But straight they told me they would bind me here
Unto the body of a dismal yew.
Sir Walter Scott applied the self-same epithet:
But here 'twixt rock and river grew
A dismal grove of sable yew.
Seem'd that the trees their shadows cast
The earth that nourished them to blast;
For never knew that swarthy grove
The verdant hue that fairies love;
Nor wilding green, nor woodland flower,
Arose within its baleful bower.
The dark and sable earth receives
Its only carpet from the leaves.
FRUIT OF YEW (Taxus baccata)
Anyone who has stood on a summer noon within one or other of the two remarkable yew woods on Lord Radnor's property near Salisbury cannot fail to recognise the truth of this picture in every detail. The sense of gloom and envious shade in those "swarthy groves" must oppress him who enters it. They are known respectively as "the Great Yews" and "the Little Yews," the former being of the greater extent—about 80 acres—but the largest trees are growing in the Little Yews. Although these two woods are almost certainly of natural origin, traces of replanting may be recognised here and there by the regular lines in which some of the great trees are disposed, telling of a time when the timber was in request for bow-making.
Tennyson came to realise that the yew really responds in its own fashion to the summons of spring as briskly as any rose or lily, and that a sparrow cannot alight upon it in April without disturbing a puff of pollen:
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.
Surely there is nothing more delightful in English verse than the delicate phrase in which Tennyson touches upon some of the less obvious workings of nature.