Winifred Welles’s “Idyll” begins with a refusal. The speaker, a birch tree, dismisses the “wise, quiet pine,” the “amorous, blonde oak,” and the “tall, pale, lady elm tree.” She was not chosen by any of these; she was chosen by the wind, who “came invisible in a magic cloak.” The title promises a gentle pastoral scene, but the poem quickly turns into a love complaint in which nature’s stillness becomes a trap.
The poem is built as four quatrains whose first and third lines stretch outward while the second and fourth lines pull back, giving the voice a rocking motion between abundance and restraint. Rhymes such as “oak/cloak,” “serene/green,” and “sea/me” create a songlike pull, while soft consonants and sibilant sounds—“wise, quiet pine,” “veils of green,” “sap in the spring”—make the language itself feel breathy, as if the wind’s whisper has entered the verse.
Much of the poem’s force comes from its personification of trees. The pine is reserved, the oak openly desiring, the elm aristocratic and distant. The birch, by contrast, presents herself as “white” and “little,” a figure of innocence who had “stood alone, serene.” But the wind does not leave her serene. The word “chose” matters: she is singled out, and that selection undoes her calm. The wind’s power is intimate and invisible. It has hands that “tore my veils of green” and lips that “laughed in my hair.” Leaves become clothing or bridal veils; the touch is both caress and dismantling. The birch experiences “strength and grace,” and “dreams rose like sap in the spring,” as though desire were not simply emotional but rooted in the body’s rising energy. She trembles “as with buds,” half bloom, half fear.
Crucially, she never sees the wind’s face. The lover remains hidden, known only through touch and sound: “I only heard you whispering.” That invisibility makes the wind feel magical but also unknowable, and it leaves the birch with an experience she cannot fully grasp, only remember.
The final stanza turns from sensual awakening to abandonment. “So yawning and careless you went on to field and sea,” she says, and “yawning” is a quietly devastating word, suggesting that what felt world-changing to the birch was only a passing sport to the wind. Field and sea represent openness and motion, while the birch remains fixed, “lonely and still.” The closing cry—“Oh wind, wind, better to have broken me / Than leave me with roots in the hill”—reverses the usual symbolism of roots. Stability becomes captivity. The tree cannot follow, cannot forget, and cannot return to her earlier contented stillness.
The poem’s significance lies in this psychological complexity. Through a simple natural scene, it dramatises the asymmetry of desire: one being can pass onward, while the other is left rooted in the same spot, alive but permanently changed. The idyll is not a peaceful escape but a place where being chosen and then abandoned can feel more destructive than being shattered outright.