Hazel (Corylus avellana)

Hazel understorey at Hagbourne Copse, Swindon

Corylus avellana (En: Hazel, Sw/No/Dn: Hassel, Fi: Pähkinäpensas, Ge: Haselnuß, Du: Hazelnoot, Fr: Noisetier / Coudrier , Sp: Avellano, Po: Aveleira, It: Nocciola,  Pl: Leszczyna, Cz: Líska, We: Collen, Ir: Coll)

Hazel (Corylus avellana), female flower above, male below

Hazels can't self-pollenate, apparently, but I can't imagine that's much of an issue. When do you ever see a lone hazel?


I feel I want to say "hazel tree", but few hazels measure up to the normal definition of a tree as having a single bole that's at least a meter or two in height.






But William Wordsworth, in "The Green Linnet" (composed in the orchard at Town-End, Grasmere, in 1803) felt no such reserve.

Amid yon tuft of hazel trees,

That twinkle to the gusty breeze,

Behold him perched in ecstasies,

Yet seeming still to hover;

This is in May, when broad-leaved trees twinkle as the lighter undersides of the leaves are exposed. 






But because of the winter catkins, Jan-Feb is the time of year when you're most likely to notice just how much hazel there is. You'd think we'd be knee-deep in cob-nuts come autumn, yet that isn't what happens. Many hazel individuals deliver few or no ripe nuts, as far as I can see.


Hence the child William's exhilaration was about his newly discovered hazel grove being both fruitful and unplundered --- until now. 


Then up I rose,

And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash

And merciless ravage: and the shady nook

Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,

Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up

Their quiet being:

(William Wordsworth, "Nutting" )


Some hazel individuals, I've noticed, seem to produce no male catkins. Nevertheless hazel is predominantly monoecious (male and female flowers on same individual), as my useless photos show.

Hazel sheen on regenerating coppice

If outside and in need of magickal protection quickly draw a circle around yourself with a hazel branch.

The loveliest thing about hazel, I think, is the grey-brown bark with its subtle silvery gleam. Seeing it, you can believe in the distant relationship of hazels (Corylus) with birches (Betula). It's one of those things you need to experience, you can't really capture it on a photograph. At any rate, I can't.




It's a good few years from when a child first learns to count to when they learn about their first irrational number - Pi, most likely. But a few years later the same child, if they carry on being interested in maths, learns that there are actually a whole lot more irrational numbers than there are rational numbers. (Infinitely more, in fact.)


I think it might be the same with the things you can't capture on a photograph: they're actually most of what there is.




If you have a wood-burning stove, hazel is a good but fast-burning wood. The wood can be used for small diameter carving and turning, but is best if it's been grown in a sheltered spot. Wind can cause splits and twisted grain.


Here's an attempt at a tiny anthology of hazel (contributions welcome!).






Hazel shares our European world as a partner -- in particular the same broad lowland bits that the bulk of humans inhabit, though the extracts from Scott's Lady of the Lake show that hazel is also an important presence in upland Britain. Hazel's culture and ours are quite intertwined. It's predominantly a working relationship.




Harry
A ship these hands have built, in ev'ry part
Carv'd, rigg'd, and painted, with the nicest art;
The ridgy sides are black with pitchy store,
From stem to stern 'tis twice ten inches o'er.
The lofy mast, a straight, smooth hazel fram'd,
The tackling silk, the Charming Sally nam'd; ...


(from Anna Laetitia Barbauld, "A School Eclogue")

Older bark on mature coppice

    The stag at eve had drunk his fill,
     Where danced the moon on Monan's rill,
     And deep his midnight lair had made
     In lone Glenartney's hazel shade;
     But when the sun his beacon red
     Had kindled on Benvoirlich's head,
     The deep-mouthed bloodhound's heavy bay
     Resounded up the rocky way,
     And faint, from farther distance borne,
     Were heard the clanging hoof and horn.   (Sir Walter Scott, The Lady of the Lake, Canto First ("The Chase"), St. I.)


  Here eglantine embalmed the air,
     Hawthorn and hazel mingled there;
     The primrose pale and violet flower
     Found in each clift a narrow bower;
(Ibid., St XII)


 And now, to issue from the glen,
     No pathway meets the wanderer's ken,
     Unless he climb with footing nice
     A far-projecting precipice.
     The broom's tough roots his ladder made,
     The hazel saplings lent their aid;
     And thus an airy point he won,
     Where, gleaming with the setting sun,
     One burnished sheet of living gold,
     Loch Katrine lay ...

(Ibid., St XIV)

Who lov'st to see the hamadryads dress

Their ruffled locks where meeting hazels darken;

(Keats, the Hymn to Pan in Endymion Book I)



  Mig finner ingen,
      ingen jag finner.
Alm, hägg, och hassel blomstra för vind.
   Jag ler åt alla,
      alla åt mig le.
Alm, hägg och hassel, lönn, sälg och lind,
    blomstra för vind,
    buga för vind
Ett vet jag bättre än klänga och springa
Det är att sjunga här under lind.


[Nobody finds me, I find nobody:
Elm, cherry and hazel bloom in the wind.
I laugh at all, all laugh at me.
Elm, cherry and hazel, maple, sallow and lind.
bloom in the wind, bow in the wind.
One thing I like better than climbing and springing:
that is to sing here under the lind.]






(from Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, "Tintomaras sång".  He responded with disarming frankness to those who pointed out that the named trees are not all early flowerers.)






I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slide by hazel covers; ...
(Tennyson, "The Brook")


Hassel-Nødder, med og uden Kjerne, dog til Tidsfordriv, plukkede af min henvisnede Livs-Busk, af Henrik Wergeland. Christiania.

(Book title, by Henrik Wergeland, 1845. Translation: Hazelnuts, with and without kernels, written as a pastime, gathered from my own bush of life, by Henrik Wergeland, Christiania.)



Does every hazel-sheath disclose a nut?

(Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book)






"Tomorrow," he continued, half amused, half thoughtful, "I know whose white brows will be knit, and whose red lips will pout. Well, they shall have their turn: but blue eyes are not always in season; hazel eyes, like hazel nuts, have their season also."
(Christina Rosetti, "The Lost Titian")

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,....

(beginning of W.B. Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus") 

Male catkins

               .......and the never-dry,

Rough, long grasses keep white with frost

At the hilltop by the finger-post;

The smoke of the traveller’s-joy is puffed

Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.

I read the sign. Which way shall I go?

A voice says: You would not have doubted so

At twenty. Another voice gentle with scorn

Says: At twenty you wished you had never been born.

(from Edward Thomas, "The Sign-post")

When the black herds of the rain were grazing,
In the gap of the pure cold wind
And the watery hazes of the hazel
Brought her into my mind ...
(from Austin Clarke, "The Lost Heifer")

Regenerating hazel coppices

Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read

The words cut oot i’ the stane

Had the fug o’ fame

An’ history’s hazelraw

No’ yirdit thaim.

[...like snow driven by wind, so I couldn't have read

the words cut on the stone

even if the moss of fame

and history's lichen

hadn't buried them.]

(from Hugh MacDiarmid, "The Eemis Stane". In the Dictionary of the Scots Language "Hazelraw" is said to be specifically the epiphytic lichen Lobaria pulmonaria , named for growing on hazels, but that doesn't fit very well with the poet's image of it growing on stone.)


Docking and grading now until after dark
In the green field or fold, there was too much work
For the mind to wander, though the robin wove
In the young hazel a sweet tale of love.
(from R.S. Thomas, The Airy Tomb)


övergivenhetens vind! ett slags tecken för ingen! en sådan hassel är du!


from the poem "Late hazel" by Gennadiy Aygi (Chuvash-Russian poet, 1934 - 2006), quoted by Katarina Frostenson in Tre vägar.

Mature hazel coppice among standards

Bark on young growth

Hazel (Corylus avellana), female flowers above, male below

[The "green linnet" William admired in the orchard in 1803 was the bird now usually called a greenfinch (Chloris chloris). According to Wikipedia "The song contains a lot of trilling twitters interspersed with wheezes, and the male has a 'butterfly' display flight".]

The catkins at a slightly earlier stage. Swindon, 29 January 2021.

Developing hazelnuts, about twenty of them. Frome, 5 July 2023.

Hazel leaf. Frome, 25 November 2023.

The infinite subtle variety of hazel leaves.

Hazel leaf. Frome, 25 November 2023.

Hazel leaf. Frome, 25 November 2023.

Hazel leaf. Frome, 25 November 2023.

Hazel leaf (underside). Frome, 25 November 2023.

A hazel shoot. Frome, 2 December 2023.

There's an asymmetry in most hazel leaves that is related to which side of the shoot they're on; whether they are a "left" leaf or a "right" leaf (when looking down on the shoot from the end, as in the photo above). This affects the venation. If you look towards the base of the leaf's central vein you'll see that the lowest node is "opposite", i.e. side veins spring to both sides. But thereafter the nodes become alternate, i.e. a side vein to one side, then to the other... The lowest of these alternate side veins is on the same side as the leaf's position in relation to the shoot. Thus on a left leaf the lowest alternate node springs to the left; on a right leaf the lowest alternate vein springs to the right.

That was really hard to explain!

Hazel leaf on the left side of the shoot. Frome, 2 December 2023.

A "left" leaf, with the lowermost alternate node springing to the left.

Hazel leaf on the right side of the shoot. Frome, 2 December 2023.

A "right" leaf, with the lowermost alternate node springing to the right.

W. B. Yeats: "Blood and the Moon"

Yeats in 1933, photo by Pirie MacDonald

[Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1657420]

Blood and the Moon

(from The Winding Stair and other poems, 1933)

Donald Davie expressed his distaste for what he saw as a Fascistic temper to this poem (quoted in full below).

“A Fascist Poem: Yeats’s ‘Blood and the Moon’” (published 1979, reprinted in Modernist Essays: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, 2004 ed. Clive Wilmer).

See also Mohammad Nabi Meimandi’s PhD thesis, “’Just as Strenuous a Nationalist as Ever’, W.B. Yeats and Postcolonialism: Tensions, Ambiguities, and Uncertainties” (University of Birmingham, 2007). 

Nevertheless this reading can't be regarded as orthodoxy. 

Try it for yourself. It's possible to piece something Fascistic together -

a bloody, arrogant power

             rose out of the race

Yeats is referring to ancient Ireland, and probably before Hitler came to power though not before Mussolini did. Perhaps the poem registers a kind of respect for the "bloody, arrogant power", which at least was not half-dead at the top; perhaps the stain of blood is identified with life itself in its fullness; perhaps the stain of blood is even in a way countenanced by the purity of the moon that cannot be stained by it. It's a possible reading, though extremely partial. But contemporary readers might pick up, as we never can, subtleties of tone or phrase that betrayed (like a class marker) very clearly where the author was coming from. Unfortunately they could also make mistakes sometimes, or read only the first four lines.

For me what's apparent in Yeats' poem is the Byzantium-style detachment of old age. That's certainly something to reckon with in our world. Life does become cheaper as one's own grave approaches... all the atrocities have been witnessed, yet somehow the world muddled on...  Only the eternal images of butterflies and the moon are lovely ...  what does it matter about passing screams and blood, now we stand above the centuries....

You might say it's a slackening of ardour for human justice, in the growing dawn of the mystery of one's own extinction, the very sources of life and death... (I'm turning Yeats' wonderful language into cliches, but anyhow)...   I wouldn't call this natural process fascistic, though I agree that the gradual indifference to small individuals contains its dangers and its terrors as well as its beauty. (It's why old people should never be in positions of power.)

Identifying Fascism or other unacceptable things in giants of literature is a game played with great intensity by all of us, university students especially. At school we get fobbed off with literature that is impeccably right-hearted, The Crucible and The Handmaid’s Tale, then our horizons widen and we have to make our own sense of the problem that famous artworks may have an uncomfortably close association with views that we find evil or actions that we find upsetting. As it happens, this provides an educative device. Not everyone knows how to be a critic, still less a reader, but everyone can be a witch-finder. There’s an enliveningly competitive aspect to the game of trying to free our own tastes from moral aspersion, and it’s an obviously relevant way of making a meaningful engagement with what would otherwise be just boring old lit. (If anything, it seems that the aspersed authors receive an unfair amount of attention.)

BLOOD AND THE MOON

                I

Blessed be this place,

More blessed still this tower;

A bloody, arrogant power

           Rose out of the race

Uttering, mastering it,

           Rose like these walls from these

           Storm-beaten cottages —

           In mockery I have set

A powerful emblem up,

And sing it rhyme upon rhyme

In mockery of a time

Half dead at the top.

                II

Alexandria’s was a beacon tower, and Babylon’s

An image of the moving heavens, a log-book of the sun’s journey and the moon’s;

And Shelley had his towers, thought’s crowned powers he called them once.

I declare this tower is my symbol; I declare

This winding, gyring, spiring treadmill of a stair is my ancestral stair;

That Goldsmith and the Dean, Berkeley and Burke have travelled there.

Swift beating on his breast in sibylline frenzy blind

Because the heart in his blood-sodden breast had dragged him down into mankind,

Goldsmith deliberately sipping at the honey-pot of his mind,

And haughtier-headed Burke that proved the State a tree,

That this unconquerable labyrinth of the birds, century after century,

Cast but dead leaves to mathematical equality;

And God-appointed Berkeley that proved all things a dream,

That this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world, its farrow that so solid seem,

Must vanish on the instant if the mind but change its theme;

Saeva Indignatio and the labourer’s hire,

The strength that gives our blood and state magnanimity of its own desire;

Everything that is not God consumed with intellectual fire.

                III

The purity of the unclouded moon

Has flung its arrowy shaft upon the floor.

Seven centuries have passed and it is pure,

The blood of innocence has left no stain.

There, on blood-saturated ground, have stood

Soldier, assassin, executioner,

Whether for daily pittance or in blind fear

Or out of abstract hatred, and shed blood,

But could not cast a single jet thereon.

Odour of blood on the ancestral stair!

And we that have shed none must gather there

And clamour in drunken frenzy for the moon.

                IV

Upon the dusty, glittering windows cling,

And seem to cling upon the moonlit skies,

Tortoiseshell butterflies, peacock butterflies,

A couple of night-moths are on the wing.

Is every modern nation like the tower,

Half-dead at the top? No matter what I said,

For wisdom is the property of the dead,

A something incompatible with life; and power,

Like everything that has the stain of blood,

A property of the living; but no stain

Can come upon the visage of the moon

When it has looked in glory from a cloud.

W. B. Yeats: The Lover Tells Of The Rose In His Heart

Willie Yeats in 1898, lithograph by Will Rothenstein

[Image source: National Portrait Gallery]

THE LOVER TELLS OF THE ROSE IN HIS HEART

All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old,

The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart,

The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould,

Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told;

I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart,

With the earth and the sky and the water, re-made, like a casket of gold

For my dreams of your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.

                                                (from The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899)

All the lines are enriched alexandrines (that is to say with extra unstressed syllables), but the first three are a specific music because of the strong medial breaks visually indicated by commas. They more or less split, amoeba-like, into restless trimeters.

This will be the most spirited part of the poem for many readers, with many detonations. In particular, setting “The cry of the child” directly after the word “old” is a wonderfully intelligent piece of concision – it tells us everything about how we are to hear this cry (in stark contrast to what it might connote): hopeless, hungry, and trapped in the cold years. But after all, the first three lines are only an introduction; we don’t know where this is going yet.

The fourth line has a quite different music. It flows from end to end, maximizing the enrichment (six accents but eighteen syllables). But though the auditory image of a rippling, unimpeded stream is certainly present, there can be no doubt that the climax of the line is “a rose”, which emerges with quiet definition at the point where, because of the preceding lines, we have learnt to expect a pause. I suppose it does not need spelling out that “a rose” blossoms in mid-line as in “the deeps of my heart”. [It is odd how this last phrase marries “the creak of a lumbering cart”, denying the opposition between them. This offers a subsidiary hint at re-integrating the lover into his surroundings and accepting the “wronging” as a natural event] 

The rose in European poetry since the troubadours is a symbol that has drifted a long way from its floral source. I suppose you assume, as I do, that this rose is red, but this idea leads not towards horticulture but towards an idealized image incorporating other complex enclosures; hearts, vaginas and heavens. It’s an image that blends the desired with the desire, so you may say that here the rose means what the lover is experiencing, which is created at least as much by himself as by the person he is addressing. It is what he is dreaming about; but it is also his dream.  

We are now clear about the relation between the opening lines and the rose of the title; they “wrong” it. Do they wrong the lover or his beloved? Is he really a victim, a nurturer, or both at the same time, or in fact neither? What is certain is that the rose is now associated with weakness, and if we feel that it might be less self-regarding to address the weakness of the child’s ignorant wailing and the ploughman’s grinding poverty, rather than feeling annoyed by them, we may not have much sympathy with the lover’s torments.

This reflection keeps coming back as we pick our way though the second stanza, which repeats the rhyme-sounds of the first stanza but without its force.  A wrong “too great to be told” feels like an inadequate expression, and the potential energy of “build” – qualified as it already is by being only a hunger to build – is further undermined by “sit” and “apart”.

But these indications of feebleness do lead to a subtly surprising outcome. When the last line comes round again, it now appears against a different background, and gains a certain paradoxical strength. If the rose seemed a bit pallid at the end of Stanza 1, it seems to glow at the end of Stanza 2. You might express the effect in these words: Nonetheless, it still blossoms. Perhaps all the more perfectly in adversity.  

As it might be: someone who feels their belief (opinion, philosophy, religion, love) slighted and collapsing continues to assert: Nevertheless, there is something in it .... there are many things we don’t understand .... somewhere, there is a happy land ... so that it is on the verge of ceasing to be a belief and remains only as a dream; then the persistence of the dream and the fact of the past belief provide a sort of testimony (at least in one’s own mind) that underwrites the long-desired Maybe. Yeats would later write of “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart”, but in those very words would cling on to the sentimental romanticism of earlier days. Maybe it had after all hidden the key to transforming the world, though he had not found it.