The poetry of England is born in a glade hedged round with the shadows of the ancient trees. Made of wood, ever sprouting their charming and tremulous leaves, their roots extending far underground, bark-adorned, they bring mystery and enchantment to the poetic imagination. Thus Sir Hugh de Hee in his fifteenth century ‘A Pretty Chaunt to ye Verdant Woodland’ remarks that:
A canopy of grene fronds dost ere enclose
The wood wherein my ladye goes
In much the same spirit, four hundred years later, the Lincolnshire dialect poet Silas Bole intriguingly observes:
Alas! The lofted arching tree!
That harbinger of melancholy
Ash and elm and oak and larch
Proud sentinels of my funeral march
Tennyson, clearly, had seen a tree, otherwise he would not have been able to write ‘Come into the Garden Maud’. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover there is a fascinating conversation between Connie and Mellows: ‘What is that large tall thing in the field with bits sticking out of it?’ ‘Don’t be so bloody soft lass, ’tis a tree.’ Potent, symbolic, tall, thin, often with green decorations, the tree bestrides the interior life of England.
And yet this is no calm and sequestered bower. Trees can fall down. They can sicken and die. The Plantagent poet Eorpwald the Lame writes of a birch tree that ‘fell upon this mannes head/and presentlee did kill him ded’. A fourteenth century legend records the arrival in the English forests of the giant Ag-royd who, together with his demonic helpers Chatto and Windus, sets out to fell the mighty oaks in order to ‘render them into countless bokes fit for Master Ottaker’s remainder traye . . .’ [continues for hundreds of pages].