Cheerless, Unsocial Yew – Robert Blair’s ‘The Grave’ (1743)
The Grave, dread thing!
Men shiver when thou’rt named: Nature appall’d
Shakes off her wonted firmness. Ah! how dark
Thy long-extended realms, and rueful wastes!
Where nought but silence reigns, and night, dark night,
Dark as was chaos, ere the infant Sun
Was roll’d together, or had tried his beams
Athwart the gloom profound.—The sickly taper,
By glimmering through thy low-brow’d misty vaults
(Furr’d round with mouldy damps and ropy slime),
Lets fall a supernumerary horror,
And only serves to make thy night more irksome.
Well do I know thee by thy trusty yew,
Cheerless, 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’s ‘The Grave’ (1743) is one of the major poems of the so called ‘Graveyard School‘, often credited as a precursor to Gothic literature. The yew in these poems must be understood as part of a the genre’s trope-stock of formulaic macabre imagery. The yew keeps company with other such boilerplate memento mori as ‘skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms’, distinguishing itself from these only insofar as it receives relatively more attention than them.
The poem begins with an apostrophe to the personified Grave, the ‘Eternal King! […] The catalogue of typical graveyard tropes is introduced in quick succession to construct an appropriately grim atmosphere – the taper, the yews and elms, the pallid moon, the ravens and owls, the chapel and its tolling bell, the possibility of spectral presence, and, of course, the graves themselves, complete with skulls, coffins, epitaphs and worms.
Eric Parisot, ‘Gothic and Graveyard Poetry’ in The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and The Arts (2019), p. 252
The yew is also imagined as the haunt of ‘light heel’d ghosts’ – so ‘fame reports’, at least. Among the apocryphal accounts of the yew identified by Blair with ‘fame’, we might consider ignis fatuus, an illusion caused by unabsorbed gases that often caused travellers to imagine they saw corpses animated underneath the yew.
Yew is hot and dry in the third degree, and hath such an attractive quality, that if it be set in a place subject to poysonous vapours, the very branches will draw and imbibe them: Hence it is conceived, that the judicious in former times planted it in Church-yards on the West side, because those places being fuller of putrefaction and gross oleaginous Vapours exhaled out of the Graves by the setting Sun, and sometimes drawn into those Meteors called Ignes fatui, divers have been frighted, supposing some dead bodies to walk […]
Robert Turner, Botanologia (1664)