Jane Kenyon's "Taking Down the Tree"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 8 January 2024

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kenyon published four volumes of poetry during her life: From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990), and Constance (1993), and, as translator, Twenty Poems of Anna Akmatova (1985). Despite her relatively small output, her poetry was highly lauded by critics throughout her lifetime. As fellow poet Carol Muske remarked in the New York Times when describing Kenyon’s The Boat of Quiet Hours, “These poems surprise beauty at every turn and capture truth at its familiar New England slant. Here, in Keats’s terms, is a capable poet.” Indeed, Kenyon’s work has often been compared with that of English Romantic poet John Keats; in an essay on Kenyon for Contemporary Women Poets, Gary Roberts dubbed her a “Keatsian poet” and noted that, “like Keats, she attempts to redeem morbidity with a peculiar kind of gusto, one which seeks a quiet annihilation of self-identity through identification with benign things.”The cycles of nature held special significance for Kenyon, who returned to them again and again, both in her variations on Keats’s ode “To Autumn,” and in other pastoral verse. In Let Evening Come [from which today’s poem comes], her third published collection—and one that found the poet taking what Poetry essayist Paul Breslin called “a darker turn”—Kenyon explored nature’s cycles in other ways: the fall of light from day to dusk to night, and the cycles of relationships with family and friends throughout a long span of years brought to a close by death. Let Evening Come “shows [Kenyon] at the height of her powers,” according to Muske in a review of the 1990 volume for the New York Times Book Review, with the poet’s “descriptive skills… as notable as her dramatic ones. Her rendering of natural settings, in lines of well-judged rhythm and simple syntax, contribute to the [volume’s] memorableness.”

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.2	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is January 8, 2023, 24.
0:09.8	I'm going to keep doing that.
0:12.0	Today's poem is by Jane Kenyon, and it's called Taking Down the Tree.
0:18.8	If you are a Christmas traditionalist and like to feast to the hilt, as they say,
0:28.1	and observe all 12 days of Christmas, then your celebration just ended on the 6th of January.
0:36.1	A feast of Epiphany, which is the traditional date for taking down
0:41.7	one's Christmas tree. There are some who are a little burnt out and exhausted by the time
0:50.0	the 25th rolls around, and by the morning of the 26th, their tree is at the curb and good riddens.
0:57.4	But there are a good many of us, I hope, that have a little more festal endurance, but even we must draw the line somewhere.
1:10.6	And so, unless you live in the South, where apparently leaving one's Christmas decorations up is a common practice, at least outside, you have probably just de-decorated or undecorated your home by now.
1:33.9	And this is a poem about the ritual that you've no doubt just relived or experienced of undressing the Christmas tree.
1:43.5	And it can be a fraught or a weighty, a pregnant ritual,
1:51.5	because for many families, the tree decorations are a kind of generational collection of memories or an amalgam of family culture and experiences.
2:06.8	And as you take each one down, just as when you hang each one up, you have an opportunity to revisit certain experiences and recall certain memories for good or for ill.
2:22.3	So here is taking down the tree. I'll read it once and then offer a few comments and read it one more time.
2:30.4	Give me some light, cries Hamlet's, midway through the murder of Gonzago.
2:36.2	"'Light! Light!' cried scattering cortisones.
2:39.5	"'Here, as in Denmark, it's dark at four, and even the moon shines with only half a heart.
2:45.8	"'The ornaments go down into the box.
2:48.5	"'The silver spaniel, my darling, on its collar. From mother's childhood in
2:54.3	Illinois, the balsa jumping jack, my brother and I fought over, pulling limb from limb.
	...

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