WEBVTT

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It's where I come from, it's
sugaring season right now,

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maple sugaring season.

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That means there's still a
lot of snow on the ground.

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But at any rate, something's
happening to the plant life.

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And that's encouraging, as is
the sight of flowers down here.

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So I'll read a kind of
optative spring poem.

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This is called "Seed Leaves."

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I was going to
call it "Cotyledons,"

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but then I thought I'd spare
some people that dictionary

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work.

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This is about what happens when
you've sown a row of beans,

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let's say, or some other dicot.

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And you're down
on hands and knees

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thinning them out after
the seedlings have come up.

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And as you know, a
bean first produces

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a couple of leaves,
which are not

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the true leaves of the plant.

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They take the shape
of the seed case.

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And then after them, and
at right angles to them,

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come along the true leaves.

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This poem is about that
and some other matters.

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I guess everybody knows
that in Norse mythology

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there was a great universal
tree, tree of life

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called Yggdrasil, which
had the planets and stars

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for its leaves and fruit.

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"Seed Leaves."

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A poem dedicated, by the way,
to Robert Frost, from whom

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it steals this and that.

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"Here something stubborn comes,
dislodging the Earth crumbs

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and making crusty rubble.

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It comes up bending double
and looks like a green staple.

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It could be seedling maple
or artichoke or bean,

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that remains to be seen.

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Forced to make choice of
ends, the stalk, in time,

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unbends, shakes
off the seed case,

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heaves aloft, and spreads two
leaves, which still display

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no sure and special signature.

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Toothless and fat, they
keep the oval form of sleep.

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This plant would like to grow,
and yet be embryo, increase

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and yet escape the
doom of taking shape.

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Be vaguely vast and climb
to the tip end of time

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with all of space to fill,
like boundless Yggdrasil

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that has the stars for fruit.

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But something at the root,
more urgent than that urge,

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bids two true leaves emerge.

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And now the plant, resigned
to being self-defined

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before it can commerce
with the great universe,

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takes aim at all the sky
and starts to ramify."

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As I said about
the word depletion,

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it's nice to rescue words
from abuse or from numb use.

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I suppose that word ramify is
a committee man's word now,

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isn't it?

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And it vaguely means
get complicated.

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The whole sense of
branching is gone from it,

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as it's commonly used.

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Every time I read
this poem now, I

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think of my more
distressed students

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who come to me to talk
about the way they

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feel on the threshold of
what we used to call life.

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You left college and
you entered life.

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A lot of them--

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a lot of them feel this way.

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This plant would like to grow
and yet be embryo, increase

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and yet escape the
doom of taking shape.

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I'm not making fun of anybody.

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I'm quite sympathetic to
that sort of distress.

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