Poem by Charlotte Mew Protesting the Cutting Down of Trees

This is from The Rambling Sailor, published the year my mom was born, 1929. Mew had killed herself by drinking Lysol the year before. I share with her her visceral reaction to the cutting down of trees I've known. Although I can't say it makes me suicidal. Other things maybe. (See also Hopkins response to cut-down trees: Binsey Poplars.)

The Trees Are Down 

    -and he cried with a loud voice:

    Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees --

                                                            (Revelation.)

They are cutting down the great plane-trees at the end of the gardens.

For days there has been the grate of the saw, the swish of the branches as they fall,

The crash of trunks, the rustle of trodden leaves,

With the "Whoops" and the "Whoas," the loud common talk, and the loud common laughs 

     of  the men, above it all.

I remember one evening of a long past Spring

Turning in at a gate, getting out of the cart, and finding a large dead rat in the mud of the drive.

I remember thinking: alive or dead, a rat was a god-forsaken thing,

But at least, in May, that even a rat should be alive.

The week's work here is as good as done. There is just one bough

On roped bole, in the fine grey rain,

Green and high

And lonely against the sky.

(Down now!--)

And but for that

If an old dead rat

Did once, for a moment, unmake the Spring, I might never have thought of him again.

It is not for a moment the Spring is unmade to-day;

These were great trees, it was in them from root to stem;

When the men with the "Whoops" and the "Whoas" have carted the whole of the whispering 

       loveliness away

Half the Spring, for me, will have gone with them.

It is going now, and my heart has been struck with the hearts of the planes;

Half my life it has beat with these, in the sun, in the rains,

In the March wind, the May breeze,

In the great gales that came over to them across the roofs from teh great seas.

There was only a quiet rain when they were dying;

They must have heard the sparrows flying,

And the small creeping creatures in the earth where they were lying --

But I, all day, I heard the angels crying

"Hurt not the trees."