The Elm in English literature

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!

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.

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

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!