I thought the idea behind the fable was a neat one, though I have some concerns about the story itself, but to be honest to my mind you'd have been better off writing it as prose.
I'm a bit of a snob where poetry is concerned, and even verse which is semi-comic (which to my mind this is) can't be treated less than seriously so far as rhythm, structure and word placement are concerned. Unfortunately, to me as I read it, the rhythm was all over the place -- just as an example, the first lines of the two opening stanzas are wholly different in both syllable-count and stress: "The
trees in the
wood" is 5 beats with the emphasis naturally falling on the second and fifth, against "Yet just beyond their eaves" which has six syllables and frankly I've no idea where the stress is meant to be -- I'd have chosen "Yet" to be stressed but the lack of comma there refutes it, so I'm left dangling, wondering if it's "just" and "eaves" or even "
be-yond". Then later with "Years passed by" you've only got 3 beats in a first line, and no reason for the abruptness within the story which would have made sense of it. I was constantly thrown by what I saw as a failure to achieve a consistent rhythm from stanza to stanza, which meant I could never relax into the story.
You also fell into the trap of repeatedly using unnatural sentence construction in order to achieve a semblance of rhythm and/or rhyme eg in "The tree
it did wail as the axe
it did hew". This, I'm afraid, is my poetical bugbear, and even in a semi-comic piece I find hard to forgive when used as often as you've done it here.
Overall, for me the entire verse felt cramped and contrived, instead of rolling neatly off the tongue as to me it should have done. (If you want to see what I mean, have a read of the masterly
The Sycophantic Fox and The Gullible Raven though this is more obviously comic than yours.) I don't know why you chose to write it in verse form, but to my mind there was no justification within the story for it, and not enough mastery of the form to compensate.
As to the story itself, I'm not convinced sorrow would have caused the tree to be withered and bitter as you've shown it, which to me speaks of jealousy and miserliness, so to me the characterisation falls short. Writing in prose would perhaps have given you more space to have shown how his distress has warped him over the years. Personally, too, I'd have liked to have known more about external conditions. All the other creatures are telling him to stay put, but is he actually better off there than in the protection of the wood? How so? I'm also not convinced by the ending. Why has the axeman taken him out? It certainly can't be for building because no one would choose a mangled tree when far better trees are nearby. So in fact if he's grown small and twisted he's more likely to be left alone, other than for firewood, and even then I doubt he'd have been picked.
I also don't think the last stanza works. I can understand why you want to show the forest trees again in the last paragraph as you've opened the story with them, but it rubbed me up the wrong way to have them acting, as opposed to just being, when they've not been seen to act before. This is partly a structural issue -- I wouldn't be happy at a character appearing in the last paragraph of a story doing things when we've not met him properly before. But it's also a (rather odd, I admit) moral one. You're showing the forest trees mourning but they've done nothing throughout his life to help him bear his loneliness and outsider status. Instead they've stayed at their proud distance, apparently paying him no attention, and then when he's dead -- saving one of their lives, perhaps -- they have the hypocrisy to feel sorrow for him? Smug b*stards all need chopping down to size.
Sorry I can't be more enthusiastic.
