“Into the scented woods we’ll go,” wrote the poet and novelist Mary Webb, “And see the blackthorn swim in snow.” The woods are scented by things I can barely detect: violets, anemones, sorrel, bud burst, and I have to imagine their combined fragrance set against the edgy pong of wild garlic leaves and vagrant smells wafting through the woods on the breeze.
The burst of white flower, the blackthorn “snow” of blossom, is so emotive it pulls at all the senses and, importantly, memory. Close up, the flowers recall Japanese or Chinese paintings – star-like, fragile yet sharp, ephemeral yet eternal. Related to hawthorn, cherry, damson, apple, pear and rose, blackthorn is a bewitching tree: it was used by sorcerers; a ring of blackthorn could drive the devil from the fields.
In her poem Green Rain, Webb wrote about returning to woodland in later life, and the blackthorn blossom, also called a “winter” because of the snow-pure flowers, carried her childhood memories of wandering Wenlock Edge.
This is similar to AE Housman’s poem about cherry trees, also blossoming on Wenlock Edge now, in which he lamented his life was not long enough. He had had too few seasons to see trees in bloom: “Fifty springs are little room/ About the woodland I will go/ To see the cherry hung with snow.”
This wistful looking back combines flowers and snow into a fleeting wonder measuring how short life is.
I felt this too about the chiffchaff. One day it appeared in the lane, not singing but perching in the hedge with the light behind it, silhouetted. The next day it began to sing its two-note walking song and then chiffchaffs were everywhere.
I felt that fleetingness in the first brimstone butterfly below Ludlow Castle and the first skylark singing above the stone circle of Mitchell’s Fold. Our most ancient and enduring works count for little against the tiny wonders which pass like the slightest of scents and yet carry the deepest of memories.
Paul Evans @DrPaulEvans1
Paul Evans gives the Wenlock Poetry Festival lecture, Betwixt & Between – the mystic ecology of Mary Webb, on 25 April. wenlockpoetryfestival.org
