118 FOREST TREES 



LINE 1, seqq. The poet is describing the adventures of 

 Una and her champion, the Red-Cross Knight, on their way to 

 rescue Una's parents from the Dragon. 



10. forth. Forward, into the forest (the Wandering Wood). 



14. can they praise. Did they praise. 'Can 1 , or 'gan', is 

 frequent in our earlier poets as an auxiliary of the past tense. 

 Coleridge, in The Ancient Mariner, imitates this use of it ; e. gr., 



The mariners all gan work the ropes. 



20. weepeth. Distils resin. 



21. The willow worn, $c. See the Willow Song in Othello, 

 Act IV, sc. iii ; see also The Merchant of Venice, Act v, sc. i 



In such a night 



Stood Dido with a willow in her hand 

 Upon the wild sea-banks, and waved her love 

 To come again to Carthage. 



23. the sallow for the mill. A kind of willow, used in the 

 construction of mill-wheels. (Lat. salix.) 



24. sweet-Weeding. Exhaling a sweet fragrance. 



26. platane. Plane tree. (Lat. platanus ; from Gr. platus, 

 wide the reference being to the broad leaf.) 



27. The carver holm. The fine-grained evergreen oak, or holly 

 (O.E. hollin), used for wood-engraving ; though not so good 

 as box, which is preferred by turners and wood-carvers to every 

 other kind of wood. [See Chaucer's reference to the box as the 

 ' piper ' in the preceding passage.] 



EXERCISES 



1. Compare and contrast Spenser's trees with Chaucer's. 



2. Compare and contrast Rime Royal with the Spenserian 

 stanza. 



3. What changes (if any) have taken place in the use of the 

 different kinds of wood since the times of Chaucer and Spenser ? 



