A single old tree dominates the opening of Anna Wickham’s “The Awakening,” its “green-stained bark” rising “like a tower of the sea” from a smooth park. Wickham was an early twentieth-century British poet whose work often treats desire, domestic constraint, and emotional honesty with unusual directness. She wrote at a time when women poets were expected to be decorous, yet her lyrics frequently turn private feeling into something large and almost mythic. Here, an ancient tree becomes the measure of a human life, and new love arrives as startlingly as spring on old wood.
From the start, the tree is made larger than its surroundings. It is “a giant among trees” that has watched the nearby house “for centuries,” as though human architecture were only a recent visitor. Its bark is “hard as rock,” and Time, Sun, and Wind have twisted its boughs into “the arms of a great carven figure of Care,” flung in “passionate appeal” to the changing air. The tree is not merely old; it is shaped by endurance and longing, its twisted limbs suggesting both suffering and an ongoing gesture toward something changeable. From this rugged permanence, however, appear “sticky buds,” with their “promise of growth and beauty for the year.” The turn is small but decisive. Those buds lead to the final confession: “It seems my life is an old tree. / And the young buds are your sweet love for me.” The central idea is an awakening into love after time has hardened the surface, an idea that makes desire natural rather than sentimental.
The shape of the verse reinforces that change. Wickham uses irregular line lengths and slant rhyme, so the poem feels organic rather than clipped and formal. Short phrases such as “With green-stained bark” balance against longer, breathless lines about twisted boughs. Rhymes like bark/park, rock/shock, appear/year, and tree/me create quiet echoes, but they are not rigid. The em dash before the final couplet marks a shift from observation to intimate speech. Key words do much of the work: “green-stained,” “tower,” “rock,” and “twisted” build an image of monumentality, while “sticky” introduces something fragile and alive. Even “Care” is capitalized, turning worry into a carved, allegorical presence. The final language is deliberately plain: an old tree, young buds, sweet love. That plainness gives the closing lines their force.
What makes “The Awakening” significant is how it joins landscape and emotional candor. The ancient tree could easily be a static emblem of age, but Wickham makes it active, even passionate, in its appeal to the “changing humour of the Air.” The arrival of buds on such hard wood suggests that renewal does not belong only to youth. For a poet who wrote against the constraints placed on women’s lives, the image carries quiet force: a life shaped by duty, time, or disappointment can still produce new tenderness. Love is not a decoration; it is a biological fact, like sticky buds splitting old bark. The poem’s power lies in that earned hopefulness. After the monumental tree and the carved figure of Care, the final line does not need grand rhetoric. It simply states what has awakened.