Thick orchards, all in white
The time of the singing of birds is come.
Thick orchards, all in white,
Stand ‘neath blue voids of light,
And birds among the branches blithely sing,
For they have all they know;
There is no more, but so,
All perfectness of living, fair delight of spring.
Only the cushat dove
Makes answer as for love
To the deep yearning of man’s yearning breast;
And mourneth, to his thought,
As in her notes were wrought
Fulfill’d in her sweet having, sense of his unrest.
Not with possession, not
With fairest earthly lot,
Cometh the peace assured, his spirit’s quest;
With much it looks before,
With most it yearns for more;
And ‘this is not our rest,’ and ‘this is not our rest.’
Give Thou us more. We look
For more. The heart that took
All spring-time for itself were empty still;
Its yearning is not spent
Nor silenced in content,
Till He that all things filleth doth it sweetly fill.
Give us Thyself. The May
Dureth so short a day;
Youth and the spring are over all too soon;
Content us while they last,
Console us for them past,
Thou with whom bides for ever life, and love, and noon.
JEAN INGELOW
****
One of those minor Victorian poets and novelists who, at times, is still able to surprise us with a fresh voice and mind, Jean Ingelow was born in 1820 in Boston, Lincolnshire. Her most famous poem, The High Tide on the Coast of Lincolnshire, 1571, is a remarkable narrative, but I thought it worth looking at one of her lesser-known poems as a tribute to her in her bicentennial year.
Thick Orchards has sometimes been classed as a hymn. While the underlying thought is Christian, and the poem ultimately evolves into an address to the Christian God, it’s far more sensuously descriptive and psychologically analytical than the usual Victorian hymn. The scene-setting of the opening lines is a visual feast: “Thick orchards, all in white,/ Stand ‘neath blue voids of light”. So much is evoked by the simple adjective “thick” in the phrase “thick orchards” – the dense texture of the blossoms, the promise of fruitfulness. The use of “voids” in the second line is also potent. As a result, a little shudder of emptiness hangs in a sky transformed into “blue voids of light”.
The challenge in the first stanza to the conventional poeticism of birds “blithely” singing” lies in the rational understanding that “they have all they know”; therefore, to them, “There is no more, but so,/ All perfectness of living, fair delight of spring.” It’s not for mere metrical convenience that the poet substitutes “perfectness” for “perfection” here. It renders “perfection” more imaginable, less abstract, and, perhaps, adds a hint of dialect.
The second stanza develops the challenge to romantic illusion. It’s almost an enquiry into poetry’s own anthropomorphic speciality – the dove’s “coo” as plaintive love-song. Ingelow’s reminder is that the cushat dove only seems to be mournful: humans impose their own dissatisfactions and yearning on to the bird’s call.
The third stanza quotes the Old Testament Book of Micah -“Arise ye, for this is not your rest” – and affirms restlessness with the repetition of “this is not our rest”. And the “unrest” projected from “man’s yearning breast” onto the call of the happy dove is cleverly echoed by those uneasy repetitions of “rest”. While the contrast of earthly discontent and the endless fulfilment of the afterlife is a common enough trope among religious writers, Ingelow fleshes it out with unusual sensuousness.
She’s an impressively musical writer in all her poems. Just as she avoids the assertiveness and dogmatism of the typical English hymn, she avoids its typical structure and meter. The metrical pattern she chooses for her stanza is an attractive one: two three-beat lines followed by a five-beat line, then two more trimeters, culminating in a surprisingly six-beat line to conclude. Though a regular pattern, it’s lightened by little details of rhythmical variety. The rhyme-scheme is a,a,b,c,c,b. As well as the cross-stanza rhyming in the second and third stanzas to underline the sounds of restlessness, there is the rhetorical cross-stanza, chiasmus-like echo in “Give Thou us more” in stanza five and “Give us Thyself” in stanza six. So, despite end-stopping, the stanzas work together as units of sound.
Ingelow’s final words to God have a certain mystical intimacy. There’s a moral lesson, too, of course, woven into that fine last stanza, as it moves towards the vision of paradise. As a construct that includes the sensuous fulfillment of “love” and “noon”, it seems to direct us back to the poem’s epigraph, a quotation from the Song of Solomon: “The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land”.