Down yonder green valley . . .

How I hated music lessons at school in the fifties. I was totally tone deaf and I remember having to stand and sing this “Traditional Welsh Air.” It continues—

. . . where streamlets meander
When twilight is fading, I pensively roam
Or at the bright noontide in solitude wander
Amid the dark shades of the lonely Ash grove.

The song has its fair share of streamlets and o’ers, a twas or two and even a bosom. The British have a whole cadre of songs like that. My theory is that they are the byproduct of the Industrial Revolution. Tell-it-like-it-is poets like Blake dared to write of “dark satanic mills”, but the rest of them hid their heads in the sand and ignored the impact of iron and steel by clinging to a bucolic vocabulary of banks and braes, and including a lot of sheep and plenty of trees, often enveloped in doubtful syntax:

To where for me, the apple tree
Do lean down low in Linden Lea. (Do? Whatever happened to doth?)

The ash tree in the photograph has never seen a grove of other ashes: it stands in front of our house, planted on the strip of city property by the local council to replace one of the magnificent elms that succumbed to Dutch Elm disease in the seventies. Now we are threatened by the emerald ash borer, which has destroyed large numbers of trees in Michigan’s lower peninsular, and was reported last week to have crossed over into the upper peninsular.

I don’t think our tree looks too good. I remember still the sadness of waking one morning to find a big red cross sprayed on the elms, indicating they had to come down. So I will watch the ash carefully, humming an appropriate air as I do so.

But sorry, Miss Benjamin, I still sing flat.