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On Trees and Poems 

They cut down a tree on our road this week.

My daughters and I were sad, and cross. Although already we couldn’t quite remember the exact shape and character of the tree – the branches had been efficiently disposed of, only the stump remained – we were bereft. It had been a kindly tree, throwing green shade over a bench on which people and dogs and occasionally the street’s reigning cat, Binky, sat to watch the world go by.

My six year old ran up to the stump, to its shocking new bright flat top, and hugged it. And then my nine year old joined her, and they made me do it too (although I might have done it anyway.) We counted its rings, and we missed it. I’m sure we looked deeply eccentric, but I’m also sure that any one of our neighbours, seeing that stark and sliced trunk, would have understood the response. Perhaps some of them might even have joined in.

It is difficult to write about trees without writing poetry. They are a wonderful example of an everyday object that can be transfigured by the kind of close attention you have to pay to something in order to write about it. What I love most about poetry is the new ways of looking at the world it offers us. Children, whose perspectives are fresher and less calcified than ours, instinctively respond to this. And when you ask them to look – to really look – at something, they will surprise and delight you with their responses.

In order to write a poem about a tree, you need to have a very good look at it… and they are magic. You need to watch and think about the movement of the leaves, to listen to the whisper of the boughs and the chattering of the squirrels. It’s important to stroke the bark, lie stretched out beneath it and look up into its canopy, inhale its scent, give it a hug. You may have walked past it a thousand times, but it might still be a tree whose shape you wouldn’t be able to recall if it was suddenly gone. 

Children build kingdoms among the trees. Whether we clambered high into the branches or looked for fairies or beetles among the roots, trees were our playgrounds. We hoarded their treasures, gathered from the parks and pavements: glossy conkers, sycamore spinners, cherry stones, acorn cups for tiny feasts, tumbled blossom, sticky buds to uncurl in a milk bottle. They furnished us with swords, pilgrims’ staffs and magic wands. They were milestones and boundaries, and a certain well-loved tree might have been – might still be – the landmark that tells us: “You are home.”

Within my private forest of remembered trees stand a friendly magnolia, regularly scrambled up in childhood, and the horse chestnut – in my mind, always bearing its pale candles – visible from a window I last gazed from decades ago. Further in, a hilltop monkey puzzle stretches its sinuous fingers, an ancient oak spreads, and every Christmas tree I have ever loved (which is all of them, perhaps especially the scrawny ones) shines. I also have trees immortalised by poets and writers in my mental forest: from nursery rhyme nut trees to Shakespeare’s bare ruin’d choirs, from Housman’s lovely cherry to Hopkins’ Binsey Poplars.

We need trees and we need people who will plant them, not cut them down. It’s why Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris included Willow, Acorn and Conker in the beautiful spell book The Lost Words, incantations for words excised from the children’s dictionary due to underuse. To lie, once in a while, under a tree and look up through its leaves is a pure and primeval kind of medicine. It is an incredible gift to be able to give and, even for those of us whose days in the classroom are far behind us, a lesson we could all do with learning.

Ana Sampson

Ana Sampson is the editor of, among other anthologies, Wonder: The Natural History Poetry Book (Macmillan Children’s Books) which contains some lovely poems about trees.

Are Song Lyrics Poetry?

As well as being a poet I am a musician, and I write songs. This year, on the suggestion of my record label, I published a book of the words to my songs, called Lyrics (2001 to 2021). This, of course, raised the inevitable question: Can lyrics stand on their own, can they be poetry? Or do they only really work when they are part of a song, being held up by a good tune?

Two of the world’s best songwriters recently joined the debate. Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 for having created new poetic expressions within the Great American Song tradition. There was, and still is, some controversy over this. But how can lines like

The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face

Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

(from Visions of Johanna)

or

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way

(from Mississippi)

not be read as poems?

Paul McCartney, too, is publishing a book with a title not unlike mine. As well as containing his lyrics, it tells the stories behind the words and about the songs they inhabit. Interestingly, the book has been edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon who, himself, has published a collection called The Word on the Street, poems that double as rock songs.

Fans of Shel Silverstein’s children’s poetry are often unaware that he wrote hits for Doctor Hook and Johnny Cash. Many contemporary children’s poets use their guitars, or percussion, to perform poems to music – e.g. Brian Moses, James Carter, Eric Ode. 

Folk singers often draw on the ballad tradition where stories (often about politics or a special event or remarkable person) have become poems which then turned into songs. 

The lyrics of many singer-songwriters stand up very well on their own. I’m thinking Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen. And in the rock genre, Patti Smith. I don’t think Dylan set out to write poetry – he sees himself primarily as a songwriter. But the structure of lyrics and songs do have much in common.

Generally lyrics also need their tune. Dylan’s lyrics work well on the page, but come alive when they are sung. The words to Waterloo Sunset, written by Ray Davies, are lovely – Terry meets Julie, Waterloo station, Every Friday night – but they really conjure up special pictures when sung by the Kinks. 

It can work in reverse, too. Many classical poems have been set to music. In German these are Liede; as a collection they are known as a Song Cycle. In more recent times, when I ran a school choir, we found some of Allan Ahlberg’s Please Mrs Butler poems set to music. They sound as brilliant as a choral work as they do as poems. 

Most of us learn some of our first words through poetry – for that is what a nursery rhyme is; and many picture books feature verse. We learn rhythms and rhymes as babies and toddlers and with nursery rhymes this is often set to music. Songs, lyrics and poems are hugely important at the beginning of our lives and we hold them in our subconscious. Music often takes centre stage later on. Some music does not honour or showcase the lyrics but it still speaks to you – but when songs do allow the words to be clearly heard, what really matters is that they move you, through your head or your heart, in some way. Perhaps it’s when the words are as important as the music that the lyrics have become a poem as well as words to a song. 

Roger Stevens

Roger Stevens is a National Poetry Day Ambassador, a founding member of the Able Writers scheme with Brian Moses and runs the award-winning website PoetryZone for children and teachers, which has just been going for more than 20 years. He has published forty books for children. A Million Brilliant Poems (Bloomsbury) was shortlisted for the CLPE prize and his book Apes to Zebras – an A to Z of shape poems (Bloomsbury) won the prestigious NSTB award.