Laying aside this nonsense, however, of poets and painters, we have no tree of such various and extensive use as the Ash. Of greenery: it is old earth’s groping towards the steep Mells blue and snow white through them, a fringe and fray The smouldering enormous winter welkin! May They touch heaven, tabour on it how their talons sweep Say it is ash-boughs: whether on a December day and furledįast or they in clammyish lashtender combs creepĪpart wide and new-nestle at heaven most high. Poetry to it, as a tree whose boughs break in the sky. Is anything a milk to the mind so, so sighs deep Not of all my eyes see, wandering on the world, Say to her, I do but wanton in the South,īut in the North long since my nest is made. O tell her, Swallow, that thy brood is flown: To clothe herself, when all the woods are green? Why lingereth she to clothe her heart with love, The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed,Īnd then in a crowd or in distance it were lost,īut the moment unveiled something unwilling to dieĪnd I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost. With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost That I passed through at either end without noticing.Īnd now an ash grove far from those hills can bring Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing,Ĭould climb down in to molest me over the wall Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles – but nothing at all, Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the interval – If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall:īut they welcomed me I was glad without cause and delayed. Little more than the dead ones made of shade. Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made I have sometimes heard the oak called the Hercules of the forest and the ash, the Venus. The comparison is not amiss: for the oak joins the idea of strength to beauty: while the ash rather joins the ideas of beauty, and elegance.

Red-haired Menelaus, deeply angered, replied: ‘Father Zeus, how vile, such arrogance as this! Leopards, lions, vicious wild boars the bravest of the brave among creatures, show less effrontery than these sons of Panthous with their ash spears!

(The ash is the most beautiful tree in the woods, the pine in gardens, the poplar by rivers, and the fir on high mountains) Populus in fluviis, abies in montibus altis Fraxinus in sylvis pulcherrima, pinus in hortis,

The Wood by John Stewart Collis