Helen Vendler as “Odyssean” and “epic”—become tree-like.⁵² The poems themselves come to shape and boundary slippery, sea-like meanings.

The sea in Alice Oswald’s Nobody, is also “formless and unstable,” the title foregrounding water’s bodiless quality.⁵³ The poems flow into each other without punctuation and in one edition Oswald threads William Tillyer’s abstract watercolor paintings between the poems, providing a visual analog for an encounter between formless water (paint) and structuring plants (paper).⁵⁴ The poetry shows this too, since under a wave “a man is a nobody,” but when he surfaces his head is full of “green water” and his hair floats like “seaweed” (27). The process of resurfacing into life evokes an arboreal green, which is reflected by the character of dawn changing “shade quickly like new leaves” (19); new life and new light are both painted in green hues. Later, the act of speaking depends on “always wavering under trees mixed with a murmurish noise,” making breathing, communication, and even the voice of poetry itself contingent on the living trees that fill Nobody (35). In the collection, trees hurry, run, and when they "take over" an island, they "say so", even “shouting for more light” (37). At once a “hymn to the sea,” Nobody also emphasizes the Odyssey’s “leaf-like” quality and when the sea “inked itself into leaves” (39), writing metamorphoses formless water into articulate green.⁵⁵ Through trees, the sea can be written, communicated, and contemplated. Most poignantly, though, is the “harbor” where cliffs keep out the wind:

An almost translation of Odysseus’ glimpse of Ithaca in book 13, this line infuses an inhospitable, incommensurable world with the hope of return. We are reminded of Sappho’s fragment 104 where the evening star enables everything to return home, and the evening shadow of the olive represents a steadfast anchor amid flux.⁵⁶ Oswald describes the sea in Nobody as “grief grief grief” (27), but trees permit communication, endurance, and structure, not only through their ghostly poetic afterlives but through their hopeful, future-facing survival.

Begin Afresh, Afresh, Afresh

At our current moment, recognizing human entanglement with the natural world is becoming a political necessity.⁵⁷ Alice Oswald and Jorie Graham encourage the reader to attend to a host of lively, still-growing trees that are always imagined in intimate relation with us. Homer’s environment is also one of plant and human interconnectedness, where trees are not mere material but equivalent tragic victims of force in the Iliad, and points of return in the Odyssey. Even though plants become objects in Homeric poetry, they possess an afterlife as metapoetic symbols and as directors of the narrative. Oswald and Graham’s ghostly trees bring the past into the present and, like memorials, laments, and poems, catalog grief—“their greenness is a kind of grief”—while simultaneously allaying it through their cycles of renewal. Trees can also make ecological and anthropogenic sea changes comprehensible and provide structure to shapeless spaces. Our constant companions, full of a kind of divine spirit, but sharing our mortality nonetheless, trees, since antiquity, have helped us to make sense of our spaces and histories, teaching that through loss, regrowth is possible. The creative green thoughts grow beside the ghostly green shades.

Footnotes