Yew

Of vast circumference and gloom profound ~ Wordsworth

Yew is a common name given to various species of trees. It is most prominently given to any of various coniferous trees and shrubs in the genus Taxus.

Quotes

• Lay a Garland on my Hearse of the dismal yew;
  • John Fletcher, The Maid’s Tragedy (1619), Act 2, Scene 2,
    Fifty Comedies and Tragedies (1679)

• Now from yon black and fun’ral Yew,
  That bathes the Charnel House with Dew,
  Methinks I hear a Voice begin;
  (Ye Ravens, cease your croaking Din,
  Ye tolling Clocks, no Time resound
  O’er the long Lake and midnight Ground)
  It sends a Peal of hollow Groans,
  Thus speaking from among the Bones:
    When Men my Scythe and Darts supply,
  How great a King of Fears am I!
  They view me like the last of Things:
  They make, and then they dread, my Stings.
  Fools! if you less provok’d your Fears,
  No more my Spectre-Form appears.
  Death’s but a Path that must be trod,
  If Man wou’d ever pass to God:
  A Port of Calms, a State of Ease
  From the rough Rage of swelling Seas.
    Why then thy flowing sable Stoles,
  Deep pendant Cypress, mourning Poles,
  Loose Scarfs to fall athwart thy Weeds,
  Long Palls, drawn Herses, cover’d Steeds,
  And Plumes of black, that as they tread,
  Nod o’er the ’Scutcheons of the Dead?
  • Thomas Parnell, "A Night-Piece on Death", Poems on Several Occasions (1722)

• Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
    That name the under-lying dead,
    Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
  Thy roots are wrapt about the bones.
  The seasons bring the flower again,
    And bring the firstling to the flock;
    And in the dusk of thee, the clock
  Beats out the little lives of men.
  O, not for thee the glow, the bloom,
    Who changest not in any gale,
    Nor branding summer suns avail
  To touch thy thousand years of gloom:
  And gazing on thee, sullen tree,
    Sick for thy stubborn hardihood,
    I seem to fail from out my blood
  And grow incorporate into thee.
  • Alfred Tennyson, "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1850), II

• Old warder of these buried bones,
    And answering now my random stroke
    With fruitful cloud and living smoke,
  Dark yew, that graspest at the stones
  And dippest toward the dreamless head,
    To thee too comes the golden hour
    When flower is feeling after flower;
  But Sorrow—fixt upon the dead,
  And darkening the dark graves of men,—
    What whisper’d from her lying lips?
    Thy gloom is kindled at the tips,
  And passes into gloom again.
  • Alfred Tennyson, "In Memoriam A.H.H." (1850), XXXIX

• Some country nook, where o’er thy unknown grave
  Tall grasses and white flowering nettles wave—
    Under a dark red-fruited yew-tree’s shade.
  • Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar Gipsy" (1853)

• No triumph and no labour and no lust,
  Only dead yew-leaves and a little dust.
  • Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Ave atque Vale (In Memory of Charles Baudelaire)",
    Fortnightly Review (January 1868)

• What of the bow?
    The bow was made in England:
  Of true wood, of yew-wood,
    The wood of English bows;
      So men who are free
      Love the old yew-tree
  And the land where the yew-tree grows.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Song of the Bow",
    The White Company (1891); Songs of Action (1898)

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 921.

• Careless, unsocial plant! that loves to dwell
  'Midst skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms:
  Where light-heel'd ghosts and visionary shades,
  Beneath the wan, cold Moon (as Fame reports)
  Embodied, thick, perform their mystic rounds.
  No other merriment, dull tree! is thine.
  • Robert Blair, The Grave, line 22.

• For there no yew nor cypress spread their gloom
  But roses blossom'd by each rustic tomb.
  • Thomas Campbell, Theodric, line 22.

• Slips of yew
  Sliver'd in the moon's eclipse.
  • William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act IV, scene 1, line 27.

• Of vast circumference and gloom profound,
  This solitary Tree! A living thing
  Produced too slowly ever to decay;
  Of form and aspect too magnificent
  To be destroyed.
  • William Wordsworth, Yew-Trees.

• There is a Yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale,
  Which to this day stands single, in the midst
  Of its own darkness, as it stood of yore.
  • William Wordsworth, Yew-Trees.