The Birch Tree

At Loschwitz above the city
The air is sunny and chill;
The birch-trees and the pine-trees
Grow thick upon the hill.

Lone and tall, with silver stem,
A birch-tree stands apart;
The passionate wind of spring-time
Stirs in its leafy heart.

I lean against the birch-tree,
My arms around it twine;
It pulses, and leaps, and quivers,
Like a human heart to mine.

One moment I stand, then sudden
Let loose mine arms that cling:
O God! the lonely hillside,
The passionate wind of spring!
– Amy Levy, The Birch-Tree at Loschwitz

Amy Levy’s ode to the birch-tree at Loschwitz is one of passion and eroticism, as it is evident she was making love to this lone and tall, silver stemmed birch-tree who stood apart from the rest upon the hill.  The first time that I saw a birch tree, I had confused it for an aspen tree.  Even though coming from entirely separate families, they are quite similar in appearance.  The most visual differences reside in their bark – a birch bark peels like paper whereas an aspen’s does not, and their leaves – birch leaves are elongated whereas aspens have heart-shaped leaves that quiver, giving their name “populus tremuloides,” or “trembling poplar.”  Though Amy Levy would tell us that the birch could, too, quiver and leap and pulse.

I had witnessed the grace and beauty of the birch forest while traveling in Siberia and trekking through Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  Here Tolstoy likened the birch tree to renewal and springtime, when “their sticky green leaves were motionless, and lilac-colored flowers and the first blades of green grass were pushing up and lifting last year’s leaves. The coarse evergreen color of the small fir trees scattered here and there among the birches was an unpleasant reminder of winter.”  The smiling and shining birch tree symbolized the charming country girl, with their wet drooping branches, swaying in the wind and flinging down bright drops of water to one side.  The birch in Russian folklore was an ancient symbol of love and marriage.  In Wassily Kandinsky’s 1904 Russian Beauty in a Landscape, a woman adorning a flowery wreath in her traditional dress sits next to a birch tree.  The treestump beside her refers to prenuptial laments of northern Russia, in which the bride sings that she will hang her maiden’s cap upon a birch, “but the birch will be cut down; she will put it in a field among the flowers, but the flowers will be mown.”

In Robert Frost’s Birches, the beauty of the birch tree is tied up in an ice-storm. After moving his family to Great Britain in 1912, his third poetry collection Mountain Interval was published in 1916, including Birches and The Road Not Taken, considered among his most popular poems:
“Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust –
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.”

In his depiction of the fallen inner dome of heaven, Frost gave his nod to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais : An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, in which he wrote:
“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.”  Underneath all that icy beauty is the harsh Truth of life, Frost wrote, with all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm, when
“life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.”

Though in the end, the author expressed an optimism, that “Earth’s the right place for love,” and that he’d like to get away from earth awhile, and then come back to it and begin over.  A decade after his passing, Richard Wilbur wrote A Black Birch in Winter, an elegy on the death of Robert Frost:

You might not know this old tree by its bark,
Which once was striate, smooth, and glossy-dark,
So deep now are the rifts that separate
Its roughened surface into flake and plate.

Fancy might less remind you of a birch
Than of mosaic columns in a church
Like Ara Coeli or the Lateran
Or the trenched features of an agèd man.

Still, do not be too much persuaded by
These knotty furrows and these tesserae
To think of patterns made from outside in
Or finished wisdom in a shriveled skin.

Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth,
New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth,
And this is all their wisdom and their art –
To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.