Poet at Large Michael Field: Thou Hast Thy Kingdom in the Trees

Poet at Large: Michael Field (Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper)

“Thou Hast Thy Kingdom in the Trees”

A bit about my thoughts and where I’m coming from …

I have been meditating on two things for a while: first, reception history, or how the poets behind “Thou Hast Thy Kingdom in the Trees” have been interpreted and reinterpreted over time;13 and second, the tension between exegesis and eisegesis (meaning, what do we bring to this poem? What do these poets bring to us?;)

These concepts are not new to me. I spent a lot of time wrestling with them during graduate school, which shaped how my research read in the end. Those pursuits and an instructional design certificate later, these concepts continue to raise interesting questions about poetry, poets, art, and its interpretation generally. They also remind me—and all of us—that poetry affords many interpretations, and that’s a really good, fruitful thing. About the Poet(s)

Michael Field is a pseudonym for Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper, who collaborated on poetry and lived together. They chose the name of Field as a symbol of their partnership, which is interesting because, according to the Poetry Foundation’s entry on them, questions about their collaboration and whether they could be considered one author seemed more pressing at the time than the fact that these two women were living together and lovers. They were outed by Robert Browning shortly after disclosing their identities to him.

The Book and the Poem

Even so, we still have their poetry, a selection of which can be easily accessed online at Michael Field (Katharine Harris Bradley and Edith Emma Cooper), A Selection from the Poems of Michael Field (The Poetry Bookshop, 1923), https://archive.org/details/michaelfield1923/mode/2up. “Thou Hast Thy Kingdom in the Trees” appears below:

“O Wind, thou hast thy kingdom in the trees.

And all thy royalties

Sweep through the land today.

It is mid June,

And thou, with all thine instruments in tune.

Thine orchestra

Of heaving fields, and heavy, swinging fir,

Strikest a lay

That doth rehearse

Her ancient freedom, to the universe.

All other sound in awe Repeals its law;

The bird is mute, the sea 'Sucks up its waves, from rain The burthened clouds refrain,

To listen to thee in thy leafery,

Thou unconfined.

Lavish, large, soothing, refluent summer-wind.”

Interpretation of the Poem…

In my ears, this poem could easily be about Flagstaff, Arizona in the summer: Ponderosa pine; impossibly bright sky; 80-90 degrees Fahrenheit; dry enough to be warm, but not uncomfortable--almost everything someone escaping the desert sun, heat, and dry could ask for.

That is to admit that the question of whether this poem is about love was not on my mind when I first encountered it. I was doing research for an instructional design project; namely, collecting poems that I’d feel comfortable putting in front of composers and songwriters setting text to music for the first time. At first glance, this poem invited ways to experiment with open musical space, wind sounds, and playing with what it means when the text mentions music.

Could it be read as a love poem? Perhaps. Reading it that way invites us to consider why it might be written as such and what that asked of the poets. (We are not owed the poem’s small pocket of unbridled joy, which makes it a gift all the more.) Like so much art though, there’s multiple ways to turn the poem and the poets and find them glowing.