Most poems about a cut-down tree are elegies. Salomon's "Fallen Elm" begins like one and then turns into something closer to a birth scene. A tree has been felled, though not "cut clean at all," and what follows is a slow, quiet account of how it survives, wounded, frozen, apparently finished, and yet still alive enough to put out green shoots. The central idea is endurance as a kind of tenderness: life continues not through force but because something in the natural world is "merciful," nursing it through its worst season.
The poem's opening is its most surprising move. Where we might expect the felling to be the event, Salomon makes it a failure. The cut was messy, so the tree "bled," and snow then "healed the wound with a silver caul." A caul is the membrane that sometimes covers a baby at birth, so the poem plants its central metaphor in the very first stanza: the snow is not a shroud but a birth-covering. Winter, normally the enemy of growth, becomes the thing that protects it.
The imagery that follows is cold, hard and beautiful. The trunk is "enameled in ice / Veined white as a crystal sheath," a surface so polished it looks like decoration rather than damage. The wind, passing through the broken wood, has a "new voice through its winter teeth." The phrase is eerie and a little comic at once. The splintered stump has teeth, and the wind speaks through them. The tree is stiff, nearly dead, but it still supplies the instrument for a voice.
The third stanza turns from observation to explanation, and its language shifts from ice to warmth. Whatever "warmed / The elm to the roots in soil" is compared to "spring / Warming the heart of the bole." The comparison is neat: in the middle of winter, something works inside the tree the way spring works outside it. Then the poem sharpens the metaphor into its boldest image. The trunk is "bound to the stump by a tongue / Of wood like a navel cord, / A mother sustaining a child / In its embryonic world." The fallen trunk and the stump are mother and child, still joined by a strip of living wood. This explains the poem's logic. The caul in the first stanza, the navel cord here and the "embryonic world" all belong to one extended image, so the felled tree is not dying but gestating.
Structurally, the poem is built on this slow build-up. Each stanza is a quatrain with an ABCB rhyme scheme, in which only the second and fourth lines rhyme, and the rhymes are often loose rather than exact: "all" and "caul," "sheath" and "teeth," "soil" and "world." The near-rhymes feel deliberate, a gentle unevenness that suits a tree not cleanly cut. The rhythm is steady and unhurried, close to iambic without being rigid, which gives the poem a calm, patient pace. Enjambment carries sentences across line breaks, and the long syntax of the third and fourth stanzas, which together form a single sentence-like movement, mimics the slow, continuous work of sustaining.
The last stanza delivers the payoff. The sentence runs "Until it could breach the wall, / And did,—as each upright stem, / Leaves in the bud, burst green." The dash and the short "And did" give the moment real force after so much stillness. "Breach the wall" is also a clever reversal of the birth image: the child breaks out of the womb, and the shoots break through the dead wood. Notice too that the new growth is "upright" while the tree itself is "fallen." Life reorients itself vertically even from a horizontal trunk.
The final phrase, "the fallen wine-glass elm," is a quiet surprise. The "wine-glass" description presumably refers to the elm's characteristic shape, tapering at the base and spreading at the top, and the phrase lends the ending an almost toast-like feeling, as though the poem were raising a glass to the survivor.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it takes a familiar subject and quietly inverts it. Felling, ice and winter all seem to promise a death scene, and each is reinterpreted as part of a nurturing process. The effect is hopeful without being sentimental, because the poem never denies the injury. The tree bleeds, stiffens, and lies in the cold. It earns its green.