A beautiful animation of Philip Larkin’s The Trees

For the 30th anniversary of Philip Larkin’s death, BBC Culture commissioned a special animated video of the poet reading The Trees. Click on the...

The Trees is one of Larkin’s most famous and best-loved poems.

In it, the poet equates the renewal of the seasons with death and pain:

“Their greenness is a kind of grief”, he writes.

But while it is regularly called one of the greatest poems about Spring, Larkin’s own feelings about The Trees were more ambivalent.

As his colleague James Booth explains in his article on England’s miserable genius…