Poem of the Week 2024/6

The Ivy Green

Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green,

That creepeth o'er ruins old!

Of right choice food are his meals I ween,

In his cell so lone & cold.

The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,

To pleasure his dainty whim;

& the mouldering dust that years have made

Is a merry meal for him.

    Creeping where no life is seen,

    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings,

& a staunch old heart has he.

How closely he twineth, how tight he clings,

To his friend the huge Oak tree!

& slily he traileth along the ground

& his leaves he gently waves,

As he joyously hugs & crawleth round

The rich mould of dead men's graves.

    Creeping where grim death has been,

    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Whole ages have fled & their works decayed,

& nations have scattered been;

But the stout old Ivy shall never fade,

From its hale & hearty green.

The brave old plant in its lonely days,

Shall fatten upon the past:

For the stateliest building man can raise,

Is the Ivy's food at last.

    Creeping on, where time has been,

    A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

– Charles Dickens

Ivy is terrifying stuff. Years ago when I moved into my current residence & my first Christmas rolled around, I went into my yard & cut down some of the holly-branches from the trees lining the driveway & some of the bright-green ivy twining around them. The holly & the ivy – festive, right? When the holidays passed, I tossed the holly branches into my green bin outside & put the ivy into my compost pile in the back. Months passed, & every time I turned the compost pile, while everything else in there decayed (or, as our poem would have it, in its British spelling, mouldered) into dirt, the ivy emerged as fresh & green as the day I threw it in there; the only change was that it was now bright & glossy from the moisture in the compost. Eventually I pulled it out of the compost pile & put it in the green bin for pick-up. Let the industrial composters handle it!

Dickens wrote this poem for inclusion in his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Pickwick & his traveling companions are staying with their new friend Mr Wardle, a well-off country gentleman, at his place in Dingley Dell. It is a winter evening, & an elderly clergyman joins the party & recites, at their urging, this poem, which he wrote as a young man. Given the chronology of the novel, that would make the intended time of this poem sometime in the late eighteenth century, but its style hearkens back to even earlier days, to the times when ballads were the main popular form of poetry. The basic ballad beat is  there (four beat lines followed by three beat lines), the regular rhymes (ababcdcd), the refrain that ends each stanza, the archaic -eth endings to the verbs.

Not just the style but the substance of the poem evokes a by-gone time: the ruins old, with crumbling walls & decaying stone, suggest, in this English setting, one of the monastic buildings deserted after Henry VIII broke with the Roman Church, a suggestion almost sealed by the reference to a cell, the typical term for a monk's or nun's room (the cell is lone & cold, which not only reinforces the picturesque quality of the ruin but brings to mind a typical English Protestant idea of a monk's or nun's life as something unnaturally cut off from normal human sensuality & domestic happiness). The fictional creator of this poem is, as I said earlier, a clergyman, & in the late eighteenth century country clergy of the Church of England were often more noted for antiquarian research than for spiritual zealotry. That sets the stage here: a romantic view of dilapidated Gothic buildings, stately buildings gone to dust, & the graves of the people (unnamed, probably forgotten) who built them.

There's a certain morbid element at play in this view, belied by the stealthy vigor of the main protagonist, the ivy. The ivy is consistently associated with green, the color of growth, of Nature at its most robust & lively. But the plant's full strength is revealed only gradually; the first description tells us that the plant is dainty, which is not a word that connotes strength, & that it creeps (creepeth) along, a style of movement associated with lowly & humble creatures. But we soon find out that the daintiness is deceptive: it indicates not fragility but the finicky tastes of a decadent connoisseur, insisting on a certain level of decay before he will consume what's left. (This is a standard trope in poetic mentions of ivy: that a seemingly weak exterior – ivy is frequently depicted as clinging, as it is in the second stanza here – hides a crushing & persistent strength.)

The ivy is deceptive, even treacherous; creeping adds to this impression; it is a sneaky, not-straightforward way of moving. The ivy crawls, it steals along, he is sly beneath his gently waving leaves. Whim & pleasure guide his devouring. But our final impression of the ivy is of its indomitable, even admirable, vigor. The first stanza gives us the contrast between the decaying ruins & the merry meals the ivy makes of them; as noted earlier, there are suggestions of decadence in the ivy's progress over the stones of the fallen buildings. The second stanza emphasizes his tight clinging & his joyous hugs, with an almost sexual physical intensity that contrasts with grim death and the dead men's graves. We find out the ivy not only has a heart, but a staunch one. But what is this staunch heart committed to?

As we find out in the third stanza, the ivy is committed to its own being, its own creative destruction of the world. It becomes a sort of Life Force. In this stanza, we move beyond the specific, limited locale in both space & time of the first two stanzas, with their ruins & their graveyards, into a sweeping view of whole Ages (fled) & whole nations (scattered), & the civilizations that emerged in those times & places are forgotten, abandoned, decayed, or lost, while the ivy crawls endlessly on. The poet's previously ambivalent or questioning views give way to admiration in this stanza: the ivy is stout, meaning sturdy, strong, & tough; it is hale & hearty, it is brave, which suggests splendor as well as fearless. It is also, more poignantly, an old plant, facing lonely days – as if it has outlived whole civilizations & their inhabitants to carry on alone. This is where the bravery comes in: to keep on keeping on. The works of humanity die, decay, & are lost, but the endlessly regenerative force of Nature in the shape of ivy continues, covering all.

This poem combines an intense, almost morbid interest in the picturesque & the ruined, in the grotesque byways of humanity, with an almost frightening sense of ongoing growth & creativity. In this it reminds me in capsule of the works of its great creator. Today is 7 February 2024; on this date in 1812, Charles Dickens came into this world.

I took this poem from the Oxford Illustrated Dickens edition of The Pickwick Papers.