The Elm in English literature

The Elm in English literature, is found as a theme in many poets, and other writers.
Browning, Robert
Oh, to be in England

*Oh, to be in England
*Now that April's there,
*And whoever wakes in England
*Sees, some morning, unaware,
*That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
*Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf
*Round the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
*In England - now!
Duffy, Carol Ann The English Elms
*Seven Sisters in Tottenham,
*long gone, except for their names,
*were English elms.
*Others stood at the edge of farms,
*twinned with the shapes of clouds
*like green rhymes;
*or cupped the beads of the rain
*in their leaf palms;
*or glowered, grim giants, warning of storms.
*In the hedgerows in old films,
*elegiacally, they loom,
*the English elms;
*or find posthumous fame
*in the lines of poems-
*the music making elm-
*for ours is a world without them...
*to whom the artists came,
*time after time, scumbling, paint on their fingers and thumbs;
*and the woodcutters, who knew the elm was a coffin's deadly aim;
*and the mavis, her new nest unharmed in the crook of a living, wooden arm;
*and boys, with ball and stumps and bat for a game;
*and nursing ewes and lambs, calm under the English elms...
*great, masterpiece trees,
*who were overwhelmed.
Forster, E. M.
from The Longest Journey
The great elms were motionless, and seemed still in the glory of midsummer, for the darkness hid the yellow blotches on their leaves, and their outlines were still rounded against the tender sky. Those elms were Dryads, or so Rickie believed or pretended, and the line between the two is subtler than we admit.
Freeman, Mary Eleanor Wilkins
from Six Trees
There was not in the whole countryside another tree which could compare with him. He was matchless. Never a stranger passed the elm but stopped, and stared, and said or thought something about it. Even dull rustics looked, and had a momentary lapse from vacuity. The tree was compelling. He insisted upon recognition of his beauty and grace. Let one try to pass him unheeding and sunken in contemplation of his own little affairs, and lo! He would force himself out of the landscape, not only upon the eyes, but the very soul……
Gray, Thomas from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
*Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
*Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
*Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
*The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr.
from The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table
At last, all at once, when I was not thinking of it—I declare it makes my flesh creep when I think of it now—all at once I saw a great green cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me, without need of uttering the words, 'This is it!' . . . What makes a first-class Elm? Why, size in the first place, and chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim, that title, according to my scale.
Kipling, Rudyard
from A Tree Song: Puck of Pook's Hill
*Ellum she hates mankind and waits
*Till every gust be laid,
*To drop a limb on the head of him
*That anyway trusts her shade,
*But whether a lad be sober or sad,
*Or mellow with ale from the horn,
*He'll take no wrong if he lieth along
*'Neath Oak, and Ash and Thorn.
Lowell, James Russell from 127. Song
*O, elm-leaves dark & dewy,
*The very same ye seem,
*The low wind trembles through ye,
*Ye murmur in my dream!
from The First Snow-fall

*The snow had begun in the gloaming,
*And busily all the night
*Had been heaping field and highway
*With a silence deep and white.
*Every pine and fir and hemlock
*Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
*And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
*Was ridged inch deep with pearl.
Plath, Sylvia, from Elm
*I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
*It is what you fear.
*I do not fear it: I have been there.
Thomas, Edward, Thaw
*Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
*The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
*And saw from elm tops, delicate as flowers of grass
*What we below could not see. Winter pass
Virgil, from The Aeneid, translated by Dryden
*Full in the midst of this infernal road,
*An elm displays her dusky arms abroad:
*The God of Sleep there hides his heavy head,
*And empty dreams on ev'ry leaf are spread.
Wilde, Oscar, from The Ballad of Reading Gaol.
*For oak and elm have pleasant leaves
**That in the springtime shoot:
*But grim to see is the gallows-tree,
**With its adder-bitten root,
*And, green or dry, a man must die
**Before it bears its fruit!
Woolf, Virginia, from Mrs Dalloway
A marvellous discovery indeed - that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! Happily Rezia put her hand with a tremendous weight on his knee so that he was weighted down, transfixed, or the excitement of the elm trees rising and falling, rising and falling with all their leaves alight and the colour thinning and thickening from blue to the green of a hollow wave, like plumes on horses' heads, feathers on ladies', so proudly they rose and fell, so superbly, would have sent him mad.

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