A hickory. Our poet shared with the English masters the noble knack of transplanting trees into verse with their sap and shade. Many years ago Disa, our King’s Queen, whose favorite trees were the jacaranda and the maidenhair, copied out in her album a quatrain from John Shade’s collection of short poems Hebe’s Cup, which I cannot refrain from quoting her (from a letter I received on April 6, 1959, from southern France):
THE SACRED TREE
The ginkgo leaf, in golden hue, when shed,
A muscat grape,
Is an old-fashioned butterfly, ill-spread,
In shape.
When the new Episcopal church in New Wye (see note to line 549) was built, the bulldozers spared an arc of those sacred trees planted by a landscaper of genius (Repburg) at the end of the so-called Shakespeare Avenue, on the campus. I do not know if it is relevant or not but there is a cat-and-mouse game in the second line, and “tree” in Zemblan is grados.