The Secret Nests of the Poets

Poets and their tree houses

To an averagely imaginative child, a tree house surely offers a unique combination of delights. Like other outdoor dens, it is a liminal space where the wild consorts oddly with the domestic and the homely is made thrillingly strange. It is a place to experiment with adult roles – to play house or soldiers or doctors and nurses – while safe from adult eyes and judgements. And unlike other dens and hidey-holes, the tree house is poised marvellously between heaven and earth – an anomalous, arboreal realm where you can root in leaves and moss and bark while also walking on air like Jack on his beanstalk or Jim in the crow’s-nest. Boss of your own branch office, king of the bouncy castle, you have something perhaps unbetterable – a hiding place that is also a look-out, an airy throne where you can sway above it all at the hub of it all, invisible but all-seeing, the careless God of a green wavering heaven.

To an averagely sensitive adult, a tree house will probably mean all of this with the added element of nostalgia – a longing for the secret places of our own childhood, our own Strawberry Fields (‘no one I think is in my tree’) or refuge under the ivy. According to point of view, the urge to shrug off adult burdens and escape into the tree tops may seem either liberating or pathetic. There’s that Ian McEwan novel I haven’t read in which a Tory MP cracks up and reverts to a Just William, short-trousers-and-catapult way of life in a tree house (inevitably one thinks of Boris). More poignantly and ambiguously, there is Calvino’s Baron in the Trees and the mad King Sweeney of Irish legend, both of whom cast off earthbound duties for a life among the treetops.

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As the man who has done most to interpret the Sweeney story to modern readers, it is no surprise to find that Seamus Heaney is a great fellow for the tree houses. Bosky childhood dens are recalled with love in his short memoir Mossbawn:

All children want to crouch in their secret nests. I loved the fork of a beech tree at the head of our lane, the close thicket of a boxwood hedge in the front of the house, the soft, collapsing pile of hay in a back corner of the byre; but especially I spent time in the throat of an old willow tree at the end of the farmyard. It was a hollow tree, with gnarled, spreading roots, a soft, perishing bark and a pithy inside. Its mouth was like the fat and solid opening in a horse's collar, and, once you squeezed in through it, you were at the heart of a different life, looking out on the familiar yard as if it were suddenly behind a pane of strangeness. Above your head, the living tree flourished and breathed, you shouldered the slightly vibrant bole, and if you put your forehead to the rough pith you felt the whole lithe and whispering crown of willow moving in the sky above you. In that tight cleft, you sensed the embrace of light and branches, you were a little Atlas shouldering it all, a little Cerunnos pivoting a world of antlers.

Readers of Heaney’s poetry may well feel they know these trees. That willow turns up in the early poem ‘Oracle’, where the child stowed in the hollow trunk becomes its ‘listening familiar’ and in turn discovers a voice:

small mouth and ear        
in a woody cleft,         
lobe and larynx        
of the mossy places.

This short, oddly charged piece seems to describe a kind of initiation, in which by some spooky means the young Heaney is singled out for poetry. The title alludes to the oracle at Dodona, where the god spoke in the rustling of leaves.

A different sort of awakening comes in the poem called simply ‘In the Beech’. If Heaney’s willow is a place to get in at ground level, to hunker down and ruminate, his beech tree is an observatory or vantage point. In the poem, the boy in the high boughs looks out on a dangerous adult world of work and armies and war, finding ‘a strangeness and a comfort’ in the smooth beech trunk and its tangling frills of ivy. ‘A lookout posted and forgotten’, he knows that his ‘thick-tapped, soft-fledged, airy listening post’ is also a ‘boundary tree’ and inescapably a ‘tree of knowledge’.

Heaney has a third tree-house poem in the untitled sonnet often known as ‘The Boortree’, a calling to mind of his childhood den in the rank shade of an elder: ‘Its berries a swart caviar of shot, / A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.’

Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,
Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder: 
It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank 
And snapping memory as I get older. 
And elderberry I have learned to call it.

Here the dialect name for the tree – related to modern English ‘bower’ – is itself a kind of refuge, a pungent den of memories. The ‘touching of tongues’ that goes on in this boor or bower is not just sexual play but a friction between the vernacular speech of home and the standard English of adulthood:

Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’ 
And felt another’s texture quick on mine. 
So, etymologist of roots and graftings, 
I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch 
Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

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And what could it mean as an adult, to climb into the children’s tree-house, and look for a kind of rest? One answer is provided by the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, in the title poem of her fine collection The Tree House. Of an evening, the poet hoists herself into branches of the apple-tree and takes in the view:

I was unseeable. A bletted fruit      
hung through tangled branches    
just out of reach. Over house roofs:    
sullen hills, the firth drained    
down to sandbanks . . .

The invisibility longed for here seems quite specific: an escape from the routines of motherhood and adult domesticity (‘bletted’, by the way, is an old word signifying that exact point at which the ripe fruit becomes over-ripe):

I lay to sleep,
beside me neither man
nor child, but a lichened branch
wound through the wooden chamber,
pulling it close; a complicity

like our own, when arm in arm
on the city street, we bemoan
our families, our difficult
chthonic anchorage in the apple-
sweetened earth, without whom 

we might have lived
the long-ebb of our mid-decades
alone in sheds and attic rooms,
awake in the moonlight souterrains
of our own minds; without whom

we might have lived 
a hundred other lives,
like taxis strangers hail and hire,
that turn abruptly on the gleaming setts
and head for elsewhere.

The tree house brings on a yearning not for childhood, but for the dens of young adulthood – those lonely ‘sheds and attic rooms’, with their sense of unchecked freedom and boundless possibility.

The poem ends in paradox, with the thought that our solid, settled lives may be more provisional than they seem, having the patched up, ‘knocked together’ quality of a child’s tree-house. To settle down is always to settle for something, with all that that implies. And yet, once made, our rickety, gimcrack choices have a taste of inevitability. Even if we were to hail and take one of these fleeting taxis, with its promise of a life quite elsewhere, would it not after all bring us to the same place, or to one very like it? There is perhaps only here, this loved, ordinary place where blossoming and growth are not to be separated from what we know of death:

where we're best played out    
in gardens of dockens   
and lady's mantle, kids' bikes    
stranded on the grass;     
where we've knocked together    

of planks and packing chests   
 a dwelling of sorts; a gall    
we've asked the tree to carry    
of its own dead, and every spring  
to drape in leaf and blossom, like a pall.

You can read the complete poem here.

First published on the Dabbler in 2012 as Part 4 of a short series on trees in houses, houses in trees, and several things adjacent or in between. The other parts are: 1. A Tree in a Pub; 2. A Pub in a Tree; 3. Henry Hastings, the Dorset Woodwose; and 5. Deakin’s Dome.

If you enjoyed this post, you might be interested in my ebook The Whartons of Winchendon —a short study of one of the strangest families in English history, featuring incest, treason, deep-sea diving, fairies, and the self-proclaimed Solar King of the World.