"I am the heat of your
hearth,
the shade screening you from the sun;
I am the beam that holds your house,
the board of your table;
I am the handle of your hoe,
the door of your homestead;
the wood of your cradle,
and the shell of your coffin.
I am the gift of God
and the friend of man."
Anonymous
"Almond blossom, sent
to teach us
That the spring days soon will reach us,
Lest, with longing over-tried,
We die, as the violets died."
Edwin Arnold (Almond
Blossoms)
Earth's
crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes -
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
Elizabeth Barrett Browing
"The country where he
lives
is haunted
by the ghost of an old forest.
In the cleared fields
where he gardens
and pastures his horses
it stood once,
and will return. There will be
a resurrection of the wild.
Already it stands in wait
at the pasture fences."
Wendell Berry, Window
Poems
"I am not bound for any
public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods."
Wendell Berry
" Cedars, that
high upon the untrodden slopes
Of Lebanon stretch out their stubborn arms,
Through all the tempests of seven hundred years
Fast in their ancient place, where they look down
Over the Syrian plains and faint blue sea,
When snow for three days and three nights hath fall'n
Continually, and heaped those terraced boughs
To massy whiteness, still in fortitude
Maintain their aged strength, although they groan;"
Laurence Binyon (The Death
of Adam)
"The slope is darkly
sprinkled
With ancient junipers,
Each a small, secret tree:
There not a branch stirs
I fear those waiting shapes
Of wry, blue-berried wood.
They make a twilight in my mind,
As if they drained my blood."
Laurence Binyon (The
Junipers)
"Touched with beauty, I
stand still and gaze
In the autumn twilight. Yellow leaves and brown
The grass enriching, gleam, or waver down
From lime and elm: far-glimmering through the haze
The quiet lamps in order twinkle; dumb
And fair the park lies; Faint the city's hum.
And I regret not June's impassioned prime,
When her deep lilies banqueted the air,
And this now ruined, then so fragrant lime
Cooled with clear green the heavy moon's high glare;
Nor flushed carnations, breathing hot July;
Nor April's thrush in the blithest songs of the year,
With broom bloom on the elms and dazzling sky;
So strange a charm there lingers in this austere
Resigning month, yielding to what must be.
Yet most, O delicate birch, I envy thee,
Child among trees ! with silvery slender limbs
And purple sprays of drooping hair. Night dims
The grass; the great elms darken; no birds sing.
At last I sigh for the warmth and the fragrance flown.
But thou in the leafless twilight shinest alone,
Awaiting in ignorant trust the certain spring."
Laurence Binyon
I'll lie here and learn How,
over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow And a light sound.
Louise Bogan,
1898-1970
And you, how old are you?
I asked the maple tree:
While opening one hand,
- he started blushing.
Georges Bonneau
"Out of the
golden-green and white
Of the brake the fir-trees stand upright
In the forest of flame, and wave aloft
To the blue of heaven their blue-green tuftings soft."
Robert Bridges
"The pink laburnum lays
her cheek
In married, matchless, lovely bliss,
Against her golden mate, to seek
His airy kiss."
Alice Brown (A
Benedictine Garden)
"A great acacia, with
its slender trunk
And overpoise of multitudinous leaves
(In which a hundred fields might spill their dew
Ans intense verdure, yet find room enough)
Stood reconciling all the place with green."
E. B. Browning (Aurora
Leigh)
"Hark, where my
blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dew-drops - at the bent spray's edge -
That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!"
R. Browning (Home
Thoughts, from Abroad)
"Tho' large the
forest's monarch throws
His army-shade,
Yet green the juicy hawthorn grows,
Adown the glade."
Burns (The Vision)
"Know ye the land where
the cypress and myrtle
Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime;
Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into
sorrow, now madden to crime?"
Byron (The Bridge of
Abydos)
"Oh, leave this barren
spot to me!
Spare, woodman, spare the beechen tree!
Though bush or floweret never grow
My dark unwarming shadow below;
T. Campbell (The Beech
Tree's Petition)
“Tree
that for twenty thousand years
Your vows have kept,
You have suddenly healed the pain
of a traveler’s heart,
And moved this brush to write a new song”
Chang
Fang-Sheng (4th Century)
"Right
as an aspen lefe she 'gan to shake"
Chaucer (Troilus and
Creseide)
Then here 's to the oak, the
brave old oak,
Who stands in his pride alone!
And still flourish he a hale green tree
When a hundred years are gone!
H. F. Chorley. 1831-1872.
"The oak, when living,
monarch of the wood;
The English oak, which, dead, commands the flood
C. Churchill (Gotham)
“Thou’st
sheltered hypocrites in many a shower
That when in power would never shelter a tree.”
John Clare (The Fallen
Elm)
"The
thorns and briars, vermilion-hue,
Now full of hips and haws are seen;
If village prophecies be true,
they prove that winter will be keen.
J. Clare (Autumn)
"Huge
elm, with rifled trunk all notched and scarred,
Like to a warrior's destiny! I love
To stretch me often on thy shadowed sward,
And hear the laugh of summer leaves above;
Or on thy buttressed roots to sit, and lean
In careless attitude, and there reflect
On times, and deeds, and darings that have been
Old castaways, now swallowed in neglect.
John Clare (The
Shepherd's Tree)
"Yet
laurels, drench'd in pure Parnassian dews,
Reward his memory, dear to ev'ry muse.
Who, with a courage of unshaken root,
In honour's field advancing his firm foot,
Plants it upon the line that justice draws,
And will prevail or perish in her cause.
Cowper ( Table Talk)
"While
thus through all the ages thou hast push'd
Of treeship - first a seedling hid in grass;
Then twig; then sapling; and, as century roll'd
Slow after century, a giant bulk
Of girth enormous, with moss-cushioned root
Upheav'd above the soil, and sides emboss'd
With prominent wens globose - till at the last
The rottenness, which time is char'd t'inflict
On other mighty ones, found also thee ......."
Cowper (Yardley Oak)
What does he plant who
plants a tree?
He plants the friend of sun and sky;
He plants the flag of breezes free;
The shaft of beauty, towering high;
He plants a home to heaven anigh
For song and mother-croon of bird
In hushed and happy twilight heard -
The treble of heaven's harmony
These things he plants who plants a tree.
Henry Cuyler Bunner, (The
Heart of the Tree)
The Trees
I did not know your names and yet I saw
The handiwork of beauty in your boughs,
I worshipped as the Druids did, in awe,
Feeling at Spring my pagan soul arouse
To see your leaf-buds open to the day,
And dull green moss upon your ragged girth,
The hoary sanctity of your decay,
Life and death glimmering upon the Earth.
Edward L.
Davidson
The talking oak
To the ancient spoke.
But any tree
Will talk to me.
Mary Carolyn Davies
"Green-hoary
alders near the wheat
Move their crisp glister"
Lord De Tabley (The Royal
Aspects of the earth)
Autumn
Leaves Falling
Dance Upon a Breeze
Kaleidoscope Of Colours
Sleep Cascading Trees
Andrew
K Fletcher
“We’ve
always had the science on our side.
That’s a fact not easily denied.
They can play their petty games
and call us nasty names
But we’ve always had the science on our side.
There’s
those of them who call our science junk
Well let me tell you that’s a lot of bunk
Their argument’s so weak
They have to scream, not speak
And we’ve always had the science on our side.
There’s
other ones who call our science weird
They’re the weird ones not to be feared
In the light of day
They simply melt away
And we’ve always had the science on our side
We’ve
always had the science on our side
That’s a source of our power and our pride
For though the truth they flout
They cannot put it out
And we’ve always had the science on our side.”
(Dennis
Fritzinger,
Warrior Poets Society)
The woods are lovely, dark
and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost (Stopping by
Woods On a Snowy Evening)
“Two roads diverged in a
yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth”.
Robert Frost (Two
Roads)
I'd like to go by climbing a
birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Robert Frost
"Unflinching
"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."
Gray (Elegy)
"I cut it down, because
it blocked the light:
And now the sunshine streams into the room
At noonday; but, at closing in of night,
I hear a ghostly murmur in the gloom -
A ghostly wind that stirs
the spectral tree
To scornful whispering of phantasmal boughs -
O foolish man, who thought to murder me;
My live roots still run under your frail house"
Wilfrid Gibson (The Tree)
"In the round hollow of
the moonlight meadow
Over the ponds the sevn willow's shiver,
And in the ghostly misty shine their branches
Rustle and glance and quiver - "
Wilfrid Gibson (The
Willows)
"Unflinchingly I have
borne the brunt of spears -
Yet, under these dark boughs that writhe and twist,
My heart is as a wren's heart when she hears
The litch-owl calling through the evening mist,
And falters cowed, a thing of fluttering fears,
Before some shadow-plumed antagonist.
Quaking I ride, yet know not
what I dread:
Nought stirs the boding silence but the sound
Of beechmast crackling 'neath my horse's tread,
Or some last leaf that flutters to the ground;
And long it seems since, roofless and blood-red,
The sun in seas of night-black bough was drowned.
Wilfrid Gibson (In the
Forest)
And for long
At night he could not bear to see
An elm against the stars.
'Twas
wrong,
He knew, to blame the innocent tree -
Though some folk hated elms and thought
Them evil, for their great boughs fell
So suddenly .....
Wilfrid Gibson (The
Elm)
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