The Trees
by Philip Larkin
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
A drama about the power of human connection during turbulent times, set in an English coastal town in the early 1980s.
Stars: Olivia Colman - Micheal Ward - Colin Firth
My favorite quotes:
Don't let them tell you what you can or can't do. No one's gonna give you the life you want. You have to go out and get it.
Stephen: Amazin'.
Norman: It is amazing. Because it's just static frames, with darkness in between. But there's a little flaw in your optic nerve so that if I run the film at 24 frames per second you don't see the darkness.
Stephen: Wow.
Norman: It's called the Phi Phenomenon. Viewing static images rapidly in succession crates an illusion of motion. Illusion of life.
Shame is not a healthy condition.
[Hilary is watching her first movie in the theatre, Being There]
President 'Bobby': Life... is a state of mind.
[Hilary sobs]
In Memoriam, [Ring out, wild bells]
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1809 –1892
Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
Ring out the grief that saps the mind
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.
Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.
Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes
But ring the fuller minstrel in.
Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.
Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.
Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.
Sonia Vallabh co-leads the initiative to develop preventive drugs for prion disease at the Broad Institute. She comes to this work with a ...
