John Millington Synge is best known as a playwright of the Irish Literary Revival, yet in his last years he wrote a small group of lyrics that carry the same precise observation as his prose. “To the Oaks of Glencree” was written under the shadow of the Hodgkin’s disease that killed him in 1909, and Mount Jerome, which the poem names, is the Dublin cemetery where he was soon buried. Glencree itself is a wooded valley in County Wicklow, a landscape Synge knew from long walks. The poem sounds like a private moment—arms around a tree, a lark overhead—but it turns on the knowledge that this living trunk will one day become the boards of his coffin.
The opening stanza fixes the speaker in an intimate present. “My arms are round you, and I lean / Against you” creates the physical pressure of a body trusting its weight to the oak; the line break after “lean” almost makes the reader feel that tilting motion. Around this embrace the lark sings “over us,” and the light falls in “golden lights, and green / Shadows” across the bark. Synge makes the tree a companion rather than a symbol: it has bark as a body has skin, and the play of light and shadow over it feels alive. The rhythm sways between longer and shorter lines, as if the speaker is physically leaning into the tree’s support, while the alternating rhymes of “lean” and “green,” “lark” and “bark” keep the stanza buoyant and songlike. Yet the word “shadows” already introduces a note of transience into all that golden light.
The second stanza jumps into the future with “There’ll come a season,” a phrase that sounds almost seasonal and natural, as if death were just another turn of the year. The same tree is addressed, but now it will “stretch / Black boards to cover me.” That verb “stretch” is quietly terrible: the flexible, growing oak will be sawn into planks, and the speaker’s body will be shut beneath them. The warm bark of the first stanza has become “black boards”; the green shadows have darkened into the grave. “Then in Mount Jerome I will lie, poor wretch, / With worms eternally” closes the poem with a deliberately unheroic self-portrait. “Poor wretch” is wry, almost self-mocking, and “worms eternally” refuses the comfort of a soaring afterlife. The long dying fall of “eternally” makes death feel less like a moment than an endless condition.
What makes the poem significant is the way it holds two kinds of time together without flinching. The present is intensely physical—light, song, touch—and the future is starkly physical too, made of wood, earth and worms. The tree is both comforter and coffin, part of the beauty that surrounds him and part of the burial that awaits him. Synge does not turn the oak into a sentimental emblem of nature’s permanence; instead, he acknowledges that the same living world will contain and outlast his body. For a school reader, the poem is a small masterclass in compression: in eight lines it moves from embrace to enclosure, from lark song to eternal silence, and it does so with a conversational tone that makes the chill of the final word feel unexpectedly intimate.