Friday
Yesterday our friends Paul and Paulette Thompson took us to see the cherry trees in the National Arboretum. Few moments of the the spring are more beautiful. I remember the shock a number of years ago when a beaver moved onto the St. Mary’s College of Maryland campus, where I was teaching at the time, and took down all the trees that bordered St. John’s Pond. The animal was captured and deported, new trees were planted, and I understand that the blossoms are back.
Former colleague Bruce Wilson, our comparative literature specialist, tells me that the Japanese prefer a different moment in the blossoming moment than do Americans. Bruce is a national expert on the ancient Japanese art of ikebana, which technically is the art of flower arrangement although that doesn’t do it justice. (“The way of the flower” might be more accurate.) Apparently connoisseurs treasure the moment when the blossoms are beginning to fall and the green is pushing through. Bruce says that this transitional moment mingles the joy of blossoming with a certain sadness about the passing of innocence.
Maybe youthful American culture thinks that innocence is still possible. Ancient Japanese culture knows otherwise.
In the greatest poem I know about cherry blossoms, English poet A. E. Housman may be getting at this hint of sadness in the midst of joy. The speaker is 20 but, instead of reveling in his youth, he sees himself getting older and having limited time.
Rather than this awareness detracting from the present moment, however, it makes the cherry blossoms seem all the more precious. Figuring that he’ll live to 70 and thinking his remaining 50 years aren’t enough to do justice to the beauty of the trees (Housman in fact lived to 77), the speaker must step more fully into appreciation. Therefore, “about the woodlands I will go/To see the cherry hung with snow.”
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.Now, of my three score years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.