This week’s choice is “A Bluebell Wood” by Felix Dennis, and I have chosen it to mark the beginning of May: the bluebell month.
By bole and bough, still black with rain,
Felix Dennis (1947—2014)
The sunlight filtered where it would
Across a glowing, radiant stain—
We stood within a bluebell wood!
Poem 436. The Bluebell Wood
We walked within an ancient wood
Beside the Heart-of-England way
Where oak and beech and hazel stood,
Their leaves the pale shades of May.
By bole and bough, still black with rain,
The sunlight filtered where it would
Across a glowing, radiant stain—
We stood within a bluebell wood!
And stood and stood, both lost for words,
As all around the woodland rang
And echoed with the cries of birds
Who sang and sang and sang and sang…
My mind has marked that afternoon
To hoard against life’s stone and sling;
Should I go late, or I go soon,
The bluebells glow—the birds still sing.
Felix Dennis was a great lover of the natural world and his poetry collection Tales From the Woods is full of verse celebrating the sights, sounds and feelings we may experience when out in nature.
This poem describes walking in a wood in early May when leaves on the trees are still rather monochrome and discovering a bright blue drift of flowers lit by a shaft of sunlight, the enchantment heightened by birdsong all around.
Dennis pictures the scene very ably: we can imagine the splash of colour—“a glowing, radiant stain”—amidst the grey shadows cast by the trees and the ceaseless singing of the birds as they court, build nests and raise their young.
In a nod to Wordsworth’s daffodils, Dennis remarks that he has stored the memory of “that afternoon” to counter the irritations, annoyances and worse that mundane life may throw at him: whether he departs his life sooner or later, the glowing bluebells and the singing of the birds will stay with him to the end.
Dennis reminds us of the power of nature to amaze us and reset our sense of proportion: the awed feeling of looking at an incredible sweep of blue and realising that it is made up of myriad tiny flowers, just as the chorus of song is made up of the notes of each small bird. Such moments stay with us just as Wordworth’s daffodils stayed with him:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
I like it because it is a simple poem praising the natural world but it paints a lovely picture of the bluebells and you can almost hear the birds “Who sang and sang and sang and sang…” Nicola bought me a copy of Tales From The Woods many years ago and it has a CD with Dennis reading his own poems including this one. The reading is not available online but this one by OnFifePress is rather good.