“The Ivy Green” by Charles Dickens

Van Gogh's Undergrowth with Ivy, July, 1889, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

Selected for Immortal Muse by Zireaux (read Zireaux’s comments on this poem)

The Ivy Green
from The Pickwick Papers, by Charles Dickens

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 and cold.
The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,
To pleasure his dainty whim;
And 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,
And a staunch old heart has he.
How closely he twineth, how tight he clings
To his friend the huge Oak Tree!
And slily he traileth along the ground,
And his leaves he gently waves,
As he joyously hugs and 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 and their works decayed,
And nations have scattered been;
But the stout old Ivy shall never fade,
From its hale and 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.

Van Gogh's Tree Trunks with Ivy, 1889, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands

Zireaux’s comments on this poem:
Last week we looked at the “greenwood tree” of Shakespeare, H.G. Wells and Thomas Hardy. The “leaf-filtered light” of passionate love. A meaningless pairing of words, the “greenwood tree” — kind of like saying, “sitting in a traffic car”(“greenwood” meaning, more or less, a “forest”).

But that’s poetry, that’s passion, that’s the sibling of song talking above its conjoined twin — shy, soft-spoken sense.

Now, 200 years and 7 days after the birth of Charles Dickens, we look at the “rare old plant” which “slily” (snake-like) twists and twines around the greenwood tree: Ivy.

There’s nothing “rare” about ivy. Such words — including the two “daintys” in the first stanza — have less to do with describing ivy than with befriending it. The poem is loaded with these chummy terms of endearment; not just “dainty” (as in “excellent”), but stout (as in “strong”), staunch, rare, brave, hearty, hale and old. These are the words that sailors and ruffians sing in pubs to their fellow drunks — which is ironic, because “The Ivy Green” is recited in The Pickwick Papers not by a bunch of burly rogues, but by an old clergyman.

Composed with a healthy dose of hyberbaton (“ivy green,” “scattered been,” “fast he stealeth”), our “Ivy Green” — like Shakespeare’s “Greenwood Tree” — works best as music. Just read aloud the seventh line of all three stanzas. So rhythmically identical are they, so perfect for a pop-song, we could have Miley Cyrus sing them for us (“So I hopped off the plane at LAX” becomes “And the mouldering dust that years have made.”).

Yet here’s the wonder of it all: Sound and song, the visual arts and meaning — they’re constantly crossing over, changing sides. Sound creates sight, and sight creates sound, and meaning can’t live without this sort of constant synesthesia.

Let me explain what I mean: Vincent Van Gogh, the best of what can be called the “poet-painters” (Longfellow, Blake, Cummings, O’Hara, Tagore and so on) also befriended ivy. Sometimes ivy was a creative force: “Like the ivy on the walls, so my pen must cover this paper.” (I quote from van Gogh’s letters). Or a source of comfort, as when he described a new pair of black gloves as “good like ivy, good like going to church.” But equally, he saw ivy as a kind of killer, a strangler, an agent of death: “Illnesses…are perhaps to man what ivy is to the oak.”

Van Gogh's Undergrowth with Ivy, 1889, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

He admired “The Ivy Green,” and even quoted two lines of the poem — from memory — to his brother Theo. (See one of the actual letters here). I say from memory because both lines are, in fact, misquoted, van Gogh preferring to follow meter rather than a direct transcription. “A strange [instead of "rare"] old plant is the ivy green;” and, most tellingly, from line 11, “which stealeth on though he wear no wings.”

Vincent recalls both lines in the same meter (iamb, iamb, anapest, iamb), whereas Charles’s line 11 is actually the most metrically unusual (five-footed, trochaic) of all the lines in the poem.

The point is this: The idea that ivy is like a snake (despite all those leaves, no winged angel, it!) — dangerous, untrustworthy, cold-blooded, slyly entwining an innocent oak — this idea no doubt resonated with van Gogh. But it’s the song that made it memorable to him; the song that produced the imprint in his mind.

That is to say, the song, the music — as much as text and meaning — creates the impression. If you look at van Gogh’s paintings of ivy, you can hear the leaves rustling in the wind. And if you recite Dickens’s “Ivy Green,” you glimpse the essence of that “rare old plant,” its duplicity, its ravenous hunger, its creepiness if you will, in a way that metaphor alone could never create. We sing out of dread, not love. Trying to appease the unappeasable, we make song.

“Ivy loves the trunk of the old oak tree,” writes van Gogh, “and so cancer, that mysterious plant, attaches itself so often to people whose lives were nothing but ardent love and devotion. So, however terrible the mystery of these pains may be, the horror of them is sacred, and in them there might indeed be a gentle, heartbreaking thing.”

Dickens, too, saw this sacred horror. It inhabits the undergrowth of everything he wrote, attaching itself to so many “heartbreaking things” in his books. Which is why “The Ivy Green” — a kind of snake-charmer’s hymn to death — is the perfect song for a clergyman after all.