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A Dictionary of Literary Symbols
This is the first dictionary of symbols to be based on literature, rather than
‘‘universal” psychological archetypes or myths. It explains and illustrates the
literary symbols that we all frequently encounter (such as swan, rose, moon
gold), and gives hundreds of cross-references and quotations. The dictionary
concentrates on English literature, but its entries range widely from the Bible
and classical authors to the twentieth century, taking in American and
European literatures. For this new edition, Michael Ferber has included over
twenty completely new entries (including bear, holly, sunflower, and tower),
and has added to many of the existing entries. Enlarged and enriched from
the first edition, its informed style and rich references make this book an
essential tool not only for literary and classical scholars, but for all students
of literature.
m i c h a e l f e r b e r is Professor of English and Humanities at the University
of New Hampshire. His books include The Poetry of William Blake (1991), The
Poetry of Shelley (1993), and A Companion to European Romanticism (2005).
A Dictionary of Literary Symbols
Second edition
Michael Ferber
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Cambridge University Press
The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521870429
© Michael Ferber 1999, 2007
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of
relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place
without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published in print format 2007
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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls
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guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
For Lucy
Contents
Acknowledgments page viii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
Dictionary 7
Authors cited 248
Bibliography 258
vii
Acknowledgments
I must first thank my colleague Douglas Lanier for helping me think through
this dictionary from the outset, for encouragement during early frustrations,
and for a great deal of detailed advice. E. J. Kenney of Peterhouse, Cambridge,
saved me from a number of mistakes in Latin and offered countless suggestions about not only classical but English literature; his notes would make a
useful and delightful little book by themselves. David Norton made many
helpful suggestions regarding biblical passages. Two graduate students at the
University of New Hampshire gave valuable assistance, Heather Wood at an
early phase by collecting data from books not close at hand and William
Stroup by going over by every entry with a keen eye to readability and cuts.
My wife Susan Arnold also cheerfully read every entry and offered many
helpful ideas.
I am grateful to Maria Pantelia for providing me with the Thesaurus Linguae
Graecae on cd-rom and advice on how to use it. Cynthia Pawlek of Baker
Library, Dartmouth, initiated me into the English Poetry Data-Base, also on
disk, Robin Lent, Deborah Watson, and Peter Crosby of Dimond Library at
UNH patiently handled my many requests and, during the reconstruction of
the library, even set up a little room just large enough for the Leob classical
series and me. I also made good use of the library of Gonville and Caius
College, Cambridge, and I thank Gordon Hunt for his good offices there.
The Humanities Center of UNH gave me a grant for a semester’s leave and
an office in which to store unwieldy concordances and work in peace; its
director Burt Feintuch and administrator Joanne Sacco could not have been
more hospitable.
For contributing ideas, quotations, references, and encouragement I also
thank Ann and Warner Berthoff, Barbara Cooper, Michael DePorte, Patricia
Emison, John Ernest, Elizabeth Hageman, Peter Holland, Edward Larkin,
Ronald LeBlanc, Laurence Marschall, Susan Schibanoff, and Charles Simic. My
editor at Cambridge University Press, Josie Dixon, not only solicited Professors
Kenney and Norton to go over my entries but made many helpful suggestions
herself while shepherding the book through its complex editing process. For
the errors and weaknesses that remain despite all this expert help I am of
course responsible.
viii
Abbreviations
AV
NT
OT
NEB
Olymp.
Bible
Authorized Version (King James Version) of the Bible (1611). All quotations are
from this version unless otherwise stated.
New Testament. Quotations from the NT that are paralleled in more than one
Gospel are cited from the first in which they appear (usually Matthew).
Old Testament
New English Bible (1961)
Pindar
Olympian
Pyth.
Pythian
Isth.
Nem.
Isthmian
Nemean
Horace
Quotations from Horace are from the ‘‘Odes” or Carmina unless otherwise
stated.
Met.
Ovid
Metamorphoses
Met.
Apuleius
Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass)
CT
Chaucer
Canterbury Tales (Gen. Pro. = General Prologue, Pro. = Prologue)
PF
Parliament of Fowls
TC
Troilus and Criseyde
FQ
Spenser
Faerie Queene (Pro. = Prologue)
SC
Shepheardes Calendar
1H4, 2H4
1H6, 2H6, 3H6
Shakespeare
King Henry the Fourth, Part One, Part Two
King Henry the Sixth, Part One, Part Two, Part Three
2GV
Two Gentlemen of Verona
12N
Twelfth Night
AC
AWEW
Antony and Cleopatra
All’s Well that Ends Well
ix
Abbreviations
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
AYLI
CE
As You Like it
The Comedy of Errors
Cor
Cym
Coriolanus
Cymbeline
H5
King Henry the Fifth
H8
King Henry the Eighth
JC
Julius Caesar
KJ
King John
Lear
LLL
MAAN
MM
MND
MV
MWW
King Lear
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Much Ado about Nothing
Measure for Measure
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Merchant of Venice
The merry Wives of Windsor
Per
R2
Pericles
King Richard the Second
R3
King Richard the Third
RJ
TC
Timon
Titus
TS
WT
Romeo and Juliot
Troilus and Cressida
Timon of Athens
Titus Andronicus
The Taming of the Shrew (Ind. = Induction)
The Winter’s Tale
Line numbers for Shakespeare are keyed to the Riverside edition;
they will not vary by much from any modern edition.
x
PL
Milton
Paradise Lost
PU
Shelley
Prometheus Unbound
Introduction
The idea for this dictionary came to me while I was reading a student essay
on Byron’s ‘‘Stanzas Written on the Road between Florence and Pisa,’’ which
sets the true glory of youthful love against the false glory of an old man’s
literary renown. After a promising start the student came to a halt before
these lines: ‘‘the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty / Are worth all your
laurels, though ever so plenty.’’ His copy lacked footnotes, and he lacked
experience of poetry before the Romantics. With disarming candor he confessed that he had no idea what these three plants were doing in the poem,
and then desperately suggested that Byron might have seen them on the
road somewhere between Florence and Pisa and been inspired to put them in
his poem the way you might put plants in your office. I wrote in the margin
that these were symbolic plants and he had to look them up. But where,
exactly, do you send a student to find out the symbolic meaning of myrtle?
The Oxford English Dictionary was all I could come up with, but I felt certain
there must be a handier source, designed for readers of literature, with a
good set of quotations from ancient times to modern. But there is no such
book.
A dozen times since then I have asked colleagues and librarians if they
knew of one. They were all sure they did, or thought ‘‘there must be one,’’ but
they could never find it. Several of them came up with Cirlot’s Dictionary of
Symbols, but that work, whatever its uses, is the last thing I would recommend
to a student. It has no entry at all for myrtle. Under ivy it mentions the
Phrygian god Attis and its eunuch-priests and then says, ‘‘It is a feminine
symbol denoting a force in need of protection.’’ One can hardly imagine the
interpretations of Byron that would arise from those claims. Under laurel it
names Apollo and mentions poets, but has nothing about fame, and it goes
on about ‘‘inner victories over the negative and dissipative influence of the
base forces.’’
Only slightly better are two recent ones: Hans Biedermann’s Dictionary of
Symbolism: Cultural Icons and the Meanings Behind Them, translated from the
German, and Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant’s Penguin Dictionary of
Symbols, translated from the French. Both range widely but unsystematically
over the cultures of the world, packing Mayan and Chinese meanings next to
those from medieval alchemy. The latter book, much the larger, lacks an entry
for myrtle; under ivy it discusses Dionysus, which is on the right track, but it
says nothing about its uses in Roman poetry that lie behind Byron. Neither
book quotes widely from poetry or prose fiction.
If no adequate dictionary exists, but everyone thinks it does (because it
must), that seemed a good reason to write one. It was also a reason not to
write one, for if even the Germans have not produced one, as it seemed, it
might be beyond mortal powers. After all, anything can be a symbol, and a
comprehensive dictionary might require thousands of entries. After some
1
Introduction
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hesitation, however, I decided the thing can be done, and the present book is
the result.
Its title is somewhat misleading. It would be more correct, if ungainly, to
call it A Selective Dictionary of Traditional Western Literary Symbols and Conventions,
Mainly in Poetry, and I shall follow the terms in that hypothetical title as I
describe the book’s features.
It was only by drastically limiting the range of possible symbols, of course,
that I could proceed with it. Yet it is more comprehensive than one might
think. This dictionary covers only traditional symbols, those that have been
used over many years by many authors. Most entries begin with the Bible or
the classics and trace examples through to fairly recent writers, with an
emphasis on British literature, and especially on Chaucer, Spenser,
Shakespeare, Milton, and the Romantics; they also typically include a few
examples from Italian, French, Spanish, German, or Russian literature
(especially from Dante and Goethe). The tradition is more stable than I had
first guessed, at least until the twentieth century; nightingales and cypresses
carry with them their ancient associations, and even where they are invoked
in new ways those connotations may still be in play. There is no need,
moreover, to take up the significance of the lathe in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary,
the pistols in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, the mysterious sound in Act 2 of Chekhov’s
Cherry Orchard, the madeleine in Proust, or the leaden circles of sound from
Big Ben that permeate Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. These must be worked out by the
reader in each case, and no dictionary on a reasonable scale could help much.
What readers need to know, in any case, are the traditional symbols, the
routine furniture of literature over thousands of years, which often appear
without explanation, and which gradually gain in connotation as the
tradition lengthens and alludes to itself. Whether it informs the meaning of
an individual work is often a subtle question -- does it matter that the bird
that seeks ‘‘your cradle narrow / Near my Bosom’’ in Blake’s ‘‘The Blossom’’ is a
sparrow, with its associations of lust? Or that the tree that Akhmatova
especially liked but is now a stump was a willow, with its suggestion of
maidenhood or fruitlessness? (‘‘The Willow’’) -- but the question cannot even
be entertained without a knowledge of the tradition. I do not know how many
of these traditional symbols there are, but the number cannot be very large,
and I am hoping that a book with 175 of the most important ones, along with
cross-references, will be complete enough to constitute a useful reference
work.
I have tried to be copious with quotations and citations in each entry,
risking redundancy, in order to give a sense of the history of a symbol and the
range of its contexts. Simply to give definitions of symbols would have made
for a short book but a misleading one, for often only a listing of examples can
convey what a symbol has meant. I have aimed, too, to interest the scholar or
experienced reader as well as to help the beginning student. There are doubtless important omissions within many of the entries -- indeed until the
moment I yielded the manuscript to the typesetter I was continually turning
up material that I wondered how I had missed -- but I have done my best
within strict word limits to include interesting variations as well as the most
typical senses.
2
Introduction
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That all the references are to western literature, counting the Bible as one
of its prime sources, would not seem to require a defense, but more than one
colleague has questioned my ‘‘western-centric bias’’ and urged that I undertake a truly multi-cultural dictionary of the all the world’s literary symbols.
It sounded like a wonderful project, but not for me, or for any one mortal.
Two days reading through Chinese and Japanese poetry in translation gave
me a glimpse into what it might entail. The swallow, I learned, is seen as a
harbinger of spring, just as it is in western poetry: the thirteenth-century
poet Chiang K’uei ponders the time ‘‘When swallows come to ask where
spring is.’’ But another common image for spring, plum blossoms, is not
common in western poetry. Since plum blossoms often appear amid latewinter snow, they are tokens of hardiness and courage as well as forerunners
of spring (somewhat, but not quite, like the almond blossom in the west);
one commentator suggests that they represent the promise of the perfect
beauty of the cherry blossoms that come later. In England, however, if we may
trust Ben Jonson, it is ‘‘The early cherry, with the later plum,’’ that mark the
usual order (‘‘To Penshurst’’ 41). The cuckoo, or rather the bird translated as
‘‘cuckoo’’ in English, seems not to be the same species as the European bird,
which is known for laying its eggs in other birds’ nests. The oriental ‘‘cuckoo’’
is known for its beautiful song and its straight flight. In the call of the
cuckoo the Chinese heard kui k’u, ‘‘go home’’; in Japanese, its charming
name hototogisu may be written in characters that mean ‘‘bird of time’’; in
both cultures the bird suggests homesickness. It is also associated with the
moon. All of this is quite the opposite of the harsh song of cuckoldry! And so
it goes. There are close similarities to western usage, not surprising since we
all live in the same world, and there are sharp differences, not surprising
either since fauna and flora, not to mention human culture, vary from
place to place. The task of working out the details in a comparison of just
two traditions would be daunting. It would be difficult even to decide
whether to enter the two ‘‘cuckoos’’ under one name or two. I hope nevertheless that scholars expert in other languages will undertake to produce
dictionaries like this one for each tradition, if they do not exist already,
so we might look forward to a systematic study of ‘‘comparative
metaphorics.’’
This is a dictionary of symbols in literature, not myth, painting, folklore,
dreams, alchemy, astrology, the Tarot pack, the Kabbalah, or the Jungian
collective unconscious. Myths come into it, of course, insofar as they take
literary form, but no proper names have entries. The reader who misses them
can easily find several excellent dictionaries of classical mythology. That there
are also excellent books about iconography in European painting allows me to
omit citations from that tradition, both the Christian symbolism seen in
countless paintings of the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, the martyrdom of
saints, and the like, and the emblem books of the Renaissance. By ‘‘literature’’
I mean for the most part the ‘‘high’’ literature of the standard western canon.
To modern eyes this tradition may seem an elite affair, in contrast not only to
proverbs and ballads but to fairy tales, popular plays and songs, seasonal
rituals, and other kinds of folklore, from all of which this dictionary might
have drawn more than the few examples it has. The limits of space (and time)
3
Introduction
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must be the main plea against having done so, but one should remember that
a great deal of Greek literature was ‘‘popular’’ in its day, as were Shakespeare
and many other writers, and many bits of folklore live on in them that have
died out among the folk. I have also tried to include a few references to less
well-known writers. Those with a particular interest in women,
African-American, Latin-American, or ‘‘post-colonial’’ writers may find them
underrepresented, but this dictionary does not seem the right place to argue
for a new canon. It is my sense, too, that at least through the nineteenth
century, women, blacks, and other ‘‘others’’ did not use symbols in ways
notably different from the dominant tradition. As for alchemy and the other
mystical traditions, they have certainly found a place here and there in
literature, but except for a few references I have had to leave out the often
difficult and lengthy explanations they would require.
This dictionary depends on no particular definition of ‘‘symbol.’’ I have
chosen to err on the side of generosity rather than exclude something one
might want to know, and many instances come closer to metaphor, allusion,
or even motif than to symbol strictly defined. I also include some conventions, commonplaces, or ‘‘topoi,’’ the standard ways a thing has been represented. So I include dawn, death, dream, nature, and certain other subjects
not so much for what they have stood for as for what other things have stood
for them.
For several reasons the great majority of examples is taken from poetry.
Nearly all the oldest western literature is in verse, and until the modern era
the poetic genres were the most prestigious and most frequently published.
Poetry tends, too, to be denser in symbolism than novels or stories, though
there is plenty of symbolic prose fiction. It is much easier, too, to scan poetry
for key words or ideas than to scan prose, as there are concordances for most
poets (in book or electronic form) but very few for novelists. I have been able
to find fifty occurrences of a symbol in a dozen poets in a few minutes, but
for novelists I can mainly rack my memory or that of colleagues. I have
nevertheless included quite a few prose examples, helped at times by scholarly
studies of one symbol, yet in the end I don’t think it would make much
difference to the range of entries and meanings within entries if there were
no prose examples at all.
Sometimes the entries are rather long. Readers may find more about the
nightingale than they strictly need for understanding a passage by
Shakespeare or Keats. Most annotated student editions of classic works, either
from limits of space or the wish not to seem intimidating, give only minimal
information in the notes, and so they fail to convey the richness of the
tradition and suggest instead that there is a code or algebra of literature. I
also think it is interesting in itself to see many threads of nightingale meanings woven together in a long entry, and it lets one take a bearing on the
whole history of western poetry.
This is not to say that whenever a nightingale appears in a poem it must
mean all the things it ever meant, or that it must allude to all the previous
appearances of nightingales. What Freud said about cigars is sometimes true
of literary symbols: sometimes a nightingale is just a nightingale, or little
more than a way of saying that night has come. On the other hand, most
4
Introduction
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poets have absorbed the traditional language of poetry and assume their
readers or listeners have done so too. The implied reader of most poetry is an
expert on nightingales, even if that reader has never heard or seen one. If it is
possible for a nightingale to make an ‘‘innocent’’ appearance after 2,800 years
in western literature it must be under special literary conditions that
somehow both invoke and erase the associations the nightingale has acquired,
as perhaps Coleridge does in ‘‘The Nightingale’’ as early as 1798, or Wallace
Stevens much more recently in ‘‘The Man on the Dump,’’ where the
nightingale is included in the great garbage pile of worn-out poetic images. To
repeat an earlier point, the ideal is to know the tradition and then decide in
each case to what extent it is still in play.
Note on sources
There is one advantage, perhaps, in the incompleteness of this dictionary,
and that is that readers, if they enjoy the existing entries but miss a particular symbol, can have the pleasure of researching it themselves. The best
place to begin, in fact, is the Oxford English Dictionary, which will at least give a
few quotations. There are comparable dictionaries in French and Italian; the
German one, begun by the Grimm Brothers, is wonderful but its citations are
from editions now very old and rare. If you read a little German, you can
make use of the great Real-Encyklopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft,
edited by Pauly, Wissowa, and Kroll, in many volumes, which is an astounding work of scholarship, a kind of super-concordance to Greek and Latin
literature. Even without Greek and Latin you can get something out of the
two large Oxford dictionaries, which are generous with quotations; you will
need to learn the Greek alphabet, but then you can track the citations in
facing-page translations in the Loeb series published by Harvard University
Press. A good university library will have concordances to the major poets;
when you have found lines, say, from Shakespeare, go to one of the scholarly
editions of the individual plays (Cambridge, Oxford, or Arden) and check
the footnotes to the lines with your symbol: they may well give sources
going back to the Romans. The great scholarly editions of Greek and Latin
classics are usually bursting with references to sources and parallels. Also
helpful are dictionaries of proverbs, especially Stevenson’s Home Book of
Proverbs, Maxims and Familiar Phrases, and indexes to titles, first lines, and last
lines of poetry. I have listed several more works in the ‘‘General’’ section of
the bibliography.
After many quotations from languages other than English I have given the
last name of the translator. Except for a few historically important
translations (e.g., Chapman, Dryden, Pope), I have used readily available
modern ones; classical texts other than Homer and Virgil are generally from
the Loeb, Penguin, or Oxford World’s Classics versions. The brief unattributed
translations are ‘‘my own,’’ that is, they are usually so simple and inevitable as
to be common property.
An asterisk before a word indicates that it is a hypothetical or unattested
form.
5
Introduction
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Introduction to the second edition
For the second edition I have written twenty new entries, expanded nearly
thirty existing entries, and added a dozen works to the bibliography.
I have also corrected a few errors, mostly citations, in the first edition. For
pointing them out I am grateful to Yatsuo Uematsu, who translated the first
edition into Japanese, and to Laimantas Jonušys, who translated it into
Lithuanian. I also thank Laura Smith for some useful tips.
6
A Dictionary of Literary Symbols
A
Absinthe
Adder
Aeolian harp
see Wormwood
see Serpent
The aeolian harp (or lyre) or wind harp was invented by the German Jesuit
Athanasius Kircher and described by him in 1650. It is a long, narrow wooden
box with a thin belly and with eight to twelve strings stretched over two
bridges and tuned in unison; it is to be placed in a window (or a grotto) where
the wind will draw out a harmonious sound. (Aeolus is the Greek king in
charge of the winds; he first appears in Homer’s Odyssey 10.) In the next
century James Oswald, a Scots composer and cellist, made one, and it soon
became well known.
It just as soon became an irresistible poetic symbol, first in English, then in
French and German. James Thomson described the harp in The Castle of
Indolence: ‘‘A certain Musick, never known before, / Here sooth’d the pensive
melancholy Mind; / Full easily obtain’d. Behoves no more, / But sidelong, to the
gently-waving Wind, / To lay the well-tun’d Instrument reclin’d; / From which,
with airy flying Fingers light, / Beyond each mortal Touch the most refin’d, /
The God of Winds drew Sounds of deep Delight: / Whence, with just Cause,
The Harp of Aeolus it hight’’ (1.352--60). Thomson also wrote an ‘‘Ode on Aeolus’s
Harp.’’ It was already so well known by the 1750s that the opening line of
Gray’s ‘‘Progress of Poetry’’ -- ‘‘Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake’’ -- was misconstrued;
Gray added a note quoting Pindar’s ‘‘Aeolian song’’ and ‘‘Aeolian strings’’ to
make clear that he was referring to a mode of Greek music, not the wind
harp. (To the ancients, however, ‘‘Aeolian lyre’’ might refer to Sappho and
Alcaeus, whose lyrics were in the Aeolian dialect of Greek.)
In poetry any harp can become an aeolian harp if suspended in the open
air. Alluding to Psalm 137, where the exiled Jews ‘‘hanged our harps upon the
willows’’ by the rivers of Babylon, William Cowper ends his long poem
‘‘Expostulation’’ by calling on his muse to ‘‘hang this harp upon yon aged
beech, / Still murm’ring with the solemn truths I teach’’ (718--19).
Among the English Romantics the wind harp became a favorite image,
capable of many extensions. In ‘‘The Eolian Harp,’’ perhaps the most extended
poetic treatment of the subject, Coleridge is prompted by the harp’s ‘‘soft
floating witchery of sound’’ (20) to consider ‘‘the one Life within us and
abroad, / Which meets all motion and becomes its soul’’ (26--27), and then
speculates: ‘‘And what if all of animated nature / Be but organic Harps
diversely fram’d, / That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps / Plastic and
vast, one intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all?’’
(44--48). Coleridge may have been influenced by the associationist psychology
of David Hartley, according to whom sensation depends on ‘‘vibrations’’
7
Aeolian harp
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
carried by the nerves to the brain, where new but fainter vibrations are
created. Diderot, in D’Alembert’s Dream, has a similar but more explicitly
musical model of sensation and memory, as does Herder, in Kalligone.
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge used the metaphor of the internal breeze
or breath responding to the inspiration of a natural wind. So Wordsworth
begins the 1805 Prelude, ‘‘Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze,’’ where the
breeze serves as a kind of epic muse; a little later he reflects, ‘‘For I,
methought, while the sweet breath of Heaven / Was blowing on my body, felt
within / A corresponding mild creative breeze, / A vital breeze . . . ’’ (41--44) and
then likens himself to an aeolian harp (103--07). In ‘‘Dejection,’’ Coleridge
compares himself to an ‘‘AEolian lute, / Which better far were mute’’ (7--8).
Shelley has frequent recourse to the image (e.g., Queen Mab 1.52--53, Alastor
42--45, 667--68) and extends it in interesting ways. It is quietly implicit in Queen
Mab 8.19--20: ‘‘The dulcet music swelled / Concordant with the life-strings of
the soul.’’ He develops an idea in Coleridge’s ‘‘Dejection,’’ where the raving
wind is told that a crag or tree or grove would make fitter instruments than
the lute, by imagining that the winds come to the pines to hear the harmony
of their swinging (‘‘Mont Blanc’’ 20--24); in his ‘‘Ode to the West Wind’’ he
implores the wind to ‘‘Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is’’ (57). In his
‘‘Defence of Poetry,’’ Shelley explicitly likens man to an aeolian lyre, but adds
‘‘there is a principle within the human being . . . which acts otherwise than in
the lyre, and produces not melody, alone, but harmony, by an internal
adjustment of the sounds or motions thus excited to the impressions which
excite them.’’
The aeolian harp enters French poetry with André Chénier’s Elégies (no. 22):
‘‘I am the absolute owner of my memory; / I lend it a voice, powerful
magician, / Like an aeolian harp in the evening breezes, / And each of my
senses resounds to this voice.’’ It appears as similes in the influential romantic
novels Les Natchez by Chateaubriand and Corinne by Germaine de Staël.
In Germany, Hölderlin in ‘‘Die Wanderung’’ (‘‘The Migration’’) makes the
link Shelley makes: ‘‘and the forests / All rustled, every lyre / In unison / At
heaven’s gentle touch’’ (trans. Sieburth). Goethe stages a brief ‘‘Conversation’’
between two Aeolian harps, male and female, and Schiller alludes to the harp
in ‘‘The Dignity of Women.’’ The song of Ariel that opens Goethe’s Faust, Part II
is accompanied by aeolian harps. Half a century later Mörike writes ‘‘To an
Aeolian Harp,’’ where the wind blows from the green tomb of ‘‘the youth I
loved so much’’: ‘‘As the wind gusts more briskly, / A lovely cry of the harp /
Repeats, to my sweet dismay, / The sudden emotion of my soul.’’ The Russian
poet Tyutchev hears a harp at midnight grieving like a fallen angel; for a
moment we feel faith and joy, ‘‘as if the sky flowed through our veins,’’ but it
cannot last, and we sink back into ‘‘wearisome dreams’’ (‘‘The Gleam’’, trans.
Bidney).
In America, Emerson praises the one sure musician whose wisdom will not
fail, the Aeolian harp, which ‘‘trembles to the cosmic breath’’ and which alone
of all poets can utter ‘‘These syllables that Nature spoke’’ (‘‘The Harp’’). Thoreau
wrote ‘‘Rumors from an Aeolian Harp,’’ a song from a harp, not about one, and
in Walden he employs the metaphor several times. As a theme or allusion, the
harp seems to have lingered longer in America than elsewhere, appearing as
late as 1888 in a poem by Melville, ‘‘The Aeolian Harp at the Surf Inn.’’
8
Air
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Kircher noted that several sounds may be produced by one string,
suggesting that the string is to the wind as a prism to light, breaking up a
unified motion or essence into its component parts. William Jones developed
the theory that ‘‘the Eolian harp may be considered as an air-prism.’’ That
idea may account for the connection between the aeolian harp and the ‘‘Harp
of Memnon,’’ which was thought to be concealed within a colossal statue of
an Egyptian pharoah and would sound when the first ray of sunlight struck it
each morning. ‘‘For as old Memnon’s image,’’ Akenside writes, ‘‘long
renown’d / By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch / Of Titan’s ray, with each
repulsive string / Consenting, sounded through the warbling air / Unbidden
strains; even so did Nature’s hand / To certain species of external things, /
Attune the finer organs of the mind’’ (Pleasures of Imagination 109--15). Amelia
Opie mentions Memnon’s harp in her ‘‘Stanzas Written under Aeolus’ Harp.’’
Byron lightly alludes to Memnon, ‘‘the Ethiop king / Whose statue turns a
harper once a day’’ (Deformed Transformed 1.531--32).
At least two composers have written music ‘‘for’’ an aeolian harp: the
Romantics Berlioz, in his Lélio (opus 14b), and Chopin, in his Etude opus 25,
no. 1.
Air
see Breath, Wind
Albatross
The albatross, of which there are several species, is a large web-footed bird
with a hooked beak and narrow wings, found mainly in the southern oceans.
The white Wandering Albatross, with a wing span of thirteen feet, is the best
known; when it follows a ship it is a striking sight, and sailors have long
considered it a bird of good omen.
The first half of the name seems to derive from Latin albus, ‘‘white,’’ but the
b was inserted into ‘‘alcatras,’’ from Portuguese alcatraz, used of the albatross,
cormorant, frigate bird, or pelican, from Arabic al-ghattas, the white-tailed
sea-eagle.
As early as the sixth century there are records of the bird following ships.
The most famous albatross in literature is the one in Coleridge’s Rime of the
Ancient Mariner; since then ‘‘albatross’’ has come to mean a burden of guilt or
sin. Melville, in Moby-Dick, chapter 42, has a memorable description of an
albatross. It was believed that albatrosses can sleep while in flight; so Hugo
likens Chateaubriand to the bird, for he soars calmly above the turmoil of the
earth (‘‘Le Génie’’ 128--30). Baudelaire, in L’Albatros, likens a poet, ‘‘exiled on
the ground,’’ his wings clipped, to an albatross captured by sailors.
Almond
The almond tree blooms earlier than any other -- as early as January in
Palestine, March in England; it is prima omnium, ‘‘first of all,’’ according to
Pliny (Natural History 16.103). It can thus symbolize spring’s arrival, or more
precisely a prophecy of its arrival.
The Lord asks Jeremiah what he sees, and he replies, ‘‘I see a rod of an
almond tree.’’ The Lord says, ‘‘Thou hast well seen: for I will hasten my word
to perform it’’ (Jer. 1.11--12). Rather mysterious in English, this passage depends
on a Hebrew pun on ‘‘almond’’ (shaqed) and ‘‘hasten’’ (or ‘‘watch,’’ ‘‘be diligent’’)
(shoqed): almonds are watchful, hastening to blossom. ‘‘‘Tis a fair tree, the
almond-tree: there Spring / Shews the first promise of her rosy wreath,’’ as
9
Amaranth
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Letitia Landon writes (‘‘Death in the Flower’’ 1--2). Shelley makes a
‘‘lightning-blasted almond-tree’’ which nonetheless scatters blossoms stand for
the renewal of hope after the defeat of the prophetic French Revolution (PU
2.1.134--35).
Calderón brings out the notion of premature blossoming. Segismund wants
no more false displays ‘‘that one gust / Can scatter like the almond tree in
flower, / Whose rosy buds, without advice or warning, / Dawn in the air too
soon’’ (Life is a Dream 3.3.2330--33; trans. Campbell).
The rod of Aaron is made from an almond tree; when it alone among all
the other rods flowers and yields almonds, it is a sign of the Lord’s favor:
Aaron is chosen to be priest (Num. 17.1--10). This passage lies behind artists’
use of an almond-shaped aureole, the mandorla (Italian for ‘‘almond’’), behind
representations of Christ and Mary, the chosen ones.
The white blossoms of the almond tree suggested hair to the author of
Ecclesiastes: ‘‘the almond tree shall flourish’’ means ‘‘their hair shall turn
white’’ as they grow old (12.5). In the last part of ‘‘Of the Four Ages of Man,’’
Anne Bradstreet explains, ‘‘Mine Almond tree, grey hairs, doe flourish now’’
(417).
Amaranth
Amphisbaena
10
The amaranth or amaranthus is an eternal flower. The word is a ‘‘correction’’
of the Greek participle amarantos, ‘‘unfading’’; taken as a noun naming a
flower the ending was respelled as if it were anthos, ‘‘flower.’’ Lucian describes
a fresco painting of a flowery meadow in spring which, as a painting, is thus
‘‘eternal spring and unfading (amarantos) meadow’’ (‘‘The Hall’’ 9). Peter uses it
twice in his first letter: through the resurrection we are begotten again to an
inheritance ‘‘that fadeth not away’’ (1.4), and we shall receive ‘‘a crown of
glory that fadeth not away’’ (5.4). Milton’s angels wear crowns woven with
amaranth, ‘‘Immortal Amarant, a Flow’r which once / In Paradise, fast by the
tree of life / Began to bloom, but soon for man’s offence / To heaven removed’’
(PL 3.353--56). Milton made it so distinctively the flower of Paradise (lost) that
Tennyson has a painter describe a flower that ‘‘only blooms in heaven / With
Milton’s amaranth’’ (‘‘Romney’s Remorse’’ 106).
In English poetry, then, it became symbolic of Paradise or eternity and of
the Christian hope of salvation. So Cowper writes ‘‘Hope . . . // On steady wings
sails through th’immense abyss, / Plucks amaranthine joys from bow’rs of
bliss’’ (‘‘Hope’’ 161--64). Wordsworth claims that the imagination has the power
‘‘to pluck the amaranthine flower / Of Faith’’ (sonnet: ‘‘Weak is the will of
Man’’). The Prometheus of the non-Christian Shelley ‘‘waked the legioned
hopes / Which sleep within folded Elysian flowers, / Nepenthe, Moly,
Amaranth, fadeless blooms’’ (PU 2.4.59--61). So when Coleridge, in his poignant
‘‘Work without Hope,’’ writes, ‘‘Well I ken the banks where amaranths blow,
/ . . . / Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, / For me ye bloom not,’’
we know it is not an earthly meadow he has lost; he is in spiritual despair.
Sainte-Beuve gives it a somewhat different meaning, as the ‘‘symbol of
virtue that never fades’’ (Causeries du lundi, vol. 8 [1851--62], p. 142).
see Serpent
Anchor
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Anchor
Any use of a ship as a symbol or metaphor may include the anchor as the sign
of safety. In a Christian context, the anchor has become a symbol of hope,
especially the hope of salvation. The source is a passage in the Epistle to the
Hebrews concerning ‘‘the hope set before us’’ in the sworn promise of God:
‘‘Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and stedfast’’
(6.18--19). The cruciform shape of many anchors seconded their connection
with the Savior.
Spenser’s character Speranza (Hope) has a silver anchor on her arm, upon
which she teaches the Redcross Knight ‘‘to take assured hold’’ (FQ 1.10.14, 22).
Cowper’s poem ‘‘Hope’’ includes the anchor among many metaphors: ‘‘Hope,
as an anchor firm and sure, holds fast / the Christian vessel, and defies the
blast’’ (167--68). The Alpine peasant, according to Wordsworth, is unmoved by
perils, ‘‘Fixed on the anchor left by Him who saves / Alike in whelming snows
and roaring waves’’ (Descriptive Sketches 206--07). Tennyson’s Enoch Arden, a
sailor, tells his wife, as he departs, ‘‘Cast all your cares on God; that anchor
holds’’ (222).
See Ship.
Animal
see Beast
Anointing
Ant (or Emmet)
see Oil
The ant is known for its wisdom, prudence, or foresight. ‘‘Go to the ant, thou
sluggard,’’ the Book of Proverbs advises; ‘‘consider her ways, and be wise’’ (6.6).
‘‘The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer’’
(30.25).
Hesiod calls the ant the ‘‘wise one’’ for ‘‘gathering stores’’ (Works and Days
778). Virgil says the ‘‘ant fears a lean old age’’ (Georgics 1.186). Horace expands:
‘‘the tiny ant with immense industry . . . / hauls whatever he can with his
mouth and adds it to the heap / he is building, thus making conscious and
careful provision for the future’’ (Satires 1.1.33--35, trans. Rudd). In a double
simile Ovid cites a column of ants carrying grain and a swarm of bees
hovering over thyme (Ars Amatoria 1.93--96). Among the gifts each animal gave
to man, according to Sidney, the ant gave ‘‘industrie’’ (Third Eclogues 66.93).
Milton names ‘‘The parsimonious emmet, provident / Of future, . . . /. . . joined
in her popular tribes / Of commonalty’’ (PL 7.485--89). Wild nature, says
Wordsworth, ‘‘to the emmet gives / Her foresight, and intelligence that
makes / The tiny creatures strong by social league’’ (Excursion 4.430--32). The
fable of the industrious ant and the improvident grasshopper goes back to
Aesop.
The social side of the ant noted by Milton and Wordsworth has a repellent
side exploited by Wordsworth himself when he describes London as a
‘‘monstrous ant-hill on the plain / Of a too busy world!’’ (1850 Prelude 7.149--50).
Baudelaire calls Paris Fourmillante cité, ‘‘swarming city’’ (from fourmi, ‘‘ant’’)
(‘‘Les Sept Vieillards’’), in a line T. S. Eliot footnotes in The Waste Land (60).
The word ‘‘ant’’ comes from Old English aemette, akin to ‘‘emmet.’’
11
Ape
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
12
Ape
The Greeks and the Romans considered apes ridiculous, strange, ugly, and
somewhat dangerous, and ‘‘ape’’ was a common term of abuse. A passage from
Heraclitus, who stressed the superiority of the gods, rests on this
contemptuous view of apes: ‘‘The handsomest ape is ugly compared with
humankind; the wisest man appears as an ape when compared with a god’’ (in
Plato, Hippias Major 289a, trans. Wheelwright). In this may lie the germ of the
notion that apes imitate people; in any case they resemble us. ‘‘The ape [Latin
simia], that most repulsive animal,’’ said Ennius, ‘‘how much it is like [similis]
ourselves!’’ (Saturae, quoted in Cicero, De Natura Deorum 1.35). Horace refers to
‘‘that ape of yours who knows nothing but how to imitate Calvus and
Catullus’’ (Sermones 1.10.18--19). The word simia is not related to similis but the
connection seemed natural: apes are simulators, imitators. In English and
other languages ‘‘to ape’’ is to imitate: ‘‘monkey see, monkey do.’’
An alchemist in Dante’s Inferno, that is, a counterfeiter, proudly calls
himself ‘‘a fine ape of nature’’ (29.139). In Chaucer some musicians begin to
watch others and ‘‘countrefete hem [them] as an ape’’ (House of Fame 1212). The
painter Julio Romano is praised in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale as capable of
depriving nature of her trade, ‘‘so perfectly he is her ape’’ (5.2.98). Cowper
looks forward to a world where ‘‘smooth good-breeding’’ will no longer ‘‘With
lean performance ape the work of love!’’ (Task 6.853--54).
Not all languages distinguish ‘‘ape’’ and ‘‘monkey,’’ but in English literature
monkeys as opposed to apes are often taken as lecherous. Shakespeare, for
instance, has ‘‘lecherous as a monkey’’ and ‘‘hot as monkeys’’ (2H4 3.2.293,
Othello 3.3.409).
Apple
The most famous apple in western culture, the one from the Tree of
Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, has a slender basis in the Bible. In Genesis
3.3 it is simply ‘‘the fruit’’; perhaps it is a fig, for right after Adam and Eve eat
it they stitch together fig leaves for clothing (3.7). It is not certain, in any case,
that apples were known in ancient Israel. How the fateful fruit got to be an
apple is a long story, complicated by the fact that the Greek word for it (melon,
or malon) meant any sort of tree-fruit; thus the ‘‘Armenian melon’’ was an
apricot, the ‘‘Cydonian melon’’ was a quince, the ‘‘Median melon’’ was a citron,
and the ‘‘Persian melon’’ was a peach; in modern Cyprus a ‘‘golden apple’’ is an
apricot; and in English a ‘‘melon’’ is not much like an apple. Latin pomum had
a similar range, as we see in its daughter languages: French pomme de terre
(‘‘apple of earth’’) is a potato, pomme d’amour (‘‘apple of love’’) is a tomato,
Italian pomodoro (‘‘apple of gold’’) is a tomato; ‘‘pomegranate’’ comes from Old
French pome grenate, ‘‘seedy apple.’’ When Latin borrowed the Greek word
(becoming malum), a pun on the common word for ‘‘evil’’ may have influenced
Christian speculation. In Milton’s influential version of the Fall it is an ‘‘apple’’
(PL 9.585, 10.487), though we cannot be sure if he means the common
crab-apple or the generic tree-fruit.
It would be enough to suit the biblical story that the ‘‘apple’’ is alluring and
tasty, but in both Hebrew and classical tradition the fruit is associated with
sexual love, which Adam and Eve discover, in some interpretations, after
eating it. Apples are mentioned three times with erotic senses in the Song of
Solomon; e.g., ‘‘As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my
beloved among the sons [young men]’’ (2.3; cf. 7.8, 8.5) (the Hebrew word
Apple
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
tappuah also has a broad sense). This passage resembles one in Sappho -- ‘‘As
the sweet-apple reddens on the top of the bough, the top of the topmost; the
apple-gatherers have forgotten it -- no, not forgotten it but were unable to
reach it’’ -- which we are told by Himerius is a simile for a girl (frag. 105
Campbell). Throwing an apple or similar tree-fruit was a signal of readiness to
be seduced (e.g., Aristophanes, Clouds 997; Virgil, Eclogues 3.64). Echoing
Sappho, Yeats imagines that Dante became a great poet out of ‘‘A hunger for
the apple on the bough, / Most out of reach,’’ which must mean his Beatrice
(‘‘Ego Dominus Tuus’’ 24--25). Frost’s ‘‘After Apple-Picking,’’ with its ladder
‘‘Toward heaven,’’ the worthlessness of apples that have fallen, and the
coming of winter and sleep, stirs echoes of biblical meanings.
In classical myth another famous apple is the Apple of Discord (or Eris),
which she tosses among the three goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite at
the wedding of Peleus and Thetis; it is labeled ‘‘For the fairest,’’ and each
goddess claims it. The ultimate result is the Trojan War. There are also the
golden apples of the Hesperides, guarded by a dragon, whom Heracles
slays.
One of the women in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata recalls that Menelaus, bent on
killing Helen, took one look at her ‘‘apples’’ and threw away his sword (155). A
girl in Theocritus asks her wooer why he has put his hand on her breasts; he
replies, ‘‘I will give your downy apples their first lesson’’ (27.49--50). The breasts
of Ariosto’s Alcina are ‘‘unripe apples’’ (Orlando Furioso 7.14). According to
Tasso, in the Golden Age before shame took effect a virgin would reveal ‘‘the
apples of her breast’’ (‘‘O bella eta de l’oro’’). Spenser compares his beloved’s
breasts to two golden apples, which surpass those that Hercules found (in the
Hesperides) and those that enticed Atalanta (Amoretti 77). These latter, Ovid
tells us, were picked by Venus herself (Met. 10.647--52). In the Walpurgisnight,
Faust tells a young witch he had a dream that he climbed a tree to reach two
fine apples; she answers that men have wanted apples ever since Paradise, and
happily she has some in her garden (Faust I 4128--35).
Josephus describes a fruit near the Dead Sea that looks like an apple but is
filled with dry, hairy seeds; later it was called a Sodom apple and thought to
be filled with the ashes of that sinful city. As fit punishment for leading Eve
to eat the forbidden apple, Milton has Satan’s legions climb trees to eat fruit
‘‘like that which grew / Near that bituminous lake where Sodom flamed,’’ but
they ‘‘instead of fruit / Chewed bitter ashes’’ (PL 10.561--66). The chorus of
women accompanying Helen to Faust’s castle finds the boys there attractive,
with cheeks like peaches: ‘‘I would gladly have a bite, but I shudder before it; /
for in a similar case, the mouth was filled, / horrible to say, with ashes!’’ (Faust
II 9162--64).
The ‘‘apple of the eye’’ is the pupil, and by extension any intimate or
cherished object. The Lord guarded Jacob ‘‘as the apple of his eye’’ (Deut.
32.10). Shakespeare’s Oberon, squeezing the love-juice on Demetrius’ eyelids,
asks it to ‘‘Sink in apple of his eye. / When his love he doth espy, / Let her
shine as gloriously / As the Venus of the sky’’ (MND 3.2.104--07).
In some accounts of the Crucifixion, Christ, as the antitype of Adam (1 Cor.
15.22), restores the apple Eve plucked. In a witty variant Byron claims that
Isaac Newton was ‘‘the sole mortal who could grapple, / Since Adam, with a
fall, or with an apple.’’ Since Newton’s theories, he predicts, will some day
13
April
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
show us how to fly to the moon, it can be said that ‘‘Man fell with apples, and
with apples rose’’ (Don Juan 10.1--16).
14
April
April is the quintessential month of spring -- ‘‘Aperil . . . of lusty Veer [Spring]
the pryme,’’ according to Chaucer (Troilus 1.156--57) -- and most of the
traditional imagery of the season has been given to the month.
Ovid gives two etymologies of the month’s name. (1) From Latin aperio
‘‘open’’: ‘‘They say that April was named from the open season, because spring
then opens (aperit) all things, and the sharp frost-bound cold departs, and
earth unlocks her teeming soil’’ (Fasti 4.87--89, trans. Frazer). (2) From Greek
aphros, the foam of the sea from which Aphrodite was born (Fasti 4.61--62). The
latter may well be on the right track, for April is the month of Venus (Fasti
4.85ff., Horace 4.11.15--16), and the name may derive from Etruscan apru, a
shortening of Aphrodite (as March comes from Mars and May from Maia,
mother of Mercury, god of spring).
The most famous description of April in English literature is the opening of
the Prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: ‘‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures
soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every
veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour . . . ’’ (1--4). The
month’s ‘‘sweet showers’’ are a commonplace. The proverb ‘‘April showers
bring May flowers’’ has been current at least since 1560; Shakespeare’s Iris
sings of ‘‘spongy April’’ (Tempest 4.1.65); Wordsworth has a character invoke ‘‘Ye
rains of April’’ (Excursion 7.701).
As the month of Venus it is the month of love. Spenser begins a stanza on
the month by calling it ‘‘fresh Aprill, full of lustyhed’’ (FQ 7.7.33). Of Octavia
weeping at her parting from Caesar, Shakespeare’s Antony says, ‘‘The April’s in
her eyes: it is love’s spring, / And these the showers to bring it on’’ (Antony
3.2.43--44). Shelley describes a beautiful woman as ‘‘A vision like incarnate
April, warning, / With smiles and tears, Frost the Anatomy [skeleton] / Into his
summer grave’’ (Epipsychidion 121--23). The spring or prime of one’s life might
be called one’s April: ‘‘I lived free in the April of my life, / Exempt from care’’
(Scève, Délie, ‘‘Dizains’’ 1).
The other famous description of April begins T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:
‘‘April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing /
Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain’’ (1--4). It is a measure
of how far modern life has lost its traditional foundation, in Eliot’s view, that
we now shrink from the renewal of life and love that April once brought.
See Spring.
Armor
In medieval chivalric romances, the armor of the hero, and especially his
shield or ‘‘escutcheon,’’ is often lovingly described and invested with great
significance. The elaborate language of heraldry or armorial bearings -- the
points, tinctures, bends, chevrons, fesses, pales, piles, and lions couchant,
rampant, regardant, or salient -- enters the literature, too, but it is beyond the
scope of this dictionary. Less technical symbolic meanings of armor, or
changes of armor, are usually unique to each work. It is of great significance,
for instance, that Achilles’ first set of armor belonged to his father Peleus, is
then lent to his friend Patroclus, who is killed in it by Hector, and is then
worn by Hector, who is killed in it by Achilles, who now wears a new set made
Arrow
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
by the god Hephaestus. Achilles’ shield, extensively described in Book 18 of the
Iliad, carries a complex set of typical scenes (such as wedding, legal dispute,
and siege) in a cosmic setting. The parallel description of Aeneas’ shield in
book 8 of the Aeneid is not typical and cosmic but historical, as if Aeneas
shoulders the future history of Rome. In Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Arthur’s
‘‘glitterand armour’’ was made by Merlin (1.7.29--36), while Britomart’s once
belonged to Angela, the Saxon Queen (3.3.58); both express the virtues of their
bearers.
Central to the language of Christianity is the metaphor of ‘‘spiritual
warfare’’ and its accompanying armor. It is fully expressed in Paul’s Letter to
the Ephesians. Since Christians do not fight against flesh and blood but
against spiritual wickedness, ‘‘Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of
God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to
stand. / Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having
on the breastplate of righteousness; / And your feet shod with the preparation
of the gospel of peace; / Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye
shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. / And take the helmet
of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God’’ (6.13--17;
cf. 2 Cor. 10.3--4). Clement of Alexandria wrote, ‘‘If the loud trumpet summons
soldiers to war, shall not Christ with a strain of peace to the ends of the earth
gather up his soldiers of peace? A bloodless army he has assembled by blood
and by the word, to give to them the Kingdom of Heaven. The trumpet of
Christ is his Gospel. He has sounded, we have heard. Let us then put on the
armor of peace’’ (Protrepticus 11.116). Erasmus continues the tradition: ‘‘If we
wish to conquer for Christ, let us gird on the sword of the word of the Gospel,
let us put on the helmet of salvation and take the shield of faith, and the rest
of the truly Apostolic panoply. Then it will come about that, when we are
conquered, we are conquerors all the more’’ (Dulce Bellum Inexpertis, in Adagia).
Beatrice tells Dante that, ‘‘to battle to enkindle faith, / the Gospels served
them [the Apostles] as both shield and lance’’ (Paradiso 29.113--14). Milton’s
Michael tells Adam that God will send a Comforter to the people, ‘‘To guide
them in all truth, and also arm / With spiritual armour, able to resist / Satan’s
assaults’’ (PL 12.490--92). Even the atheist Shelley uses these terms: ‘‘And from
that hour did I with earnest thought / Heap knowledge from forbidden mines
of lore, / Yet nothing that my tyrant knew or taught / I cared to learn, but
from that secret store / Wrought linked armour for my soul, before / It might
walk forth to war among mankind’’ (‘‘Dedication’’ of Laon and Cythna, 37--42).
Arrow
Ash
see Bow and arrow
In Greece, where they are plentiful, ash trees were known for their strength
and for their excellence as firewood. The centaur Chiron gave Achilles’ father
Peleus a great spear made of Pelian ash (Homer, Iliad 16.143); in his catalogue
of trees Ovid calls the ash ‘‘useful for spear-shafts’’ (Met. 10.93), and Chaucer
perhaps follows him in listing ‘‘the hardy asshe’’ (Parliament of Fowls 176).
Angry over a trick by Prometheus, Zeus denied the power of fire to ash trees
(Hesiod, Theogony 563), implying they were the preferred firewood. There were
Meliae or ash-nymphs (e.g. Theogony 187), but they are not clearly distinguished
from the generic Dryads or tree-nymphs.
15
Asp
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Hesiod says that the bronze race was made of ash trees (Works and Days 145),
and a similar tale is found in Norse mythology, where the first man is named
Ash (Askr) (‘‘Voluspa’’ 17 in The Poetic Edda). The world tree Yggdrasill, where
the fates deal out justice, is an ash (‘‘Voluspa’’ 19).
In his catalogue of trees Spenser mysteriously names ‘‘the Ash for nothing
ill’’ (FQ 1.1.9).
Asp
16
see Serpent
Asphodel
The asphodel is the flower of Hades. After speaking with Odysseus, the shade
of Achilles ‘‘stalked away in long strides across the meadow of asphodel’’
(Odyssey 11.539 trans. Lattimore, cf. 11.573). It is a lean, spiky plant with small,
pale flowers and gray leaves; it blooms throughout the winter in
Mediterranean regions. Pliny says it is planted on graves (Natural History 21.68).
Milton names asphodel beside nectar and ambrosia as having the power to
confer immortality (‘‘Comus’’ 838). Pope invokes ‘‘those happy souls who
dwell / In yellow meads of Asphodel’’ (‘‘Ode for Music’’ 74--75). Tennyson more
or less translates Homer in his ‘‘Demeter and Persephone’’: ‘‘the shadowy
warrior glide / Along the silent field of Asphodel’’ (150--51); in ‘‘The LotosEaters’’ he imagines ‘‘others in Elysian valleys dwell, / Resting weary limbs at
last on beds of asphodel’’ (169--70). W. C. Williams takes ‘‘asphodel, that greeny
flower,’’ as a symbol, or recurring occasion, of memory, poetry, and love in a
bleak world. ‘‘I was cheered,’’ he says near the opening, ‘‘when I came first to
know / that there were flowers also / in hell’’; he ends: ‘‘Asphodel / has no
odor / save to the imagination / but it too / celebrates the light. / It is late / but
an odor / as from our wedding / has revived for me / and begun again to
penetrate / into all crevices / of my world’’ (‘‘Asphodel, that greeny flower’’).
Ass
As the preeminent beast of burden and the poor man’s horse, the ass deserves
a better literary reputation, but since the Greeks at least it has stood for
stupidity. A string of insults in Terence gives a handy list of synonyms: stulto,
caudex, stipes, asinus, plumbeus (‘‘fool, blockhead, stumpwit, ass, leadbrain’’)
(Self-Tormentor 877). A shorter list is Shakespeare’s ‘‘Asses, fools, dolts’’ (Troilus
1.2.241). ‘‘What a thrice-double ass / Was I,’’ says Caliban, after his foolish
rebellion against Prospero (Tempest 5.1.295). When thick-witted King Midas
judges Pan’s pipes superior to Apollo’s lyre, Apollo gives him ass’s ears (Ovid,
Met. 11.144--93); asses are proverbially deaf to music, as to all intellectual
things.
As the horse could represent the willful or irrational part of the soul, so
the ass, in a humbler way, could stand for the merely physical or bodily side
of life. The allegorical dimension of Apuleius’ Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses), in
which Lucius is punished for his foolish curiosity and sexual indulgence by
being transformed into an ass and made to suffer enormous torments, comes
to a climax in his transformation back into the human as he becomes a
chaste initiate into the religion of Isis. St. Francis famously calls the body
‘‘Brother Ass.’’ Shakespeare reweaves motifs from Apuleius in his ‘‘translation’’
of Bottom into an ass in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Bottom is the ‘‘shallowest
thickskin’’ of the workers (3.2.13), but like Lucius, to whom Isis comes in a
dream, he alone meets the queen of the fairies. So it was that Balaam’s ass
Attic bird
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
saw the angel that Balaam himself was blind to (Num. 22.22--35). The satirical
side of Apuleius’s novel inspired Renaissance satire on the theme of asininity,
such as Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, but something of the emblematic character of
the ass as the redeemable lower dimension of life may be found in the
braying of the ass that reconciles Prince Myshkin to life in Dostoyevsky’s The
Idiot. Lawrence hears in the braying an agonized cry of love: ‘‘He fell into the
rut of love, / Poor ass, like man, always in rut’’ (‘‘The Ass’’).
See Horse.
Attic bird
Autumn
see Nightingale
Though not as popular as spring, autumn has been a frequent subject of
poetry since the classical Roman era, when certain conventions were
established. Autumn, of course, has two aspects: it completes summer and it
anticipates winter, it celebrates the harvest of the summer’s crops and it
mourns the death of the year; it is, in Dickinson’s words, ‘‘A little this side of
the snow / And that side of the Haze’’ (no. 131). Latin poetry usually dwells on
its summery side, associating it with harvest and vintage, wealth and cornucopias. So Virgil calls autumn ‘‘vine-leafed’’ (Georgics 2.5), Horace imagines his
head decked with ripe fruit (Epodes 2.17--18), Lucretius has Bacchus arrive with
him (5.743), Ovid describes a nymph bearing ‘‘The horn with all its wealth’’
(Met. 9.88, trans. Melville). Descriptions of ‘‘perpetual spring’’ equally describe
perpetual autumn, for as Homer puts it in his account of the garden of
Alcinous, ‘‘Pear matures on pear in that place, apple upon apple, / grape
cluster on grape cluster, fig upon fig’’ (Odyssey 7.120--21, trans. Lattimore). In
Eden, according to Milton, ‘‘spring and autumn here / Danced hand in hand’’
(PL 5.394--95). (For more examples see under Spring.)
Spenser describes Autumn as ‘‘Laden with fruits that made him laugh,’’
while he bore ‘‘Upon his head a wreath, that was enrold / With ears of corne
of every sort’’ and carried a sickle in his hand (FQ 7.7.30). Shakespeare calls it
‘‘childing autumn’’ (MND 2.1.112) and ‘‘teeming autumn, big with rich
increase’’ (Sonnets 97). In his long section on ‘‘Autumn’’ in The Seasons, Thomson
describes the joyous harvest at length.
Some of the most delicate and convincing of modern descriptions of the
season hold both facets of autumn in balance, the fullness and satisfaction of
the harvest with the coming on of winter and death. So Goethe calls on the
vine and berries to turn greener and swell plumper, as the sun and the moon
bring them to fulfillment -- and his own tears of love bedew them (‘‘Herbstgefühl’’). Keats (‘‘To Autumn’’) serenely describes autumn’s moment of
‘‘mellow fruitfulness’’ when all seems ready and ripe; he ends with an evening
scene where the day is ‘‘soft-dying,’’ the ‘‘small gnats mourn,’’ and ‘‘gathering
swallows twitter in the skies’’ as if preparing to fly south. Pushkin welcomes
autumn alone of all the seasons: ‘‘How can I explain this? She pleases me / As
sometimes, perhaps, you have been drawn to / A consumptive girl. . . . / She is
alive today -- tomorrow, not’’ (‘‘Autumn’’ 41--48, trans. Thomas). After a brief
tableau of November, Pascoli writes, ‘‘in the distance you hear / a fragile
falling of leaves. It is the summer, / Cold, of the dead’’ (‘‘Novembre’’). After
asking God to ‘‘Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine,’’ Rilke
concludes, ‘‘Whoever is alone will long remain so, / will stay awake, read, write
17
Azure
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
long letters / and in the streets up and down / will wander restlessly while
leaves are blowing’’ (‘‘Herbsttag’’). Hopkins asks, ‘‘Margaret, are you grieving /
Over Goldengrove unleaving?’’ and answers for her, ‘‘It is Margaret you mourn
for.’’ The title of that poem, ‘‘Spring and Fall,’’ reminds us that when the
English largely replaced ‘‘fall’’ with the latinate ‘‘autumn’’ they broke up a
poetically perfect pair; the original sense of ‘‘spring’’ is now less evident.
Autumn, of course, is a metaphor for the phase of maturity or middle age
in a human life. ‘‘Then autumn follows,’’ says Ovid, ‘‘youth’s fine fervour
spent, / Mellow and ripe, a temperate time between / Youth and old age, his
temples flecked with grey’’ (Met. 15.209--11, trans. Melville). ‘‘Nor spring, nor
summer beauty hath such grace,’’ Donne writes, ‘‘As I have seen in one
autumnal face’’ (Elegies 9.1--2). After several stanzas of scenic description,
Baratynsky stops to ask, ‘‘And you, when in the autumn of your days, / O
plowman of the fields of living, / And your own harvest lies before your gaze,
/ . . . / Can you, then, like the farmer, count your hoard?’’ (‘‘Autumn’’ 60--71,
trans. Myers). Shelley’s ‘‘Ode to the West Wind’’ is an ode to autumn; he
implores the wind to ‘‘Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: / What if my
leaves are falling like its own!’’ (57--58).
See Seasons, Spring, Summer, Winter.
Azure
see Blue
B
Basilisk
18
The basilisk is a mythical reptile whose stare is lethal. It is described by Pliny
as native to Cyrenaica (Libya), about a foot long, and adorned with a bright
mark on its head like a diadem -- whence the name basiliscus, from Greek
basiliskos, ‘‘little king.’’ It routs all serpents with its hiss; its touch or breath is
fatal to all creatures but the weasel, which kills it with the weasel’s stench
(8.78). In his catalog of snakes Lucan describes ‘‘the basilisk which pours forth
hisses terrifying all / the beasts, which harms before its poison and orders the
entire crowd / far out of its way and on the empty sand is king’’ (9.724--26,
trans. Braund); later he tells how the poison of a dead basilisk traveled up the
spear of a soldier and penetrated his hand, which had to be cut off (9.828--33).
The Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) used basiliskos for several snakes in
the Hebrew, including the well-known messianic passage of Isaiah 11, where
the wolf shall live with the sheep, etc., and ‘‘the infant shall play over the
hole of the asp, and the young child dance over the nest of the basiliskos’’
(11.8). Jerome translated basiliskos here and in most other passages into the
Vulgate as regulus, ‘‘little king,’’ but Wyclif and his followers translated it into
English as ‘‘cockatrice.’’ Blendings of various fabulous reptiles and birds make
the history of the cockatrice extremely complex. The word seems to derive
from Latin ∗ calcatrix, from calcare, ‘‘tread’’ or ‘‘track,’’ translating another
Greek lizard, the ichneumon, meaning ‘‘tracker’’ or ‘‘hunter.’’ The French
version of ‘‘basilisk’’ was basilicoc, the form also used by Chaucer -- ‘‘the
basilicok sleeth folk by the venym of his sighte’’ (Parson’s Tale 853) -- and so the
Bat
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
idea got round that the reptile was generated from an egg laid by a cock but
hatched by a toad or snake.
Spenser uses both names to make the same point. A terrible man on a
dromedary ‘‘secretly his enemies did slay: / Like as the Basiliske, of serpents
seede, / From powerfull eyes close venim doth convay / Into the lookers hart,
and killeth farre away’’ (FQ 4.8.39); while in a sonnet Spenser begs his mistress
to turn elsewhere her cruel eyes ‘‘and kill with looks, as Cockatrices doo’’
(Amoretti 49). Shakespeare also uses both. Polixenes demands, ‘‘Make me not
sighted like the basilisk. / I have look’d on thousands, who have sped the
better / By my regard, but kill’d none so’’ (WT 1.2.388--90; see also Cymbeline
3.4.107); Juliet fears the possible news of Romeo’s death ‘‘shall poison more /
Than the death-darting eye of cockatrice’’ (RJ 3.2.46--47; see also 12N 3.4.196-98). Maurice Scève, in the first of his dizains in Délie, tells that ‘‘my Basilisk,
with her pointed look / Piercing body, heart, and distraught reason, /
Penetrated into the Soul of my Soul.’’
The Isaiah passage in the Authorized Version reads: ‘‘And the sucking child
shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on
the cockatrice’s den.’’ In his paraphrase of this passage Pope restores ‘‘basilisk’’:
‘‘The smiling Infant in his Hand shall take / The crested Basilisk and speckled
Snake: / Pleas’d, the green Lustre of the scales survey, / And with their forky
Tongue shall innocently play’’ (Messiah 81--84). Shelley also draws on Isaiah in
his description of the future, which includes ‘‘a babe before his mother’s
door, / Sharing his morning’s meal / With the green and golden basilisk / That
comes to lick his feet’’ (Queen Mab 8.84--87).
Thomas Browne, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, has a chapter on the basilisk (3.7),
in which he denies that it is the product of a cock’s egg and a reptile’s
incubation, but credits its existence and most of its other attributes. He also
distinguishes it from the cockatrice, which has legs and wings and a comb
like a cock!
A secondary sense of ‘‘basilisk,’’ as the name of a large cannon, arose in the
sixteenth century. Marlowe evokes its roaring noise in Tamburlaine I 4.1.2,
while Shakespeare puns on the two senses when he has Queen Isabel tell the
conquering King Henry V that she is ‘‘glad to behold your eyes; / Your eyes,
which hitherto hath borne in them, / Against the French, that met them in
their bent, / The fatal balls of murdering basilisks’’ (H5 5.2.14--17).
Bat
Until they are examined closely, the most notable features of bats are that
they fly at night (though they are visible only at twilight), utter a thin squeak,
and often dwell in caves. Though Aristotle knew they were mammals, most
ancients took them as a kind of bird. On the Isle of Dreams, according to
Lucian, ‘‘bats are the only birds to be found’’ (‘‘A True Story’’ 2.33), Milton lists
‘‘owls, bats, and such fatal birds’’ (Eikonoklastes, sec. 15), and as late as
Saint-Pierre we find ‘‘birds of prey, such as the bat, the owl, the eagle owl’’
(Harmonies de la Nature [1814], p. 268).
In both Greek and Latin their name has an element meaning ‘‘night’’ or
‘‘evening’’: Greek nukteris comes from nukt-, ‘‘night,’’ and Latin vespertilio, as
Ovid tells us, comes from vesper, ‘‘evening’’ (Met. 4.415).
As caves were evidently entrances into the underworld, bats were thought
to be the spirits of the dead. The oldest and most influential literary passage
19
Bay
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
in this respect is the simile in the Odyssey (24.6--9), where the souls of the dead
suitors, recently killed by Odysseus, are likened to a chain of gibbering bats in
a dreadful cave. Plato cites this passage as one that must be expunged so that
boys will not learn to be afraid of death (Republic 387a).
Homer’s verb for the bats’ cry, trizein, is imitative of the sound, as is the
cognate stridere in Latin. Ovid describes bats as crying levi stridore, ‘‘in thin
squeaks’’ (Met. 4.413); Virgil gives them a vocem / exiguam, ‘‘a wispy cry’’ (Aeneid
6.492--93). Hence ghosts, whether or not they are likened to bats in other
respects, make batlike cries. In the Iliad the ghost of Patroclus goes underground ‘‘with a squeak’’ (23.101). The spirits in Horace’s Satires 1.8.41 make a
similar sound. Shakespeare’s Horatio remembers that ‘‘the sheeted dead / Did
squeak and gibber in the Roman streets’’ (Hamlet 1.1.118--19) and Calphurnia
warns Caesar that ‘‘ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets’’ (JC 2.2.24);
all four of Shakespeare’s verbs imitate the cry.
From their connection with the underworld, features of bats were attributed to the devil. In Dante’s Inferno, Satan’s giant wings ‘‘had no feathers but
were like those of a bat (vispistrello)’’ (34.49--50). Its infernal and nocturnal
character was thus well established before the nineteenth-century vampire
stories, notably Polidori’s The Vampyre and Stoker’s Dracula.
It became a standard epithet or tag phrase about bats that they were night
creatures. Lydgate writes, ‘‘No bakke [bat] of kynde [by nature] may looke
ageyn the sunne’’ (Cock 43). Among the ‘‘fatall birds’’ Spenser lists is ‘‘The
lether-winged Batt, dayes enimy’’ (FQ 2.12.36), while Drayton calls it ‘‘the
Watch-Man of the Night’’ (Owl 502). Only in the early seventeenth century, in
English at least, do we find such phrases as ‘‘bat-blind’’ or ‘‘blind as a bat’’ -blind, presumably, in the daylight.
Bay
Bear
20
see Laurel
The Greeks recognized a northern constellation as a bear (Arktos, whence
English ‘‘arctic’’), better known to us as Ursa Major (‘‘Great Bear’’ in Latin) or
the Big Dipper (e.g., Homer, Iliad 18.487). They also had tales involving bears,
such as the one retold in the second book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses about
Jupiter, Callisto, and Arcas. No very definite symbolism, however, attaches to
bears. It has been conjectured that a very ancient myth about bears underlies
the Odyssey, whose hero ‘‘hibernates’’ in caves, and Beowulf, the name of whose
hero may mean ‘‘bee-wolf,’’ a kenning for ‘‘bear,’’ but the evidence for the
myth is thin. Bears became popular, and populous, in literature in the early
nineteenth century with the Grimm brothers’ collection of German folktales
and Southey’s ‘‘The Three Bears.’’ Bears can seem attractive and friendly -- they
are readily humanized -- but they are also wild and dangerous. Their alienness
as embodiments of the wilderness, but with hints of human or superhuman
wisdom, is well brought out in Faulkner’s story ‘‘The Bear.’’
Bear-baiting, where dogs attack a tethered bear, was long a popular
entertainment, notably in Elizabethan England. Spenser invokes it as a simile:
‘‘As chained beare whom cruell dogs doe bait’’ (FQ 1.12.35); Macbeth, facing his
final battle, sees himself as a bear: ‘‘They have tied me to a stake: I cannot
fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course [bout or round]’’ (5.7.1--2).
Beast
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Beast
The animal kingdom has been a lavish source of metaphors, similes, and
symbols from the earliest literature to the present. Since beasts come in such
great variety, their literary uses are usually specific to the species: lions mean
certain things, wolves others things, dogs still others. Even where ‘‘beast’’ or
‘‘brute’’ is used as a general term, there is often an implicit distinction
between wild (dangerous) and domestic (tame), a beast of prey or beast of
burden.
If the human being is the rational animal, as Aristotle and other ancients
defined it, then beasts are ‘‘lacking in reason’’ (Ovid, Amores 1.10.25). Yet even
‘‘a beast that wants discourse of reason,’’ Hamlet insists, might have acted in
more human fashion than his mother (1.2.150). People can be reproached for
bestial or brutal behavior, and animals held up as examples for people to
follow. Prospero calls Caliban a ‘‘beast’’ (Tempest 4.1.140) after his rebellion, but
his role has been that of a beast of burden all along; Prince Ferdinand, to
prove he is worthy of Miranda, must play a similar part, as if he must sound
the depths of his animal or physical nature in order to become fully human,
or kingly.
A frequent opposite to beast is god or angel, as when Hamlet contrasts his
father to his uncle as ‘‘Hyperion to a satyr’’ (1.2.140); it was a commonplace
among Renaissance writers that man occupies a space between beast and
angel, sharing traits of both, and liable to sink to the one though capable of
rising to the other. The dual nature of humans is a widespread literary theme,
perhaps most literally embodied in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
The most famous ‘‘beasts’’ in the Bible are the highly symbolic monsters in
Revelation, such as the beast from the sea, with seven heads and ten horns
(13.1); the seven heads stand for seven kings (17.9--10) and the ten horns for ten
more kings (17.12).
Beast entries in this dictionary: Ape, Ass, Basilisk, Bat, Bear, Crocodile,
Deer, Dog, Dolphin, Fox, Frog and toad, Goat, Horse, Leopard, Lion, Lynx,
Mole, Pig, Salamander, Serpent, Sheep, Tiger, Whale, Wolf, Worm.
Bee
Bees have been highly prized for their honey and wax for as long as we have
record, and much beekeeping lore can be found in ancient literature, notably
in book 4 of Virgil’s Georgics. They are social insects with a highly organized
hive ‘‘government,’’ they cull nectar from many kinds of flowers, and they are
both useful and dangerous to people. These obvious characteristics and others
less obvious have made them frequent emblems or analogues in literature.
The Greeks considered the bee (Greek melissa or melitta, from meli-, ‘‘honey,’’
and perhaps ∗ lich-, ‘‘lick’’) a sign of eloquence or poetic gifts, partly perhaps
because of its buzzing or murmuring but mainly as a natural extension of
idioms still common in English and other modern languages such as ‘‘honeyvoiced,’’ ‘‘sweet-lipped,’’ and ‘‘mellifluous.’’ Homer calls the Sirens meligerus,
‘‘honey-voiced’’ (Odyssey 12.187). There were legends that bees hovered around
the mouth of the infant Sophocles, as if to gather the honey he was born
with, or perhaps to feed him the honey he will need as the great playwright;
the same tale was told of Pindar, Plato, and others who were thought to have
a divine gift. A sixth-century ad poem from the Greek Anthology is about
statues of the great poets; one of them is Homer, and ‘‘a Pierian bee wandered
21
Bee
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
around his divine mouth, / producing a dripping honeycomb’’ (2.343--44).
(Pieria, on the slope of Mt. Olympus, was the birthplace of the Muses.) In the
opening of his ‘‘Elegy on the Death of Ronsard,’’ Garnier wishes that ‘‘the bee
may always make its honey in your tomb.’’
Alternatively the poet himself or herself might be called a bee. Aristophanes’ birds tell us that Phrynichus, another playwright, resembled a bee
who ‘‘always sipped from the fruit of our ambrosial song [ambrosion meleon],
bearing away the sweet ode’’ (Birds 749--51), perhaps punning on melitta (‘‘bee’’)
and melos (‘‘song’’). Pindar makes the same pun in likening his song to honey
in Olymp. 10.97. Plato writes, ‘‘the poets tell us, don’t they, that the melodies
they bring us are gathered from rills that run with honey, out of glens and
gardens of the Muses, and they bring them as the bees do honey, flying like
the bees’’ (Ion 534b, trans. Cooper). The Greek Anthology poem just cited calls
Sappho ‘‘the Pierian bee,’’ and also mentions melos in the next line (69--70).
Theocritus tells the story of Comatas, the goatherd-poet, who was shut alive in
a chest but was fed by bees ‘‘drawn by the Muses’ nectar about his lips’’ (Idylls
7.78--83); Wordsworth retells the tale in the 1805 Prelude 10.1021--26. Lucretius
opens the third book of De Rerum Natura by comparing Epicurus’ writings to
flowery lawns and his readers to bees (Latin apis). Horace turns this tradition
to gentle self-deprecation by contrasting Pindar the high-flying swan with
himself the hard-working bee (Odes 4.2.27--32). The metaphor is found in such
modern poets as Foscolo, who calls a musician a ‘‘nurse of the bees’’ (‘‘Spesso
per l’altre eta’’); Dickinson, who identifies with a bee: ‘‘We -- Bee and I -- live by
the quaffing’’ (no. 230); Darı́o: ‘‘my rhymes go / all around the vast forest / to
gather honey and aromas / in the half-opened flowers’’ (‘‘Primaveral’’); and
Rilke: ‘‘We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the
visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible’’ (letter to Hulewicz,
13 November 1925).
How a hive governed itself was the subject of much ancient speculation.
Aristotle writes about bees in De Generatione Animalium (3.10) and Historiae
Animalium (5.21--23, 9.40); the chief Latin authorities are Varro (3.16) and Pliny,
Natural History (11.11--70). Virgil draws from these sources in Georgics, book 4,
which is largely devoted to beekeeping and bee lore. These authors almost
invariably used masculine terms -- Greek basileus and hegemon, Latin rex, dux,
and imperator -- for the ‘‘king’’ bee, to whom the hive is absolutely devoted. The
Greeks knew that the Egyptians used the bee as a hieroglyph for the pharaoh,
and several modern states, such as France, have used the bee as a symbol of
their king. It caused some embarrassment in France and elsewhere when
Swammerdam (1637--80) established that the ‘‘ruler’’ bee was really female. In
the Georgics Virgil goes on at length about bee patriotism, providence, and
division of labor, though he also describes a bee civil war. In a famous simile
of the Aeneid, Virgil likens the building of the city of Carthage, where some
lay out streets, others build walls, and still others pass laws, to the activity of
bees, who ‘‘Hum at their work, and bring along the young / Full-grown to
beehood; as they cram their combs / With honey, brimming all the cells with
nectar, / Or take newcomers’ plunder, or like troops / Alerted, drive away the
lazy drones’’ (1.430--36, trans. Fitzgerald). Shakespeare draws largely from the
Georgics in Canterbury’s speech about the division of human labor: ‘‘for so
work the honey-bees, / Creatures that by a rule in nature teach / The act of
22
Bee
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
order to a peopled kingdom. / They have a king and officers of sorts; / Where
some, like magistrates, correct at home, / Others, like merchants, venture
trade abroad, / Others like soldiers, armed in the stings, / Make boot upon the
summer’s velvet buds;’’ there are also ‘‘civil citizens kneading up the honey’’
(H5, 1.2.187--204). After the evacuation of Moscow, as Tolstoy tells it, the city
was empty, ‘‘empty as a queenless, dying hive is empty’’; then follows a
lengthy, detailed description of the behavior of bees when a hive has lost its
queen (War and Peace 3.3.20).
Bees were often thought of as particularly warlike and their hive as
organized like an army. The first simile of Homer’s Iliad likens soldiers to bees
(2.87--90), as does another simile in Aeschylus’ Persians (126--30). Three of the
four times bees are mentioned in the Old Testament, they are associated with
armies of enemies (Deut. 1.44, Ps. 118.12, Isa. 7.18), and it may be significant
that the name of the warrior-leader Deborah means ‘‘bee’’ in Hebrew.
Virgil and other ancients believed that bees had no sexual intercourse but
gathered their young from among the flowers. This idea may account for
Plutarch’s claim that ‘‘bees are thought to be irritable and bellicose towards
men who have been with women’’ (Advice to Bride and Groom 44). Others,
however, associated bees with love. ‘‘O Love . . . the Muses’ bee’’ begins a song in
Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae (973--74). Theocritus said Eros is like a bee, so small
yet able to make so great a wound (Idylls 19). The two-sidedness of bees,
producers of honey and stings, made them good symbols of love. That Melissa
or similar terms were common girls’ names made the symbol almost
inevitable. A fragment of Sappho reads: ‘‘[I want] neither honey nor honeybee’’
(frag. 146 Campbell); it is the oldest trace of the common proverb ‘‘Who licks
honey will get stung’’ or ‘‘No honey without a bee.’’ Lyly’s Euphues has ‘‘The bee
that hath honey in her mouth, hath a sting in her tail’’ (79).
Valéry’s sonnet ‘‘L’Abeille’’ (‘‘The Bee’’) subtly evokes many classical bee
contexts as the female speaker invites a bee to sting her breast so ‘‘my sense
may be illuminated / by that tiny golden alarm / without which Love dies or
falls alseep.’’ It is erotic, but also aesthetic: the bee is also the Muses’ bee.
A swarm of bees was considered an unlucky omen. When a swarm settles in
the sacred laurel of Latium, in the Aeneid (7.65--70), it is a sign that the Trojans
will occupy the citadel.
Virgil and others believed that bees generate spontaneously from the
carcass of a cow or other animal (Georgics 4.285--314), a belief the Hebrews
shared, for it underlies the famous riddle of Samson in Judges 14.8--18.
In Latin literature the bee’s preferred food or source of nectar is thyme (or
wild thyme): Georgics 4.31, 112ff., 170, 180; Aeneid 1.436; etc. It was so well
established that Martial could refer to honey as ‘‘Hyblaean thyme,’’ Hybla (in
Sicily) being famous for its bees (5.39.3). Theocritus had already written that
thyme belongs to the Muses (Epigram 1), no doubt because poets are like bees.
By his date Spenser could make ‘‘bees-alluring’’ a routine epithet for thyme
(Muiopotmos 191). When Marvell in ‘‘The Garden’’ writes, ‘‘the industrious bee /
Computes its time as well as we’’ (69--70), he is punning on the plant, which
Shenstone called ‘‘pun-provoking thyme’’ (The Schoolmistress st. 11).
It has been proverbial since ancient times that bees are busy. Ovid calls
them sedula (whence English ‘‘sedulous’’) at Metamorphoses 13.928. ‘‘Busy as a
bee’’ is found in Chaucer (Merchant’s Tale, Epilogue, 2422, ‘‘as bisy as bees’’).
23
Beech
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Marvell calls them ‘‘industrious’’ (‘‘Garden’’ 69), Thomson ‘‘fervent’’ (Spring
508), and so on.
The bee produces honey and wax, that is, ‘‘sweetness and light,’’ the famous
title of a chapter of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (drawn from Swift’s Battle of
the Books): these are his touchstones of culture.
See Spider.
24
Beech
Medieval commentators on Virgil defined a scheme called ‘‘Virgil’s wheel’’ (rota
Virgilii), which linked the three genres established by Virgil (pastoral, georgic,
and epic) with sets of three styles, social ranks, locales, animals, plants, etc.
The beech was the tree appropriate to pastoral poetry (eclogues or bucolics).
Indeed the beech (fagus) is mentioned in the first line of the first Eclogue, and
early in the next two; it is prized for its shade, the right place to sit and
‘‘meditate the sylvan Muse’’ (1.2). In his pastoral ‘‘Summer’’ Pope addresses ‘‘Ye
shady beeches, and ye cooling Streams, / Defence from Phoebus’, not from
Cupid’s beams’’ (13--14). Shelley called the beech ‘‘to lovers dear’’ (Orpheus 111).
The Greek phagos (or phegos), though cognate with Latin fagus, refers to the
oak, also welcome for its shade; cf. Theocritus, Idylls 12.8. The word ‘‘beech’’
itself is also cognate with fagus.
In his catalogue of trees (FQ 1.1.9) Spenser lists the ‘‘warlike Beech,’’ perhaps
because beechwood is hard and useful for weapons. It is not listed in his main
source, the catalogue of trees in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls 176--82. Spenser
may have been misled by Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad 5.838, where
the axle of a chariot is made of ‘‘the Beechen tree’’; the Greek pheginos axon
should read ‘‘axle of oak.’’
Bile, choler, gall,
spleen
In Homer the commonest word for ‘‘anger’’ (cholos) is the same except for
gender as the common Greek word for ‘‘bile’’ or ‘‘gall’’ (chole); once in Homer it
seems to have a physiological sense: ‘‘Your mother nursed you on cholos!’’ (Iliad
16.203). The liver, which secretes bile, was thought to be the seat of deep
emotions, perhaps of life itself, though cholos and its kindred terms nearly
always had the narrower sense of bitter wrath.
Black bile (chole melaina) had more or less the same sense at first as bile
alone; later, under the term melancholia, it was distinguished from it. Another
synonym is ‘‘choler,’’ from Latin cholera, from Greek cholera, the disease (which
expels bile and other fluids from the body); it came to mean ‘‘anger’’ when its
sense was replaced by that of chole. A ‘‘choleric’’ person is irascible. Chaucer’s
Reeve is introduced as ‘‘a sclendre colerik man’’ of whom everyone is afraid
(CT Pro. 587).
In Latin literature ‘‘bile’’ (bilis) also means ‘‘anger.’’ Martial speaks of the
‘‘heat of my anger’’ (bilis . . . ardor) (6.64.24); Horace writes, ‘‘often your uproar
has moved my bile, often my mirth’’ (Epistles 1.19.20). In English ‘‘bilious’’ also
means ‘‘irascible.’’ Of a woman’s brief stormy rage, Byron writes, ‘‘Nought’s
more sublime than energetic bile’’ (Don Juan 5.1076).
More common in English literature than ‘‘bile’’ is ‘‘gall’’ (from Old English,
related to ‘‘yellow’’ and chole); it tended to mean a bitter, grudging anger
rather than a hot, fiery one, and then anything bitter. Chaucer’s Criseyde sees
her pleasure and joy ‘‘al torned into galle’’ (TC 5.732). To Spenser’s Envie,
‘‘whose nature is to grieve and grudge at all,’’ the sight of something
Bird
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
praiseworthy ‘‘makes her eat her gall’’ (FQ 5.12.31). Gall and honey are often
paired as contrasts. Duessa speaks ‘‘With fowle words tempring faire, soure
gall with hony sweet’’ (FQ 1.7.3); Ralegh’s nymph argues ‘‘A honey tongue, a
heart of gall, / Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall’’ (‘‘The Nymph’s Reply’’ 11--12).
Even more common is ‘‘spleen’’ (from Greek and Latin splen), which by
Shakespeare’s day could mean violent ill-humor or irascible temper. Spenser’s
allegorical character Wrath suffers from ‘‘swelling Splene’’ (FQ 1.4.35).
Shakespeare’s Talbot tells how ‘‘leaden age’’ was ‘‘Quickened with youthful
spleen and warlike rage’’ (1H6 4.6.12--13); ‘‘the unruly spleen / Of Tybalt’’ leads
to the fatal fight with Romeo (RJ 3.1.155--56). But its earlier and nearly opposite
sense of ‘‘merriment’’ or ‘‘gaiety’’ is also found in Shakespeare, as in the phrase
‘‘over-merry spleen’’ (Shrew Ind. 136). Its modern sense is much the same as
‘‘bile,’’ and the adjective ‘‘splenetic’’ is yet another near-synonym for ‘‘choleric.’’
In the seventeenth and eighteenth century ‘‘spleen’’ tended to mean
‘‘dejection’’ or ‘‘melancholy,’’ but with a connotation of oversensitivity or
deliberate posturing. Gulliver observes that spleen afflicts only the lazy,
luxurious, and rich (Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 4.7). It soon seemed to afflict the
English more than anyone else. Boswell introduces The Hypochondriack to an
‘‘England, where the malady known by the denomination of melancholy,
hypochondria, spleen, or vapours, has long been supposed almost universal.’’
The French equivalent was ennui, borrowed by English, though it is less
intense than spleen, closer to boredom or world-weariness. Byron seems to
equate the two, and is thus misleading in denying there is a comparable
English word: ‘‘For ennui is a growth of English root, / Though nameless in our
language: -- we retort / The fact for words, and let the French translate / That
awful yawn which sleep can not abate’’ (Don Juan 13.805--08). French for its
part borrowed ‘‘spleen,’’ which is most notable in the titles of several poems
by Baudelaire (e.g., ‘‘Le Spleen’’). Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin suffers from it, as
many Russians did: ‘‘A malady, the cause of which / ’tis high time were
discovered, / similar to the English ‘spleen’ -- / in short, the Russian
‘chondria’ -- / possessed him by degrees’’ (1.38.1--5).
See Humor, Liver, Melancholy, Yellow.
Bird
The symbolism of birds is sometimes metonymical in origin, as when larks
represent dawn and nightingales night, or swallows and cuckoos stand for the
arrival of spring, because the birds belong to these phenomena. More often it
is metaphorical, as when cuckoos stand for cuckoldry, or nightingales and
swans symbolize poets, because the birds resemble them. Claude Lévi-Stauss
claims that ‘‘Birds are given human christian names’’ (e.g., Polly, Robin, Bob)
‘‘because they can be permitted to resemble men for the very reason that they
are so different. . . . they form a community which is independent of our own
but, precisely because of this independence, appears to us like another society,
homologous to that in which we live: birds love freedom; they build themselves homes in which they live a family life and nurture their young; they
often engage in social relations with other members of their species; and they
communicate with them by acoustic means recalling articulated language.
Consequently everything objective conspires to make us think of the bird
world as a metaphorical human society.’’ Dogs, by contrast, being domesticated and therefore metonymical with human life, are typically given special
25
Bird
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
dog names (Fido, Rover, Flush) to set them apart. (See Savage Mind 204--05.)
Since at least Aristophanes’ The Birds, western literature has been rich with
metaphorical bird-communities; one allegorical variety common in the Middle
Ages was the bird conclave, such as Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.
Because they can fly, and seem to link the sky with the earth and sea, birds
also resemble gods, so the ancients often considered birds either incarnations
of gods or their messengers. In Homer’s Odyssey Athena is disguised as a ‘‘bird’’
(1.320), a vulture (3.372), and a swallow (22.240); Hermes as a gull or tern
(5.51); Leucothea as a shearwater or gannet (5.337). Zeus famously descended
as a swan to Leda. Many gods, moreover, had heraldic or familar birds: Zeus
the eagle, Athena the owl, Apollo the swan or raven, Aphrodite the dove, and
so on. In Christian myth it was a heavenly dove that filled Mary with the Holy
Spirit; it is usually depicted as speaking (the Word) into her ear. As messengers
of the gods birds spoke sometimes through their flight patterns, and so arose
the immemorial art of bird-augury, where an auspex (Latin, from aui- ‘‘bird’’ +
spek- ‘‘watch’’) decided whether or not the patterns were ‘‘auspicious.’’
Homer and other Greeks imagined the dead in Hades as birdlike (Odyssey
11.605); sometimes souls (psychai) are batlike (24.6--9); or the soul (thymos) is
said to fly (Iliad 16.469). Christians likened the rebirth of the soul to that of
the phoenix. Visitations of birds were felt to be reappearances of the dead, a
thought lying behind Poe’s ‘‘The Raven.’’ At the same time birds seem to have
souls themselves, and to pour them forth when they sing. Thomson imagines
that birds in spring ‘‘in courtship to their mates / Pour forth their little souls’’
(‘‘Spring’’ 619--20) while in autumn they sit ‘‘Robbed of their tuneful souls’’
(‘‘Autumn’’ 979). Keats tells his nightingale, ‘‘thou art pouring forth thy soul
abroad / In such an ecstasy!’’ (57--58). Hardy hears a bird on a winter afternoon:
it ‘‘Had chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom’’ (‘‘The Darkling Thrush’’ 23--24). Contributing to this notion may be the use of ‘‘soul’’ in
some dialects of English to mean the lungs of a bird.
In Homer a frequent formula is ‘‘winged words,’’ as if speech flies from the
mouth like birds. When Penelope does not reply to Telemachus, ‘‘her speech
stayed wingless’’ (Odyssey 17.57). Plato has Socrates rather playfully compare the
mind of a man to a cage and the things he knows to birds (Theaetetus 197c ff.).
If words can fly, so can a song or poem. Thus Milton’s song ‘‘with no middle
flight intends to soar / Above the Aonian mount’’ (PL 1.14--15). From here we
circle back to the identification of poets with songbirds: poets sing like birds,
and sometimes they, or their songs, take flight, transcending the mundane
life. Thus they often represent freedom or escape from the gravity-bound
lower world.
A bird in a cage, or hooded or clipped, might stand for any trapped or
exiled person. Ovid in exile likens himself to a nightingale: ‘‘Though the cage
might be good for the confined daughter of Pandion, / she struggles to return
to her own forests’’ (Ex Ponto 1.3.39--40). Baudelaire’s clipped bird in L’Albatros is
a poet. The bird might stand, as in Hopkins, for the soul in a body: ‘‘As a
dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage / Man’s mounting spirit in his bonehouse, mean house, dwells’’ (‘‘The Caged Skylark’’). It might have spiritual
significance in itself, as Blake asserts: ‘‘A Robin Red breast in a Cage / Puts all
Heaven in a Rage’’ (‘‘Auguries of Innocence’’). See also Yeats’s ‘‘The Hawk.’’ It
has stood in particular for a woman’s restricted life in a society dominated by
26
Bird of Jove
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
men. The old woman in de Meun’s Romance of the Rose likens women to caged
birds that, no matter how well treated, always search for ways to gain their
freedom (13911--36). Spenser tries to persuade his doubting beloved that by
marriage she will gain two liberties by losing one, as ‘‘the gentle bird feels no
captivity / within her cage, but singes and feeds her fill’’ (Amoretti 65). As Mary
Wollstonecraft puts it, ‘‘Confined, then, in cages like the feathered race, they
have nothing to do but to plume themselves, and stalk with mock majesty
from perch to perch’’ (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, chap. 4). In Epipsychidion, addressed to a young woman confined to a convent until her marriage, Shelley calls her ‘‘Poor captive bird! who, from thy narrow cage, / Pourest
such music, that it might assuage / The rugged hearts of those who prisoned
thee, / Were they not deaf to all sweet melody’’ (5--8). In Aurora Leigh, E. B.
Browning describes a woman who ‘‘has lived / A sort of cage-bird life, born in
a cage, / Accounting that to leap from perch to perch / Was act and joy
enough for any bird’’ (1.304--07).
P. L. Dunbar’s poem ‘‘Sympathy,’’ which is implicitly about the oppression of
black Americans, ends: ‘‘I know why the caged bird sings!’’
The killing of a bird might be a great sin, as it seems to be in Coleridge’s
‘‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’’; or it might symbolize the death of a person,
as the wild duck in Ibsen’s play is linked to Hedvig, who kills herself, or as the
seagull in Chekhov’s play is associated with Nina, who is seduced and abandoned by the man who has killed the gull.
For catalogues of birds see Aristophanes, Birds, passim; Chaucer, Parliament of
Fowls 330--364; Skelton, Phyllyp Sparowe 395--570; Thomson, ‘‘Spring’’ 572--613.
Bird entries in this dictionary: Albatross, Cock, Cuckoo, Dove, Eagle,
Goose, Gull, Hawk, Heron, Lark, Nightingale, Owl, Peacock, Pelican,
Phoenix, Raven, Sparrow, Stork, Swallow, Swan, Woodpecker.
Bird of Jove
Bird of night
Black
see Eagle
see Owl
In both Greek and Latin there were several terms for ‘‘black’’ or ‘‘dark’’ with
subtle differences among them, but their symbolic associations were similar
and almost always negative. The color does not occur frequently in the Bible,
but when it does (with one notable exception) it is also negative.
In Homer wine, water, blood, earth, the west, and other things can be black
or dark (Greek melas) without any particular symbolism, and such applications
continue through Greek and Latin literature. More symbolically Death is
sometimes black in Homer (e.g., Iliad 2.834), as is Ker, the spirit of death
(2.859). Hades is black in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (29) and Euripides’s Hippolytus
(1388), while Death (personified) is black (Latin ater) in Seneca’s Oedipus (164)
and Statius’ Thebaid (4.528). (For more ancient examples see Death.) Famine
rides a black horse in the Book of Revelation (6.5). Dante’s inferno is dark,
with ‘‘black air’’ (5.51, 9.6) as well as black devils (21.29) and black angels and
cherubim (23.131, 27.113). In Spenser Pluto, the ‘‘infernall Furies,’’ and the
‘‘Stygian lake’’ are black (FQ 1.1.37, 1.3.36, 1.5.10); in Shakespeare death, hell,
Acheron, and Hecate are all black, while we also learn that ‘‘Black is the
badge of hell, / the hue of dungeons, and the school of night’’ (LLL 4.3.249--51).
27
Black
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Funerals are black in Lucretius (2.580), and Propertius warns of a ‘‘black day of
funeral at the end’’ (2.11.4). Hence the custom of wearing black in mourning.
Chaucer’s Theseus, for instance, meets a procession of widows ‘‘clad in clothes
blake’’ (Knight’s Tale 899). The most famous literary mourner, of course, is
Hamlet; when his mother urges him to ‘‘cast thy nighted colour off ’’ he
claims he feels a deeper mourning that his ‘‘inky cloak’’ and ‘‘customary suits
of solemn black’’ cannot express (1.2.68--86).
In Homer and other Greek poets the heart or breast can turn black with
anger or grief (e.g., Iliad 1.103), as if filled with smoke. Pindar writes that
whoever does not love Theoxenus ‘‘has a black heart forged from adamant or
iron’’ (frag. 123.5).
Black often means simply ‘‘bad’’ or ‘‘evil.’’ Virgil tells of infants whom a
‘‘black day’’ carried down to the underworld (Aeneid 6.429; see 11.28). The
Romans marked black days on the calendar and forbade business to take place
on them. Ovid tells that in former times black pebbles were used to condemn
the guilty, white to acquit the innocent (Met. 15.41--42). A character in
Shakespeare denounces ‘‘so heinous, black, obscene a deed’’ (R2 4.1.131), while
Macbeth says, ‘‘Let not light see my black and deep desires’’ (1.4.51). Racine’s
Hippolyte is indignant at ‘‘a lie so black’’ (Phèdre 4.2.1087). Milton’s Samson
feels his griefs fester to ‘‘black mortification’’ (622). A character in Shelley says
that one can ‘‘stir up men’s minds / To black suggestions’’ (Cenci 2.2.157).
As the color of death and mourning, black has been adopted by Christians
as a sign of death to this world (mortification) and thus of purity or humility.
Spenser’s Palmer, a pilgrim who had been to Jerusalem, is ‘‘clad in black
attyre,’’ and seems ‘‘A sage and sobre syre’’ (FQ 2.1.7). Milton claims that black
is ‘‘staid Wisdom’s hue’’ (‘‘Il Penseroso’’ 16). Gray echoes Milton when he
presents ‘‘Wisdom in sable garb arrayed’’ (‘‘Ode to Adversity’’ 25).
‘‘I am black but comely,’’ says the female lover of Song of Solomon 1.5, but
this translation (the Authorized Version, based on the Latin Vulgate) is almost
certainly mistaken about the ‘‘but,’’ perhaps deliberately: it should be ‘‘I am
black and comely,’’ as the Greek Septuagint gives it. The switch in
conjunctions bespeaks the history of western prejudice against dark skin, and
especially against Africans or Negroes (from Spanish and Portuguese negro,
from Latin niger, ‘‘black’’). Black writers have had to contend with the almost
entirely negative meanings of the color. The American slave Phillis Wheatley
accepts the meanings but insists that the color (or its meanings) can be
changed: ‘‘Some view our sable race with scornful eye, / ‘Their colour is a
diabolic die’. / Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain, / May be refin’d,
and join th’angelic train’’ (‘‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’’). Blake,
a white sympathetic to oppressed blacks, presents his ‘‘Little Black Boy’’ as in
the grip of similar conceptions -- ‘‘I am black, but O! my soul is white’’ -- but
the boy remembers that he has a spiritual advantage over English boys,
for the burning love of God (who lives in the sun) has prepared him for
heaven. A black character in Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig asks a white, ‘‘Which
you rather have, a black heart in a white skin, or a white heart in a black
one?’’ Later writers have rejected the traditional (western) senses of ‘‘black’’
altogether. Négritude, a term coined by the Martinican author Aimé Césaire in
1939, was adopted in name or spirit by many African and African-American
writers for whom ‘‘black is beautiful’’ and ‘‘blackness’’ is an essence or power.
28
Black sun
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Gwendolyn Brooks affirms the color-label in the face of euphemisms:
‘‘According to my Teachers, / I am now an African-American. / They call me
out of my name. / Black is an open umbrella. / I am Black and A Black
forever.’’ (‘‘Kojo: ‘I am a Black’’’).
See White.
Black sun
When the day of the Lord comes to Babylon, Isaiah prophesies, ‘‘the sun shall
be darkened in his going forth” (13.10) (see also Joel 3.15). Jesus makes the
same prophecy of the final days: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the
stars shall fall (Matt. 24.29). As John of Patmos envisages them, ‘‘the sun
became black as sackcloth of hair” (Rev. 6.12).
Hugo imagines a dark hell where ‘‘a frightful black sun” radiates night (Les
Contemplations 6.26.186). But Novalis, in his Hymns to the Night, welcomes
‘‘night’s lovely sun” (Hymn 1). Hovering, perhaps, between these two poles,
Nerval’s outcast prince has a lute that bears ‘‘the black sun of melancholy’’
(‘‘El Desdichado’’ 4). Alluding to Racine’s Phèdre, where the queen has harbored
a ‘‘black flame’’ (310) and then cannot bear the sight of the sun (1273--74),
Mandelstam writes of ‘‘the savage sleepless passion of the black sun’’ of
Phaedra, who may represent the murderous stepmother Russia has become
(Tristia, poem 1). The black sun became a central symbol in Mandelstam’s
poetry: ‘‘I woke in a radiant cradle / Lit by a black sun’’ (Tristia, ‘‘This night is
irredeemable,’’ trans. Greene).
Blood
‘‘Blood,’’ as Mephistopheles reminds Faust, ‘‘is an altogether singular juice’’
(Goethe, Faust I 1740). A substance so vital to human life and so striking in
appearance is bound to have many symbolic meanings, but we shall stress
three clusters of meanings here: blood as ‘‘life’’ (or ‘‘lifeblood’’), blood as family
or ancestry, and blood as sacrifice.
After the Flood God blessed Noah’s family and gave them new dietary laws:
they may eat animal flesh, ‘‘But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood
thereof, shall ye not eat’’ (Gen. 9.4; see Deut. 12.23). Life is equated with blood.
To ‘‘kill’’ and to ‘‘shed blood’’ are synonymous (Gen. 37.21--22). A murderer is a
‘‘man of blood’’ or (in the AV) ‘‘bloody man’’ (2 Sam. 16.8, Ps. 26.9); he is
‘‘bloodthirsty’’ (Prov. 29.10).
Two words in Homer differing only in accent may well be related, brótos
(‘‘gore’’) and brotós (‘‘mortal’’). Only mortals have blood; the gods do not eat
bread and wine like mortals, but nectar and ambrosia, and what flows through their veins is ichor (Iliad 5.339--42, 416). Dead mortals are bloodless; to
enable them to speak, Odysseus must pour animal blood into a trench for
them to drink (Odyssey 11.24--50). Horace asks, even if one could play the lyre
better than Orpheus, ‘‘would the blood return to the insubstantial ghost?’’
(1.24.15).
From the time of Hippocrates to very recent times blood was taken as one
of the four vital fluids or ‘‘humors’’ whose balance is essential to human
health and sanity. (See Humor.) Blood, according to Burton, is ‘‘a hot, sweet,
temperate, red humour’’ (Anatomy of Melancholy 1.1.2.2); one who has an excess
of it is ‘‘sanguine,’’ which usually means ‘‘cheerful’’ or ‘‘hopeful’’; it came
also to mean ‘‘courageous,’’ as if full of heart (Latin cor), the seat of the
blood.
29
Blood
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Milton describes angels’ blood much as Homer describes that of the gods:
‘‘A stream of nectarous humour issuing flowed / Sanguine, such as celestial
spirits may bleed’’ (PL 6.332--33).
One whose blood is hot is passionate, angry, impetuous. When Byron’s Juan
gets angry, ‘‘His blood was up’’ (Don Juan 1.1471), still a common expression.
Cold blood or sangfroid is usually thought to be inhuman. ‘‘Eager to be held as
one of the immortal gods, Empedocles in cold blood leapt into the flames of
Etna’’ (Horace, Ars Poetica 464--66); a character in Shakespeare denounces a
traitor as a ‘‘cold-blooded slave’’ (KJ 3.1.123).
We commonly use ‘‘blood’’ today to mean ‘‘ancestry’’ or ‘‘kinship’’ or ‘‘race,’’
though blood has very little to do with it biologically. This usage is not found
in the Bible, where ‘‘seed’’ would be used, as in ‘‘the seed of Abraham’’ (e.g.,
Isa. 41.8), but it is normal in Greek and Latin. In Homer one can say, ‘‘You are
of good blood’’ or refer to the ‘‘blood of your race’’ (Odyssey 4.611, Iliad 19.111);
Pindar sings that Aristagoras had ‘‘the blood of Peisandros of old’’ (Nem.
11.33--34). Virgil describes ‘‘the race [genus] of the two branches from one
blood’’ (Aeneid 8.142), while Juvenal asks, ‘‘What good is it . . . to be valued for
one’s ancient blood?’’ (8.1--2).
Juno, according to Chaucer, destroyed almost ‘‘al the blood / Of Thebes’’
(Knight’s Tale 1330--31). Spenser’s Red Cross Knight is told he is ‘‘borne of
English blood’’ (FQ 1.10.64); Spenser equates ‘‘noble seed’’ with ‘‘gentle blood’’
(2.4.1). Shakespeare has the phrase ‘‘well-born bloods’’ (KJ 2.1.278), referring not
only to their rank but their martial spirit. Racine’s play La Thébaïde, which is
about the war between two brothers born of ‘‘incestuous blood’’ (1.1.33), turns
on the value of blood (the word occurs seventy times): Jocaste hopes that
common blood will bring peace, but Créon understands that the blood is bad
and must be shed.
Occasionally in classical poetry ‘‘blood’’ can refer to a person. ‘‘I, blood of
poor parents’’ (=son) (Horace 2.20.5--6); Byblis ‘‘hated the name of blood’’
(=brother) (Ovid, Met. 9.466); in a similar vein Neptune is Nelei sanguinis auctor,
‘‘originator of Neleus’ blood’’ (i.e., his father) (Met. 12.558).
Perhaps because ‘‘blood’’ implied relationship, some cultures required that
blood be spent in ratifying a bond of brotherhood or any other deep pact
among nonkindred; ‘‘blood brothers’’ are not brothers by blood. The devil
demands it of Faust, but it is not in fact common in western tradition: the
Greeks, for instance, usually poured out wine, not blood, as they swore an
oath. There is one biblical case, where Moses concludes a covenant between
God and Israel by sacrificing twelve bulls and casting their blood on the altar
and the people; this the ‘‘blood of the covenant’’ that creates a new consanguinity among the Israelites (Exod. 24.4--9). Schiller has his Swiss rebels
declare ‘‘we are one in heart and one in blood’’ as they take their oath on the
Rütli, but they do so by clashing swords and clasping hands (Wilhelm Tell
2.2.1202).
Bloodshed demands vengeance. God hears Abel’s blood crying to him from
the ground and places a curse on Cain (Gen. 4.9--15), though there the
vengeance is promised against those who might slay Cain. God tells Noah,
‘‘Whoso sheddeth man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed’’ (Gen. 9.6). ‘‘It
is law,’’ a chorus of Aeschylus sings, ‘‘that bloody drops spilling into the
ground demand more blood’’ (Choephoroe 400--02). Macbeth learns that he has,
30
Blue
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
as he feared, taught ‘‘Bloody instructions’’ (1.7.9), which now return to plague
him: ‘‘It will have blood, they say: blood will have blood’’ (3.4.121--22).
Christ’s blood is the blood of sacrifice, renewing the ‘‘blood of the
covenant’’: ‘‘This cup [of wine],’’ he says, ‘‘is the new testament in my blood,
which is shed for you’’ (Luke 22.20). The faithful are ‘‘justified by his blood’’
(Rom. 5.9); in him ‘‘we have redemption through his blood’’ (Eph. 1.7). The
redeemed in heaven wear white robes, for ‘‘they have washed their robes, and
made them white in the blood of the Lamb’’ (Rev. 7.14). Dante sees them as
‘‘the holy army / That Christ with his blood took as bride’’ (Paradiso 31.2--3).
See Purple.
Blue
Rabelais says ‘‘of course blue signifies heaven and heavenly things’’ (Gargantua
1.10). ‘‘Blue! -- ’Tis the life of heaven -- the domain / Of Cynthia,’’ Keats begins a
sonnet; ‘‘Blue! -- ’Tis the life of waters -- Ocean / And all its vassal streams’’;
blue is also the ‘‘gentle cousin to the forest green.’’ ‘‘The blue of sky and sea,
the green of earth,’’ according to Tennyson’s ‘‘Ancient Sage’’ (41), are the two
great colors of the surface of things.
Because it is the color of the sky (and perhaps because the sea is blue only
on sunny days), blue is traditionally the color of heaven, of hope, of constancy,
of purity, of truth, of the ideal. In Christian color-symbolism blue belongs to
the Virgin. Spenser’s Speranza (Hope) is clad in blue (FQ 1.10.14). For Shelley,
the two hues that nature has made divine are ‘‘Green strength, azure hope’’
(‘‘Ode: Arise’’ 33). In Chaucer’s ‘‘Against Women Unconstant’’ the refrain is
‘‘Instead of blue, thus may ye wear all green’’ -- the blue of constancy, the
green of the changeable earth. (See Green.)
It is so common to see ‘‘blue’’ or ‘‘azure’’ before ‘‘sky’’ or ‘‘heaven’’ -Shakespeare has ‘‘blue of heaven,’’ ‘‘aerial blue,’’ and ‘‘azured vault,’’
Wordsworth has ‘‘clear blue sky,’’ ‘‘azure heavens’’ and ‘‘blue firmament’’ -that it takes a feat of phrasing to bring home the blueness and its symbolic
resonance. Perhaps Coleridge does so when he claims ‘‘saints will aid if men
will call: / For the blue sky bends over all’’ (Christabel 330--31); or Shelley, when
Beatrice, after her rape, cries ‘‘My God! / The beautiful blue heaven is flecked
with blood!’’ (Cenci 3.1.12--13).
The Greek word for ‘‘blue,’’ kuaneos (whence the stem ‘‘cyan-’’ in chemical
terms), meant ‘‘dark’’ in Homer and the other early poets. It was the color of
mourning: Thetis puts on a kuaneos veil when she sees Achilles’ fate is near
(Iliad 24.93--94), Bion calls on Aphrodite to wear a cyan-colored robe (‘‘Lament
for Adonis’’ 4). With Bacchylides and later poets the term seems to have meant
‘‘blue’’ (it is often used of the sea), but its sense ‘‘dark’’ remained traditional
(as in the Bion). The Latin term caeruleus (whence English ‘‘cerulean’’) modifies
sea and sky and other blue things but sometimes also means ‘‘dark.’’
Another Latin word, lividus, meant ‘‘leaden’’ or ‘‘black and blue,’’ the color
of a bruise; we still use ‘‘black and blue’’ in that sense, as Shakespeare did: a
character in Merry Wives is ‘‘beaten black and blue’’ (4.5.98). It is also the color
of death: Virgil uses livida for the murky waters of Styx in the underworld
(Aeneid 6.320), and Milton follows with the ‘‘livid flames’’ of hell (PL 1.182). In
English ‘‘livid’’ is applied to corpses: Coleridge addresses the dead Chatterton:
‘‘thy corse of livid hue’’ (‘‘Chatterton’’ 30); Ann Radcliffe writes, ‘‘the light
glared upon the livid face of the corpse’’ (The Italian 5); while Byron has ‘‘thy
31
Blue flower
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
livid living corse’’ (Giaour 762). It is the living corpse of Gluttony that Spenser
describes: ‘‘Full of diseases was his carcas blew’’ (FQ 1.4.23). Pestilence was
considered blue. Thomson describes the ‘‘vapours rank and blue corruption’’
of ‘‘swampy fens’’ that breed disease (‘‘Summer’’ 1032); Shelley tells how ‘‘blue
Plague’’ fell on mankind (Revolt of Islam 3964).
Latin lividus also meant ‘‘envious’’ -- the hue one turns when filled with
spite -- and English retains the phrase ‘‘livid with envy.’’ A character in Dante’s
Purgatorio confesses, ‘‘My blood was so afire with envy that / . . . / the lividness
(livore) in me was plain to see’’ (14.82--84, trans. Mandelbaum).
‘‘Azure’’ has always had nearly the opposite connotation: it is the noble,
pure, ideal blue, especially of the clear sky or the Mediterranean Sea. (The
word has the same Persian source as ‘‘lazuli,’’ as in ‘‘lapis lazuli.’’) It is a
favorite word of Shelley’s. Leopardi speaks of the purissimo azzurro of heaven
(‘‘La Ginestra’’ 162). But some later writers saw the ideal as impossibly distant
and indifferent to human suffering. Baudelaire sees a swan turning its neck
‘‘towards the ironic and cruelly blue sky’’ (‘‘Le Cygne’’). Mallarmé uses azur for
the pure ideal toward which his soul sighs (‘‘Soupir’’), the ‘‘virginal azure’’
whose air makes his lips hungry (‘‘Don du Poème’’), but it is a ‘‘cruel ideal’’ for
its ‘‘serene irony,’’ its inaccessibility except by glimpses to the tormented poet
who tries to apprehend it (‘‘L’Azur’’). A blue sky presides over a terrible slaughter in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Darı́o, on the other hand,
tells how a fairy reveals the dawn and a lovely woman’s face, filling him with
joy, and then ‘‘More? . . . said the fairy. And then I had / fixed my pupils / on
the Azure [Azul]’’ (conclusion of ‘‘Autumnal,’’ in the book Azul). Wallace Stevens
uses ‘‘blue’’ and ‘‘azure,’’ sometimes in contrast to the green of nature, as the
color of imagination and art in such poems as ‘‘The Man with the Blue
Guitar’’ and ‘‘Sea Surface Full of Clouds’’; in the latter he makes five tries at
reviving the imagination: ‘‘And then blue heaven spread / Its crystalline
pendentives on the sea,’’ for instance, or ‘‘Then the sea / And heaven rolled as
one and from the two / Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue’’ (33--34,
88--90). But in the spirit of Baudelaire he also speaks of the sky’s ‘‘dividing and
indifferent blue’’ (‘‘Sunday Morning’’ 45).
Blue flower
32
see Flower
Boar
see Pig
Book
That the word ‘‘book’’ occurs over a hundred times in the Old Testament is not
surprising given the importance of sacred books to the Hebrews. Books were
far less important to the Greeks, who tended to rely more on oral tradition; for
all the care given to editing him even ‘‘Homer’’ was never a holy text. Various
particular books are named in the Old Testament, some of them otherwise
unknown to us, but when the Lord tells Joshua that ‘‘This book of the law
shall not depart out of thy mouth’’ (Josh. 1.8) he is referring to the Book of
Deuteronomy, whose author uses the same name for it (e.g., Deut. 28.61).
The phrase about Joshua’s mouth may have inspired Ezekiel to a more
metaphorical usage where the angel in his great vision tells him to eat a
scroll written with lamentations -- ‘‘eat this roll, and go speak unto the house
of Israel’’ -- which then tastes as sweet as honey (Ezek. 2.8--3.3); this
Book
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
commissioning of Ezekiel as prophet combines the oral and the ‘‘literal’’
dimension of his culture with revealing awkwardness.
God is the ultimate author. The two tables Moses brings down from Sinai
are ‘‘written with the finger of God’’ (Exod. 31.18). There is also a book that
names the righteous; the Lord threatens, ‘‘Whosoever hath sinned against me,
him will I blot out of my book’’ (Exod. 32.33). This is ‘‘the book of the living’’
of Psalm 69.28 and ‘‘the book of life’’ of Revelation 3.5. In Daniel’s vision of
the Last Judgment, the Ancient of days sits on a throne ‘‘and the books were
opened’’ (Dan. 7.10, elaborated in Rev. 20.12). The names of the rebellious
angels, according to Milton, were ‘‘blotted out and razed / By their rebellion,
from the books of life’’ (PL 1.361--62). God also writes his law within us, says
Jeremiah: the Lord promises ‘‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and
write it in their hearts’’ (31.33, echoed by Paul in 2 Cor. 3.3).
The ‘‘book of life’’ easily becomes the book of one’s own life. Vigny’s Jesus,
for instance, pleads with his Father to let him live: ‘‘Before the last word do
not close my book!’’ (‘‘Le Mont des Oliviers’’ 2.2). When we vow to reform
ourselves we ‘‘turn over a new leaf.’’
Pindar has the name of an Olympic victor ‘‘written on my heart’’ (Olymp.
10.3). The same metaphor for memory is used six times by Aeschylus; e.g.,
‘‘the wax-tablets of the mind’’ in Prometheus 789. Plato likens the memory to a
block of wax, which varies from individual to individual in size and softness
(Theaetetus 191c). This is the origin of the idea of the tabula rasa (used by
Thomas Aquinas), the ‘‘blank slate’’ made commonplace by empiricist
philosophers such as Locke. After the Ghost enjoins him to ‘‘Remember me,’’
Hamlet vows, ‘‘from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond
records, / . . . / And thy commandment all alone shall live / In the book and
volume of my brain’’ (1.5.98--103).
Mystical Jewish speculation of the Middle Ages imagined the Torah
(Pentateuch) as the foundation of the world, and each of the twenty-two letters
of the Hebrew alphabet were gates or structural elements in the Creation. In
the late Middle Ages the idea arose among Christians that nature or the world
is a book to be studied for its truths. That led to the notion of ‘‘the two books
of God’’ or ‘‘the two revelations’’ (found also in Islamic thought). As Thomas
Browne puts it, ‘‘there are two Books from which I collect my Divinity; besides
that written one of God, another of His servant Nature, that universal and
publick Manuscript, that lies expans’d under the Eyes of all’’ (Religio Medici
1.15). A soothsayer of Shakespeare’s says, ‘‘In nature’s infinite book of secrecy /
A little I can read’’ (Antony 1.2.10). Milton’s Raphael tells Adam that ‘‘heaven / Is
as the book of God before thee set, / Wherein to read his wondrous works’’ (PL
8.66--68). Thomson asks, ‘‘To me be Nature’s volume broad displayed; / And to
peruse its all-instructing page, / . . . / My sole delight’’ (‘‘Summer’’ 192--96).
When the Romantic philosopher Schelling writes, ‘‘What we call nature is a
poem that lies locked in a secret marvelous script’’ (Sämtliche Werke [1856--61],
3.628), he is not necessarily invoking God as the author of the script.
Coleridge draws from Schelling but takes a more Christian viewpoint: ‘‘all
that meets the bodily sense I deem / Symbolical, one mighty alphabet / For
infant minds’’; when the mind grows it shall see God unveiled (‘‘Destiny of
Nations’’ 18--20). Writing of his infant boy, who will grow up in natural
surroundings, he prophesies, ‘‘so shalt thou see and hear / The lovely shapes
33
Boreas
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
and sounds intelligible / Of that eternal language, which thy God / Utters,
who from eternity doth teach / Himself in all, and all things in himself’’
(‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ 58--62). Wordsworth reverses the relation of poem to
nature when he argues that a child who grows up knowing Nature will
‘‘Receive enduring touches of deep joy / From the great Nature that exists in
works / Of mighty poets’’ (1805 Prelude 5.617--19).
We note finally that the ‘‘language of flowers’’ cult, which flourished in the
nineteenth century, could be assimilated to the ‘‘book of nature’’ metaphor.
For example, a sonnet by Lassailly quoted in Balzac’s Lost Illusions has the line,
‘‘Each flower speaks a word from the book of nature.’’ See Flower.
Boreas
Bow and arrow
34
see Wind
As the weapon that combines distance, speed, stealth, and piercingness or
penetration, the bow and arrow have been recruited since our oldest literature
to play figurative parts. Psalm 64, for instance, complains of the ‘‘secret
counsel of the wicked’’ (2), who ‘‘bend their bows to shoot their arrows, even
bitter words’’ (3), ‘‘that they may shoot in secret at the perfect’’ (4). Shelley
enlists this image in his elegy on Keats, whom he thought had been mortally
wounded by the bitter words of an anonymous critic: ‘‘pierced by the shaft
which flies / In darkness’’ (Adonais 11--12).
As the weapon of Apollo, god of sickness and healing, the bow shoots
plague upon the Achaeans at the outset of the Iliad (1.43--52). Apollo’s sister
Artemis, an archer like him (she is goddess of the hunt), also has a bow; her
association with the moon may have been prompted in part by the shape of
the moon as a crescent, ‘‘the moon,’’ in Hippolyta’s words, ‘‘like to a silver
bow / New bent in heaven’’ (MND 1.1.9--10). See Moon, Silver.
Because Apollo is also the god of poetry and music, Pindar likens the god’s
arrows to songs: ‘‘from the far-shooting bows of the Muses / shoot a volley of
arrows such as these’’ (Olymp. 9.5--8). And so Pindar’s own songs are arrows: to
honor a victory, for example, ‘‘I set my arrow’s aim, / As near as I may be to
the Muses’ mark’’ (Nem. 9.55). And so, again in Adonais, the classicist Shelley
imagines Byron routing the critics ‘‘When like Apollo, from his golden bow, /
The Pythian of the age one arrow sped / and smiled’’ (249--51). Claiming that
no peaceful breast ever produced powerful poetry, Lamartine combines
Apollo’s two sorts of arrows, disease and song: ‘‘when Homer’s Apollo / Came
down from the summit of Eryx / To launch his shafts on the earth, / Flying to
infernal shores / He steeped his fatal weapons / In the boiling waters of the
Styx’’ (‘‘Enthusiasm’’ 65--70).
When Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, finally holds his mighty bow, Homer
compares him to a bard with a lyre (Odyssey 21.406--11). See Harp, lyre, and
lute. He then sends his arrow through twelve axe-heads, perhaps symbolizing
his twelve adventures or escapades, whereupon he slaughters the suitors. In
these climactic deeds Odysseus is revealed as an avatar of Apollo himself,
patron of bards and archers, whose feast day this is (20.277--78).
Zechariah prophesies that ‘‘the Lord shall be seen over them, and his arrow
shall go forth as the lightning’’ (9.14). This apocalyptic image seems to
combine with the climax of the Odyssey in Blake’s image of the bow which the
awakening Albion seizes at the conclusion of Jerusalem. It is a bow of spiritual
Bower
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
warfare, ‘‘a Bow of Mercy & Loving-kindness: laying / Open the hidden Heart
in Wars of mutual Benevolence wars of Love’’ (97.13--14).
In a lower form of metaphorical warfare, of course, ‘‘wars of love’’ have long
been fought with ‘‘love’s sad archery,’’ as Byron puts it (Childe Harold 1.72). Io
reports to Aeschylus’ Prometheus that ‘‘Zeus has been inflamed by a shaft of
desire’’ (649--50). The chorus of Euripides’ Hippolytus sings that neither fire nor
stars have stronger arrows than those of Aphrodite sent by the hand of Eros
(530--33). Dido, aflame with love for Aeneas, wanders through the city like a
doe wounded by an arrow shot from afar (4.69--72). Thus was launched that
greatest of clichés, the love-dart, Cupid’s bow, the Valentine heart pierced by
an arrow. Petrarch exploits it to the full in his Rime: Amor takes up his bow
and secretly pierces my heart (2), he found the way to my heart through my
eyes (3), I might call on him to shoot me with his ‘‘pitiless bowstring’’ again so
I might die (36), but I bless the bow and arrows that pierced me (61), yet I
shall always hate the window from which love has shot a thousand darts in
me (86), and so on, through many contradictions and mood swings. Among
petrarchan sonnets in English is Spenser’s sonnet 16, which turns entirely on
the image of ‘‘loves with little wings’’ ‘‘darting their deadly arrows,’’ one of
whom aims at his heart. In another, Sidney imagines Cupid, having lost his
bow and arrows, receiving two better bows from Stella’s brows and infinite
arrows from her eyes (Astrophel and Stella 17). Desportes makes a vow ‘‘by the
sweet shafts which Love conceals in your eyes’’ (‘‘Par vos grâces, ma dame’’).
Bower
see Garden
Brass
see Bronze
Bread
Bread is the fundamental foodstuff of humans. One earns one’s bread, begs
for bread, prays for ‘‘daily bread’’ (Matt. 6.11), acts the breadwinner, and so on.
Bread is the ‘‘staff’’ of life: when the Lord sent famine, ‘‘he brake the whole
staff of bread’’ (Ps. 105.16). The Greek word sitos meant ‘‘grain,’’ ‘‘bread,’’ and
‘‘food,’’ developing much as English ‘‘meal’’ has; in Homer ‘‘eaters of bread’’
means ‘‘humans’’ (Odyssey 9.89), while to be alive is to eat bread (8.222). To
‘‘break bread’’ is a New Testament phrase for eating or feasting (e.g., Acts 2.42).
The English words ‘‘lord’’ and ‘‘lady’’ are from hlafweard (‘‘loaf-ward’’) and
hlafdige (‘‘loaf-kneader’’).
Even where classical authors tell us that bread was not the original food of
humans, they assume bread’s priority: Hesiod reports that the terrible bronze
race ‘‘ate no bread’’ (Works and Days 146), while Ovid claims that ‘‘the bread of
the first mortals was the green herbs / which the earth gave without solicitation’’ (Fasti 4.395--96).
Bread is thus plain fare, the food of the common people. Horace prefers it
to cakes or cookies (Epistles 1.10.11), and Don Quixote agrees: ‘‘Since we have
bread (hogazas), let’s not look for tarts (tortas)’’ (2.13). All the more perverse for
Marie-Antoinette to say, ‘‘If they have no more bread, let them eat cake
(brioche).’’ She should have known, as the rulers of Rome knew, that the grain
supplies must be kept flowing. The cynical Juvenal coins a famous phrase as
he observes that the Roman mob no longer meddles in public affairs but
‘‘longs for just two things: / bread and circuses (panem et circenses)’’ (10.80--81).
35
Breath
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
‘‘Bread’’ in the Old Testament is sometimes used, like ‘‘cup,’’ to mean one’s
portion or lot (see Cup). The Lord feeds the people with ‘‘bread of tears’’ (Ps.
80.5), and gives them ‘‘the bread of adversity, and the water of affliction’’ (Isa.
30.20). Spenser echoes Isaiah when he has one wandering ‘‘in affliction’’ say,
‘‘My bread shall be the anguish of my mind, / My drink the teares which fro
mine eyes do raine’’ (Daphnaida 374--76). Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke recalls
‘‘Eating the bitter bread of banishment’’ (R2 3.1.21). More literal is Dante’s
description of his own banishment: he knows ‘‘how bitter / is the bread of
others’’ (Paradiso 17.58--59).
The ‘‘unleavened bread’’ (Hebrew matzah) that the Israelites must eat for
seven days while awaiting the departure from Egypt (Exod. 12.15) was simply
expedient -- there was no time to wait for bread to rise -- but it also seems to
stand for a ritual purification and, re-enacted in the Passover ceremony, a
reminder of suffering; it is later called ‘‘the bread of affliction’’ (Deut. 16.3). In
the wilderness the starving Israelites remember that they ate ‘‘bread to the
full’’ in Egypt, so the Lord promises Moses, ‘‘I will rain bread from heaven for
you’’ (Exod. 16.3--4); this is manna (16.15). The Lord ‘‘had rained down manna
upon them to eat, and had given them of the corn of heaven. / Man did eat
angels’ food’’ (Ps. 78.24--25). But Jesus disparages this manna from Moses as not
true bread from heaven, ‘‘For the bread of God is he which cometh down
from heaven, and giveth life unto the world.’’ ‘‘I am the bread of life: he that
cometh to me shall never hunger’’ (John 6.33--35). Moreover, at the Last Supper,
Jesus passes out bread to his disciples and says, ‘‘Take, eat, this is my body’’
(Matt. 26.26); that, with the wine taken as his blood, is the origin of the
Eucharist (see Wine). Cowper, to give one modern instance, is disgusted with
affected preachers who try to ‘‘dazzle me with tropes,’’ ‘‘When I am hungry
for the bread of life’’ (Task 2.423--26).
During the years in the wilderness the people were taught ‘‘that man doth
not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth
of the Lord doth man live’’ (Deut. 8.3). When Jesus is in the wilderness he tells
Satan the same thing (Matt. 4.4). Since Jesus is the Word of God, however, it is
he who feeds the faithful -- with his word, and with himself as the bread of
life.
Breath
36
Breath is life, and those who draw breath are those who are alive. Homer
refers to ‘‘all those that breathe on earth or crawl’’ (Iliad 17.447), while
Sophocles uses ‘‘those who breathe’’ for ‘‘those who live’’ (Trachiniae 1160).
Horace equates ‘‘breath’’ (spiritus) and ‘‘life’’ (4.8.14), and Statius like Sophocles
uses ‘‘breathe’’ for ‘‘live’’ (Thebaid 4.559). So Chaucer has ‘‘lyf or breth’’ (Legend
of Good Women 2031), and Shakespeare has ‘‘all the breathers of this world’’
(Sonnets 81). This equation is really metonymy rather than metaphor, since
breath is essential to life. The ‘‘breath of life’’ that God ‘‘breathed into the
nostrils’’ of Adam (Gen. 2.7) -- in Milton’s elaboration the ‘‘breath of life, the
spirit of man / Which God inspired’’ (PL 10.784--85) -- is the soul, the psyche, the
pneuma, the spiritus, the Greek and Latin terms all connected with ‘‘breath.’’
(See Wind.) ‘‘Breath of life’’ occurs in classical Greek as well (e.g., Aeschylus,
Persians 507). To die is to ‘‘spend breath’’ (Euripides, Hecuba 571); to breathe
one’s last is to ‘‘expire’’: one of Shakespeare’s characters puns, ‘‘your breathing
shall expire’’ (John 5.4.36). In Spenser a fallen warrior ‘‘breathd out his ghost’’
Bronze
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
(FQ 2.8.45). Since in English ‘‘death’’ and ‘‘breath’’ rhyme with each other and
with almost nothing else, poet after poet has exploited this accident -Shakespeare for instance several times in Richard II -- to make points about the
fragile evanescent nothing that means life; ‘‘life,’’ in Byron’s words, is ‘‘a mere
affair of breath’’ (Don Juan 9.128).
See West wind, Wind.
Bronze
The Greek word khalkos and the Latin aes have been variously translated as
‘‘bronze, ‘‘brass,’’ and ‘‘copper.’’ Probably the usual sense in Homer is ‘‘bronze’’;
the phrase ‘‘red bronze’’ appears once (Iliad 9.365), where it may mean
‘‘copper’’ if ‘‘red’’ is not just formulaic. In Greek poetry the word could mean
‘‘metal’’; Pindar has the phrase ‘‘grey bronze’’ (Pyth. 3.48), though ‘‘grey’’
ordinarily belongs with ‘‘iron.’’ Apollonius of Rhodes later argued that khalkos
could mean ‘‘iron’’ as well. Iron was in fact known in Homer’s day, but the
time he sings of was the ‘‘Bronze Age,’’ as scholars now call it (not quite the
same as the Bronze Age in classical myth). Even in later settings, where iron
was the metal of warfare, battles in literature were often fought with
‘‘bronze.’’
Bronze is the third in the ancient hierarchy of metals. Hesiod names five
races, of which the bronze race was third, a race of terrible warriors, while
Ovid makes bronze the third of his four ages.
Older English translations are the more confusing because ‘‘brass’’ used to
cover what is now meant by ‘‘bronze’’ as well. We now distinguish brass, an
alloy of copper and zinc, from bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, but brass
once referred to any copper alloy. Pope uses ‘‘brass’’ and ‘‘brazen’’ (the adjectival form of ‘‘brass’’) to translate Homer’s khalkos and khalkeos. ‘‘Bronze’’ was
introduced into English in the seventeenth century, from Italian via French
(perhaps ultimately from Persian), at first in art-historical contexts and then
with reference to its brown color; Pope uses it as a verb: people ‘‘bronze their
face’’ in the sun (Dunciad 2.10).
As brass is hard and relatively impenetrable, it came to be used of someone
impervious to shame. Shakespeare’s Kent cries against Oswald, ‘‘What a
brazen-fac’d varlet art thou, to deny thou knowest me!’’ (Lear 2.2.26--27).
Hamlet wants to wring his mother’s heart, ‘‘If it be made of penetrable stuff, /
If damned custom have not braz’d it so, / That it be proof and bulwark against
sense’’ (3.4.36--38; one text has ‘‘brass’d’’). We still use ‘‘brazen’’ or ‘‘brassy’’ to
mean ‘‘impudent’’ or ‘‘shameless.’’
In Rome bronze tablets with laws engraved on them were mounted in
public spaces (see Ovid, Met. 1.92); such tablets might also record and preserve
famous deeds, especially upon tombs. Horace concludes his third book of odes
with the famous lines, ‘‘I have achieved a monument more lasting than
bronze’’ (3.30.1). In English ‘‘brass’’ is closely associated with the idea of fame.
Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost begins, ‘‘Let fame, that all hunt after in their
lives, / Live regist’red upon our brazen tombs.’’ The Duke tells Angelo, ‘‘your
desert . . . / . . . deserves with characters of brass / A forted residence ’gainst the
tooth of time / And razure of oblivion’’ (MM 5.1.9--13). This use is synonymous
with ‘‘marble,’’ as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 55: ‘‘Not marble nor the gilded
monuments / Of princes . . . ’’). Ben Jonson thinks his country should have
37
Butterfly
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
written the name of Lord Mounteagle ‘‘in brass or marble’’ (Epigrams 60).
Sidney has ‘‘brasen fame’’ (Astrophel 28), Pope and Wordsworth both
‘‘monumental brass’’ (Temple of Fame 227, Dunciad 2.313; White Doe of Rylstone
1895). Cowper notes that patriots’ names live in ‘‘ever-during brass’’ while
martyrs for the truth die unknown (Task 5.710); Shelley seems to reply when
he claims that fame lodged in human hope will ‘‘Survive the perished scrolls
of unenduring brass’’ (Laon and Cythna 3747).
See Metal.
Butterfly
38
Simply to list the expressive and widely different words for ‘‘butterfly’’ in the
European languages is to compose a little poem: papillon (French), farfalla
(Italian), mariposa (Spanish), Schmetterling (German), ‘‘butterfly.’’ The English
word evokes the echoing phrase ‘‘flutter by’’; in Old English it was equally
charming: fifoldara, probably akin to Latin papilio, perhaps from a root meaning ‘‘shake’’ or ‘‘flutter.’’
In Greece there seem to have been few colorful butterflies, and the Greek
term for them referred to moths as well, but it is the most interesting of the
terms: the ‘‘so-called psyche,’’ as both Aristotle and Plutarch put it (Historia
Animalium 551a14, Moralia 2.636c), the same as the word for ‘‘soul.’’ Greek vase
paintings sometimes show a butterfly leaving the mouth of a dying person.
Ovid refers to ferali . . . papilione, ‘‘funereal butterflies’’ (Met. 15.374), for they
were often depicted on graves. The idea is that the soul undergoes a metamorphosis at death, leaving behind its earthbound larval state to take wing in a
glorious form. It was adopted in Christian iconography as a symbol of the
resurrection. ‘‘O Christians,’’ Dante cries, ‘‘do you not know that we are
worms / born to form the angelic butterfly?’’ (Purgatorio 10.124--25). As Faust’s
immortal part ascends to heaven, the Blessed Boys sing ‘‘Joyfully we receive /
this one in chrysalis state’’ (Goethe Faust II 11981--82). The soul ascends to
heaven, according to Wordsworth, as ‘‘before your sight / Mounts on the
breeze the butterfly’’ (Excursion 4.391--92).
The tale of Cupid and Psyche (in Apuleius’ Golden Ass) does not involve
butterfly imagery, though depictions of Psyche as early as the third century bc
gave her butterfly wings. In his Muiopotmos: or, The Fate of the Butterflie, Spenser
has the jealous Venus, remembering her son’s earlier love of Psyche, change
the nymph Astery into a butterfly. In his ‘‘Ode to Psyche’’ Keats sees ‘‘thy
lucent fans [wings], / Fluttering among the faint Olympians’’ (41--42). Shelley
reminds us of the traditional symbolism when he describes a cocoon as ‘‘an
antenatal tomb / Where butterflies dream of the life to come’’ (‘‘SensitivePlant’’ 2.53--54). As a butterfly vanishes into the seaward October wind,
Lawrence cries, ‘‘Farewell, farewell, lost soul!’’ (‘‘Butterfly’’).
Sometimes a butterfly is a messenger, a kind of angel, that brings grace or a
change of heart. Blake’s lowly Lilly is ‘‘So weak, the gilded butterfly scarce
perches on my head. Yet I am visited from heaven’’ (Book of Thel 1.18--19). In two
early poems by Frost a butterfly brings him a glad moment amidst gloom
(‘‘Tuft of Flowers,’’ ‘‘My Butterfly’’).
It is a commonplace that children chase butterflies. Men follow Coriolanus
‘‘with no less confidence / Than boys pursuing summer butterflies’’
(Shakespeare, Cor 4.6.94--95). The sight of a butterfly revives memories in
Wordsworth of the time he and his sister chased them (‘‘To a Butterfly’’).
Cage
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
A fop or fancily dressed courtier is a butterfly. That seems to be what Lear
means when he foresees that he and Cordelia will ‘‘laugh / At gilded
butterflies’’ (5.3.12--13). Pope declares, ‘‘The Fops are painted Butterflies, / That
flutter for a Day’’ (To Moore 17--18). Gay asks, ‘‘And what’s a Butterfly? At best /
He’s but a Caterpillar, drest’’ (Fables 1.24.41). Shelley scorns ‘‘Those gilded flies /
That, basking in the sunshine of a court, / Fatten on its corruption!’’ (Queen
Mab 3.106--08). One of Byron’s characters calls a man ‘‘a mere court butterfly, /
That flutters in the pageant of a monarch’’ (Sardanapalus 5.90--91).
Occasionally poets have called their poems butterflies. Jean de Sponde
addresses his verses as ‘‘well-loved butterflies, nurslings of my soul’’ (‘‘Elegy’’).
Tennyson reports, ‘‘out of painful phrases wrought / There flutters up a happy
thought, / Self-balanced on a lightsome wing’’ (In Memoriam 65.6--8). Schumann
wrote a set of poems called Schmetterlinge, and then composed a set of dancelike piano pieces called Papillons (op. 2), which he thought of as a masked ball
transformed into music; the German word for ‘‘mask’’ here is Larve, which also
means ‘‘larva.’’ Chopin also wrote an Etude (opus 25, no. 9) called papillon.
Papillon also meant a sheet of paper bound in a book.
C
Cage
Castle
Caterpillar
see Bird
see Siege
The caterpillar appears in the Old Testament as a pest that devours crops; it is
included with ‘‘pestilence, blasting, mildew, locust’’ (1 Kgs 8.37, 2 Chr. 6.28)
and associated with the locust as one of the plagues of Egypt (Pss. 78.46,
105.34). Jeremiah prophesies that Babylon will be filled with men ‘‘as with
caterpillers’’ (51.14, 27).
The English name for them probably derives from Old French catepelose
(‘‘hairy cat’’), but it was taken to be a compound with ‘‘piller,’’ meaning
‘‘pillager’’: the larvae pillage fields and gardens. As parasites they became
symbols of social hangers-on and dependents. Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke has it
in for King Richard’s friends, ‘‘Bushy, Bagot, and their complices, / The caterpillars of the commonwealth, / Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away’’
(2.3.164--66). Jack Cade and his rebels are more radical: ‘‘All scholars, lawyers,
courtiers, gentlemen, / They call false caterpillars and intend their death’’ (2H6
4.4.36--37). Blake continues this populist imagery in his attack against
priestcraft. ‘‘As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so
the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys’’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 9); in
his story of the tree of religion or Mystery Blake means priests when he writes,
‘‘And the Catterpiller and Fly, / Feed on the Mystery’’ (‘‘Human Abstract’’).
In English poetic diction ‘‘worm’’ sometimes serves for ‘‘caterpillar.’’ The
cankerworm (sometimes simply ‘‘canker’’) is really a caterpillar, for instance.
The loss of Lycidas, says Milton, is ‘‘As killing as the Canker to the Rose’’
(‘‘Lycidas’’ 45). Blake’s ‘‘invisible worm’’ that destroys the rose is the same
39
Cave
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
creature (‘‘Sick Rose’’). Some sort of metamorphosis-capable insect must be
‘‘the worm’’ that Byron says ‘‘at last disdains her shatter’d cell’’ (Childe Harold
2.45).
See Butterfly, Worm.
Cave
40
Caves in the Bible are burial sites: Abraham buries Sarah in a cave (Gen. 23.19)
and Lazarus is buried in one when Christ comes to him (John 11.38). They are
also refuges or hiding places: Lot dwells in a cave with his daughters after
Sodom is destroyed (Gen. 19.30), the five kings flee to one (Josh. 10.16), the
Israelites hide in them to avoid the Philistines (1 Sam. 13.6), and Isaiah prophesies that on the day of the Lord ‘‘they shall go into the holes of the rocks,
and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord’’ (Isa. 2.19). In these caves
there seems to be little symbolic resonance. The cave that David flees to, ‘‘the
cave Adullam’’ (1 Sam. 22.1), is sometimes alluded to; a character in Scott’s
Old Mortality (chap. 43) says, ‘‘I like my place of refuge, my cave of Adullam.’’
In classical epic, however, caves are so common as to be a defining feature
of the epic and romance landscape ever since. Calypso and the Cyclopes live in
them, for instance, and Odysseus stores his gifts in the cave of the Naiads
(Odyssey 5.57, 9.400, 13.357). In the Aeneid there are caves of Aeolus, Scylla, the
Cyclops, the Sibyl, Vulcan, Cacus, and others, as well as the cave where
Aeneas and Dido consummate their love (4.124, 165). There are a dozen caves
in The Faerie Queene, including several that are entirely allegorical, such as the
caves of Error (1.1.11), Despair (1.9.33--35), Mammon (2.7.28ff.), and Guile
(5.9.8ff.). In Milton Death has a ‘‘grim cave’’ (PL 11.469). Caves are where
things go when they are not visible or active. In Spenser, Night has a cave
where she hides during the day (FQ 1.5.20--21); when the moon is absent,
according to Milton, she hides ‘‘in her vacant interlunar cave’’ (Samson
Agonistes 89). Personified abstractions also withdraw to caves. So in Shelley’s
poetry Famine, Pity, and Poesy all have caves, in Keats’s poetry Quietude has
one, and so on.
Probably the most important symbolic cave is Plato’s in Republic 7.514ff. In
this cave sit shackled prisoners with their backs to the opening; they have
never seen the sun or even sunlight. Behind them in the cave’s mouth is a fire
that casts the shadows of passing people and objects against the cave’s inner
wall, which is all the prisoners can see. It is an allegory about the knowledge
most people possess; only a few escape to see the sun and real objects. This
image of epistemological darkness seems to contribute to Blake’s image of the
human skull as a cave. In the modern age ‘‘Man has closed himself up, till he
sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern’’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell
14). Yet caves might also suggest the depth and not just the opacity of thought
or perception. Byron says ‘‘thought seeks refuge in lone caves’’ or ‘‘in the
soul’s haunted cell’’ (Childe Harold 3.43--45); Tennyson speaks of ‘‘the Templecave of thine own self’’ (‘‘Ancient Sage’’ 32). What Shelley calls ‘‘the dim caves
of human thought’’ (PU 1.659) are also ‘‘prophetic caves’’ (1.252) from which
our bright future shall come (see ‘‘Ode to Liberty’’ 49--50). In both Blake and
Shelley these caves are dormant volcanoes. Behind this image too is the
Romantic notion of the poet as retreating to a cave. Wordsworth remembers
‘‘poets who attuned their harps / In wood or echoing cave’’ (1850 Prelude
Cedar
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
11.456--57); the prototype was the legendary Ossian, the Gaelic bard who took
refuge in ‘‘Fingal’s mystic Grot’’ or ‘‘tuneful Cave,’’ to quote from two of
Wordsworth’s three sonnets entitled ‘‘Cave of Staffa.’’ A cave is a refuge for
Julien Sorel in Stendhal’s novel The Red and the Black, and a site of primitive
mystery and unconscious fears in Forster’s A Passage to India.
Cedar
Because the cedar, especially the cedar of Lebanon, is very tall but with wide
branches, in the Bible it is sometimes an emblem of pride or arrogance. ‘‘For
the day of the Lord of hosts,’’ says Isaiah, ‘‘shall be upon every one that is
proud and lofty, and upon every one that is lifted up; and he shall be brought
low: / And upon all the cedars of Lebanon, that are high and lifted up’’
(2.12--13). Ezekiel warns Egypt by telling of Assyria: ‘‘Behold, the Assyrian was
a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches’’ whose ‘‘height was exalted above all
the trees of the field,’’ but God delivered him to the heathen and he was
ruined; the nations shook at the sound of his fall (chap. 31).
So Spenser calls the cedar ‘‘proud and tall’’ (FQ 1.1.8) and makes it one of
the emblems of vanity in ‘‘Visions of the World’s Vanitie’’ (7). Sidney’s
character Dorus, after pondering the symbolic meaning of many other trees,
turns at last to ‘‘the Cedar, Queene of woods,’’ as most resembling his
disdainful mistress, and prays to her (First Eclogues 13.141--54). Jonson’s Sejanus
boasts that he ‘‘did help / To fell the lofty cedar of the world, / Germanicus’’
(Sejanus 5.241--43). A cryptic oracle in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline claims, ‘‘when
from a stately cedar shall be lopped branches which, being dead many years,
shall after revive, be jointed to the old stock, and freshly grow,’’ then shall
Britain flourish (5.4.140--43); a soothsayer explains that the ‘‘lofty’’ and
‘‘majestic’’ cedar is Cymbeline (5.5.452--57).
Chaff
see Wind
Chariot
Chess
see Moon, Night, Sun
Chess is the game of kings in two senses: it was for centuries a royal and
aristocratic game, and its object is to ‘‘check’’ the opposing king. The name,
moreover, is really the plural of ‘‘check,’’ from Old French eschecs, from Persian
(via Arabic) shah, ‘‘king.’’ ‘‘Checkmate’’ means ‘‘the king is dead,’’ from shah
plus Arabic mat, ‘‘dead.’’ One of the pieces, the rook, also has a Persian name
(rukh, of uncertain meaning). We are reminded of the Persian origin of chess
in Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: ‘‘But helpless Pieces
of the Game He plays / Upon this Checker-board of Nights and Days; / Hither
and thither moves, and checks, and slays, / And one by one back in the Closet
lays’’ (st. 69).
The symbolic resonance of chess depends, of course, on whether people are
taken to be players of the game or, as in the Omar Khayyam passage, pieces on
the board. As it is the royal game, it is appropriate that Ferdinand and
Miranda are discovered playing chess in the final act of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest (5.1.171); there they are the happy master and mistress of the game.
The black knight of Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess bewails the fact that he lost
his beloved queen at a game of chess against ‘‘fals Fortune,’’ who played with
‘‘false draughtes [moves] dyvers’’ (618, 653); it is surprising that Fortune, who
41
Choler
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
ought to be playing roulette or another game of chance, should be playing a
game entirely based on skill.
The Old French Romance of the Rose describes a battle in chessboard terms
(6620ff.). Sancho Panza seems to have been reading Omar Khayyam, for he
describes life as a game of chess: ‘‘so long as the game lasts, each piece has its
special office, and when the game is finished, they are all mixed, shuffled, and
jumbled together and stored away in the bag, which is much like ending life
in the grave’’ (Cervantes, Don Quixote 2.12, trans. Starkie). Middleton bases a
whole play, A Game at Chess, on the pieces, gambits, and goals of chess; it is
‘‘the noblest game of all’’ (Ind. 42), but it is the vehicle of a very current
political satire, involving foreign Catholic plots against the English royal
house. The ‘‘White Queen’s Pawn,’’ for example, may stand for Princess
Elizabeth, daughter of James I. Some of the characters seem to be both pieces
manipulated by others and players themselves. Two later works based on the
game are Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and Nabokov’s The Defence.
T. S. Eliot names the second part of The Waste Land ‘‘A Game of Chess,’’
where the game represents a way to kill time -- ‘‘And we shall play a game of
chess, / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door’’ (137--38) -while the queenly figure whose ‘‘nerves are bad’’ dominates a man who thinks
he is, or wishes he were, dead. Allusions to The Tempest evoke the ideal young
couple at their game.
Beckett’s play Endgame (French Fin de partie), named for the final moves of
chess, might be taken as a working out of Omar Khayyam’s fatalistic stanza,
only there is no God to make the moves. The first words of the ‘‘king’’ character, Hamm, are ‘‘Me -- (he yawns) -- to play,’’ for he is both player and the least
mobile of the pieces, but there are few moves left, and they only bring closer
the inevitable checkmate.
Choler
Chough
Cicada
42
see Bile
see Raven
The insect that the Greeks called tettix and the Romans called cicada is not
always distinguished from the cricket, grasshopper, or locust, which have
various symbolic connotations in English. In classical literature, however, the
‘‘cicada’’ has quite distinct and consistent associations.
However it may strike our ears, to the ancients the shrill stridulation of the
cicada was a pleasant sound. Though there were specialized verbs for its
sound in both Greek and Latin, the cicada was often said to ‘‘sing’’ like any
bird. A hymn to Apollo by Alcaeus, according to Himerius, tells that when
Apollo returned to Delphi in the middle of summer he was greeted by the
songs of the nightingale, swallow, and cicada. Socrates in the Phaedrus praises
the setting of his conversation for its fresh air and ‘‘the shrill summery music
of the cicada choir’’ (230c). He later warns that he and Phaedrus must beware
of ‘‘their bewitching siren song’’ and tells the legend that cicadas were once
human: they are descendants of humans who were so enchanted with music
when they first heard it that they sang continually, without stopping to eat
and drink, until they died. So cicadas need no sustenance, and when they die
they report to the Muses on which mortals honored the Muses’ gifts (259a--d).
Clay
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Theocritus’ goatherd in Idyll 1 praises Thyrsis by saying ‘‘you outsing the
cicada’’ (1.146), and Meleager addresses the cricket (akris) as ‘‘the Muse of the
grainfields’’ (Anthology 7.195).
The cicada’s first appearance in literature comes in a simile in Homer’s Iliad,
where the old men of Troy are said to be fine speakers ‘‘like cicadas, who
through the woods / settle on trees and send forth their lily-like voice’’
(3.150--52). Just what ‘‘lily-like’’ might mean here is unclear, but Hesiod uses
the same epithet for the voice of the Muses (Theogony 41); perhaps it means
‘‘delicate.’’ Hesiod establishes the cicada’s link to summer in The Shield of
Heracles: ‘‘When the dark-winged whirring cicada, perched on a green shoot,
begins to sing of summer to men’’ (393--94; see also Works and Days 582--85).
Virgil’s Eclogues (2.12) and Georgics (3.328) both tie the cicada to summer’s heat.
Indeed its link to summer was so obvious that it could be used as a
synecdoche for summer: Juvenal writes, if you’re cold in the winter, then
durate atque expectate cicadas, ‘‘hold on and wait for the cicadas’’ (9.69).
Hesiod says that cicadas eat dew (Shield 395), and that too became a
commonplace. About an underfed calf one of Theocritus’ herdsmen asks, ‘‘She
doesn’t feed on dew like the cicada?’’ (4.16). Cicadas were also thought to be
dry and bloodless; that characteristic may lie behind Homer’s simile, for old
age was taken to be a kind of drying out of the body. The modern Greek poet
Sepheris likens an old man to ‘‘an empty sheath of a cicada on a hollow tree’’
(‘‘The Old Man’’ 12).
Cicada lore comes to a culmination in a charming poem among the
Anacreontea (34), called eis tettiga, ‘‘To the Cicada’’: ‘‘drinking a little dew / you
sing like a king / . . . sweet prophet of summer, / the Muses love you, / Apollo
himself loves you, / and gave you clear song.’’ Among others Goethe translated
it into German (‘‘An die Zikade’’) and Abraham Cowley and Thomas Moore
into English. Richard Lovelace’s ‘‘The Grasse-Hopper’’ is based on it.
Several recent poets have taken up Socrates’ identification of the cicada
with the singer or bard. Dario describes a moment when ‘‘The old cicada /
tries out its hoarse, senile guitar, / and the cricket begins a monotonous solo /
on the only string of its fiddle’’ (‘‘Symphony in Gray Major’’ 28--32, trans.
Kemp). In an early poem Lorca envies the insect’s poetic death: ‘‘But you,
cicada, / die enchanted, spilling music, / transfigured in sound / and heavenly
light’’ (‘‘Cicada!’’ 30--33, trans. Brown). Montale in several poems feels at one
with a lone cicada, fragile and short-lived, chirring on a treetop.
In English literature one may find ‘‘cicala’’ and ‘‘cigale’’ as variant forms,
derived from Italian and French.
See Dew.
Clay
The main symbolic sense of clay is human flesh, what Spenser calls ‘‘living
clay’’ (FQ 3.4.26) or Blake calls ‘‘mortal clay’’ (Jerusalem 27.59).
In Genesis ‘‘the Lord God formed man [Hebrew adam] of the dust of the
ground [adamah]’’ (2.7); the Hebrew pun may be duplicated in English with
‘‘human’’ and ‘‘humus’’ (from the same Latin root): man is an ‘‘earthling,’’ a
creature of earth or clay. A phrase in Job, ‘‘them that dwell in houses of clay’’
(4.19), means ‘‘mortals.’’ Isaiah prays, ‘‘O Lord, thou art our father; we are the
clay, and thou our potter’’ (64.8). Paul asks, ‘‘Nay but, O man, who art thou
that repliest against God? . . . / Hath not the potter power over the clay . . . ?’’
43
Clod
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
(Rom. 9.20--21). In some versions of the Prometheus myth the Titan also made
men out of earth (cf. Ovid, Met. 1.82--84).
‘‘Mould’’ is sometimes used in a similar way, as in Shakespeare’s Pistol’s
plea, ‘‘Be merciful, great duke, to men of mould,’’ meaning ‘‘mortal men’’ (H5
3.2.22). In the coming age of gold, according to Milton, ‘‘leprous sin will melt
from earthly mould’’ (‘‘Nativity’’ 138). Emerson refers to ‘‘the Creator of our
human mould’’ (‘‘Naples’’ 2).
Echoing Job, Cowper believes that ‘‘An heav’nly mind / May be indifferent to
her house of clay’’ (Task 2.457--58). Writing of broken hearts, Byron varies the
potter image: ‘‘happy they! / Thrice fortunate! who of that fragile mould, / The
precious porcelain of human clay, / Break with the first fall’’ (Don Juan 4.81--84).
Remembering those who have died, the mind, says Dickens, can recall ‘‘the
beaming of the soul through its mask of clay’’ (Oliver Twist chap. 11). When in
the body, in Tennyson’s phrase, the spirit is ‘‘claspt in clay’’ (In Memoriam 93.4).
Blake invokes the root sense of Hebrew adamah, ‘‘red,’’ in his image of
reviving life: ‘‘And on the bleached bones / Red clay brought forth’’ (Marriage of
Heaven and Hell 2.12--13). For him a ‘‘clod of clay’’ is both death and life; a clod
happily sacrifices itself under the cattle’s feet (‘‘Clod and Pebble’’), while
another is a mother to an infant worm (Book of Thel 4.7ff.). The title ‘‘Clay’’ to
one of Joyce’s Dubliners stories makes one incident resonate: Maria, blindfolded
in a game, touches ‘‘a soft wet substance’’ and provokes an embarrassed
silence and whispering, as if she has revealed death in the midst of the game
of life.
Clod
Cloud
44
see Clay
A cloud can be anything that prevents vision. Since in Greek terms life is
seeing the light, as well as being seen in the light, death comes as a cloud:
‘‘the black cloud of death concealed him’’ (Homer, Iliad 16.350); Statius
imitates the phase in Thebaid 9.851. So Spenser writes, ‘‘on those guilefull
dazed eyes of his / The cloude of death did sit’’ (FQ 1.3.39), and Shakespeare,
‘‘Dark cloudy death o’ershades his beams of life’’ (3H6 2.6.62). As sleep resembles death, it also comes in a cloud: a Stygian sleep escapes from the box
Psyche carries and ‘‘pervades all her limbs in a thick cloud’’ (Apuleius, Met.
6.21), and Spenser has ‘‘cloudes of deadly night / A while his heavy eyelids
cover’d have’’ (FQ 2.8.24). Perhaps because one is blinded by griefs or sorrows
they come in clouds as well: ‘‘the dark cloud of sorrow closed over Hektor’’
(Iliad 17.591 trans. Lattimore); a cloud fills Ovid’s mind as he must leave his
wife (Tristia 1.3.13); Chaucer elaborates: ‘‘right as when the sonne shyneth
brighte / In March, that chaungeth ofte tyme his face, / And that a cloude is
put with wynd to flighte, / Which oversprat the sonne as for a space, / A
cloudy thought gan thorugh hire soule pace, / That overspread her brighte
thoughtes alle’’ (Troilus 2.764--69).
Homer also has the phrase ‘‘cloud of war’’ (Iliad 17.243), as do Pindar (Nem.
9.38), Statius (Thebaid 4.840), and other ancient writers; one can imagine the
literal dustcloud stirred up by battle or the almost literal cloud of flying
weapons, but perhaps this phrase is an extension of ‘‘cloud of death.’’ It too
has become a modern commonplace (‘‘warclouds’’). Blake makes good use of
the image in America, where Orc, the spirit of revolution, rises in red clouds
Cock
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
and is surrounded by ‘‘myriads of cloudy terrors’’ (4.10), Albion sends a cloud
of plagues (war) (14.4), and Urizen conceals Orc from English eyes by sending
down clouds and mists (16.13).
The sky gods of the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews dwell among clouds.
Zeus is called ‘‘cloud-gatherer’’ in Homer, and Jehovah has a ‘‘secret place,’’ a
‘‘pavilion’’ of clouds; ‘‘clouds and darkness are round about him’’ (Pss. 18.11,
97.2). As Zeus comes down in disguise lest his naked glory annihilate the
mortal that beholds him (Semele’s fate), Jehovah ‘‘came down in a cloud, and
spake unto him [Moses]’’ (Num. 11.25; cf. Exod. 19.9, 34.5), while at Christ’s
Transfiguration ‘‘there was a cloud that overshadowed them: and a voice came
out of the cloud’’ (Mark 9.7). One might think that the glory of the Lord would
be revealed by a parting of the clouds, as if the Lord were the sun shining with
‘‘all-cloudless glory’’ (in Byron’s phrase, DJ 9.61), but in this life, at least, we
need the clouds, which are glorious enough. It is in a pillar of cloud that the
Lord leads the Israelites out of Egypt (Exod. 13.21) and at the Second Coming
we shall see ‘‘the Son of man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and
great glory’’ (Matt. 24.30). According to Milton, God dwells in ‘‘his secret
cloud’’ (PL 10.32); as Mammon elaborates, ‘‘How oft amidst / Thick clouds and
dark doth heaven’s all-ruling sire / Choose to reside, his glory unobscured, /
And with the majesty of darkness round / Covers his throne’’ (2.263--67). Even
to the Seraphim God appears only through a cloud (3.378); his only cloudless
manifestation is through his Son, ‘‘In whose conspicuous countenance,
without cloud / Made visible, the almighty Father shines’’ (3.385--86).
It is an ancient trope that the face is like the sky over which clouds may
pass and from which tears may rain. Sophocles’ Ismene has ‘‘a cloud on her
brow’’ (Antigone 528), and so does Euripides’ Phaedra (Hippolytus 173). Horace
advises a friend, ‘‘Lift the cloud from your brow’’ (Epistles 1.18.94). ‘‘Clear up,’’
one of Shakespeare’s characters echoes, ‘‘that cloudy countenance’’ (Titus
1.1.266). ‘‘Let clouds bedimme my face,’’ Sidney asks, ‘‘breake in mine eye’’
(Astrophil 64). Spenser likens his lady’s smile to ‘‘sunshine when cloudy looks
are cleared’’ (Amoretti 40). And so on, as late as Frost: ‘‘A cloud shadow crossed
her face’’ (‘‘Cloud Shadow’’).
In 1803 Luke Howard established the modern nomenclature of clouds and
inspired a great deal of interest in them: Constable, Turner, Friedrich, and
other painters studied them carefully, and among other writers Goethe and
Shelley took note of Howard’s terms. One of them, ‘‘cirrus,’’ Latin for ‘‘lock’’ or
‘‘curl,’’ may have led to Shelley’s description of ‘‘The locks of the approaching
storm’’ as ‘‘the bright hair uplifted from the head / Of some fierce Maenad’’
(‘‘Ode to the West Wind’’ 20--23); see also his poem ‘‘The Cloud.’’
See Rain, Sun.
Cock
The cock, or rooster (Greek alectruon, Latin gallus), is the herald of dawn.
Theognis speaks of ‘‘dawn, at the sound of the rousing roosters’’ (864);
Simonides calls them ‘‘day-sounding’’ (frag. 80B). Theocritus concludes his
epithalamion to Helen by promising to return when ‘‘the first singer’’ crows,
perhaps a decorative phrase for cock (18.56). ‘‘Before the cocks sing’’ means
‘‘early’’ in Plautus’ Miles 689. The cock is not found in epic -- it may have been
thought too homely, or out of place in a military camp; the birds whose
‘‘morning songs’’ awaken Evander in Virgil’s Aeneid may be martins (8.455--56).
45
Cockatrice
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Chaucer charmingly lists ‘‘The kok, that orloge is of thorpes lyte’’ (‘‘the clock
of little villages’’) (Parliament of Fowls 350). In Spenser, ‘‘chearefull Chaunticlere
with his note shrill’’ warns of dawn (FQ 1.2.1). Horatio explains that ‘‘The cock,
that is the trumpet to the morn, / Doth with his lofty and shrill-sounding
throat / Awake the god of day,’’ and repeats the ancient belief that ghosts
withdraw at his crowing (Hamlet 1.1.155--61); moreover at Christmas ‘‘This bird
of dawning singeth all night long,’’ as if heralding the divine Sun (1.1.165). (See
Sun.)
Aristophanes has the phrase, ‘‘the second cock sounded’’ (Ecclesiazusae 390).
Chaucer writes, ‘‘When that the first cok hath crowe’’ (Miller’s Tale 3687) and
‘‘Til that the thridde [third] cok bigan to synge’’ (Reeve’s Tale 4233). Macbeth’s
Porter explains, ‘‘we were carousing till the second cock’’ (2.3.24), while Edgar
explains the Flibbertigibbet ‘‘walks till the first cock’’ (Lear 3.4.113). It hardly
seems possible that these numbers mean anything precise, but conventionally
the three crowings take place at midnight, three, and an hour before dawn.
So Tolstoy writes, ‘‘The cocks were crowing for the third time and the dawn
was breaking’’ (‘‘Family Happiness’’ sec. 3).
The most famous cock-crow in the Bible is the one Jesus predicts will end
the night in which Peter betrays him: ‘‘this night, before the cock crow, thou
shalt deny me thrice’’ (Matt 26.34); just when Peter denies for the third time
that he knew Jesus, ‘‘immediately the cock crew’’ and Peter ‘‘wept bitterly’’
(26.74--75).
Cock-fighting was common in ancient Athens, Rome, and most European
cities until quite recently. In Aristophanes ‘‘the Persian bird’’ (cock) is the
‘‘nestling of Ares’’ (Birds 833--35). Cocks were noted for their pugnacity and
pride.
A ‘‘coxcomb’’ (cock’s comb or crest) is a fool’s cap and then a foolish, conceited person (who struts vainly). Shakespeare’s Kate and Petruchio pun on
‘‘crest’’ as well as ‘‘cock’’ in their badinage: ‘‘What is your crest, a coxcomb?’’
‘‘A combless cock, so Kate will be my hen.’’ ‘‘No cock of mine, you crow too
like a craven’’ (TS 2.1.225--27).
Cockatrice
Color
Comet
46
see Basilisk
see Black, Blue, Green, Purple, Red, Scarlet, White, Yellow
The first comet in western literature may be the plunging star found in
Homer’s simile for Athena’s flashing descent from Olympus: ‘‘As when the son
of devious Cronus [Zeus] throws down a star, / a portent to sailors or to large
armies of men, / blazing and sending out many sparks, / in such a likeness
Pallas Athena sped to the earth’’ (Iliad 4.75--78). Homer does not use the word
‘‘comet,’’ and what he describes sounds more like a meteor or what we call a
shooting star or falling star. Later translators have taken it to be a comet,
however, as we see in this expansive version by Chapman: ‘‘as Jove, brandishing a starre (which men a Comet call), / Hurls out his curled haire abrode,
that from his brand exhale / A thousand sparkes (to fleets at sea and everie
mightie host / Of all presages and ill haps a signe mistrusted most): / So Pallas
fell twixt both the Camps’’ (4.85--89). The ‘‘hair’’ of Chapman’s comet is
implicit in the word ‘‘comet’’ itself, Greek kometes, which literally means
Copper
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
‘‘hairy’’ or ‘‘long-haired’’ and is understood to modify ‘‘star’’ (aster). (Less
frequent Greek terms included ‘‘bearded star’’ and ‘‘sword-shaped star.’’) The
Romans translated (aster) kometes as (sidus) crinitum or (stella) crinita, occasionally (stella) cincinnata.
The Romans took comets, especially red ones, as signs of impending war or
civil commotion. As the stars in their orderly motions represented the normal
course of government, a new and striking ‘‘star’’ with a tail or beard must
portend disorder or disaster. Cicero writes of ‘‘what are called by the Greeks
comets and in our language ‘long-haired stars,’ such as recently during the
Octavian War [87 bc] appeared as harbingers of great calamities’’ (De Natura
Deorum 2.14). During the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey (49--45 bc),
according to Lucan, there were many celestial portents, including ‘‘the hair of
the baleful / star, the comet that portends a change of reign (mutantem regna)
on earth’’ (1.528--29).
A particularly famous comet was the Star of July (or Julius), the sidus Iulium,
which appeared four months after the death of Julius Caesar and during the
month named after him; it was taken as a sign that he had been deified as
well as an apocalyptic portent. Ovid tells how Venus took up the soul of
Caesar, which glowed as it rose, leaving a fiery train (Met. 15.849--50). It
remains a star, protector of Caesar’s adopted son Augustus, who wears it,
according to Virgil, on his crest (Aeneid 8.681); see also Horace, Odes 1.12.46--47.
Shakespeare’s Calphurnia tells her husband Caesar, ‘‘When beggars die there
are no comets seen; / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes’’
(JC 2.2.30--31), and Horatio tells Barnardo that just before Julius fell there were
such portents as ‘‘stars with trains of fire’’ (Hamlet 1.1.120). At the time of
Nero, according to Tacitus, ‘‘a comet blazed, of which vulgar opinion is that it
portends a change in reigns (mutationem regnis)’’ (Annals 14.22).
Tasso echoes Lucan’s and Tacitus’ phrases: ‘‘with its bloody streaming locks
a comet shines through the parching air, which changes reigns (i regni muta)
and brings fierce pestilence, an ill-omened light for princes of the purple’’
(Jerusalem Delivered 7.52). Shakespeare’s Bedford opens the Henry VI plays by
calling on ‘‘Comets, importing change of times and states, / [To] Brandish your
crystal tresses in the sky’’ (1H6 1.1.2--3). Milton, following Tasso, likens Satan to
a comet that ‘‘from his horrid hair / Shakes pestilence and war’’ (PL 2.710--11);
behind that simile also lies Virgil’s simile for Aeneas, whose shield spouts
flames ‘‘as when bloody mournful comets shine red in the clear night’’ (Aeneid
10.272--73).
Copper
see Bronze
Cricket
see Cicada
Crocodile
‘‘Crocodile tears’’ (French larmes de crocodile, German Krokodils Tränen, etc.) are
false or hypocritical tears. In a simile Spenser shows where this odd phrase
comes from: ‘‘As when a wearie traveiler, that strayes / By muddy shore of
broad seven-mouthed Nile, / Unweeting of the perillous wandring wayes, /
Doth meete a cruell craftie Crocodile, / Which, in false griefe hyding his
harmefull guile, / Doth weepe full sore, and sheddeth tender teares . . . ’’ (FQ
1.5.28). Travellers in the Middle Ages had reported ‘‘tears’’ on crocodiles, and
47
Crocus
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
since they could not project human pity onto so ferocious a beast they
projected human hypocrisy instead. In a terrible moment Othello, having
struck the innocent Desdemona, scorns her tears: ‘‘If that the earth could
teem with women’s tears, / Each drop she falls would prove a crocodile’’
(4.1.240--41). Dryden’s Ventidius foretells that Caesar, when he learns his rival
Antony is dead, ‘‘will weep, the crocodile will weep’’ (All for Love 1.224).
Hypocrisy, looking like Viscount Sidmouth, rides a crocodile in Shelley’s The
Mask of Anarchy (24--25).
Crocus
Crow
Cuckoo
48
see Saffron
see Raven
The cuckoo, like the swallow and the nightingale, is a harbinger of spring.
‘‘When the cuckoo first calls in the leaves of the oak,’’ Hesiod tells us, we
know it is March (Works and Days 486). The medieval ‘‘Cuckoo Song’’ is famous:
‘‘Sumer is ycomen in, / Loude sing cuckou!’’ (‘‘summer’’ referring here to what
we call spring and summer together). Spenser calls it ‘‘The merry cuckow,
messenger of Spring’’ (Amoretti 19); Wordsworth the ‘‘Darling of the Spring’’
(‘‘To the Cuckoo’’). ‘‘I should learn spring by the cuckooing,’’ according to
Dylan Thomas (‘‘Here in this Spring’’).
Its call is so distinctive that its name in every European language is
imitative: Greek kokkux or koukkos, Latin cucullus, French coucou, etc. Germanic
forms such as Old English geac and German Gauch, as they deviated from an
original ‘‘gook-’’ sound, yielded to ‘‘cuckoo’’ and ‘‘Kuckuck,’’ as if the bird itself
gave lessons in pronunciation (though ‘‘gowk’’ survives in northern England
and Scotland). In Greek kokku! meant ‘‘Go!’’ or ‘‘Quick!’’ perhaps because the
sound of the bird in spring meant ‘‘back to work’’ to farmers. In a comment
on his ‘‘Cuckoo’’ poem, Wordsworth speaks of ‘‘the seeming ubiquity of the
voice of the Cuckoo’’ which ‘‘is almost perpetually heard throughout the
season of Spring’’ but ‘‘seldom becomes an object of sight’’ (1815 Preface).
But the bird has another distinctive feature: as Aristotle and other ancients
noted, it lays its eggs in other birds’ nests, and its hatchlings push the other
eggs out. As Shakespeare writes, ‘‘hateful cuckoos hatch in sparrows’ nests’’
(Lucrece 849). (This is not true of the American variety.) Such behavior seemed
unnatural; as Chaucer puts it, ‘‘the cukkow [is] ever unkynde’’ (Parliament of
Fowls 358). It also seemed symbolic of adultery, especially by a married woman
who deceives her husband. The word ‘‘cuckold’’ comes from ‘‘cuckoo’’ and
refers only to the husband; its equivalent in German and sometimes in French
refers, more logically, to the adulterous man. So the famous sound of the
cuckoo became a source of fear in husbands, and of merriment in onlookers.
Clanvowe calls the bird ‘‘the lewde cukkow’’ (‘‘The Cuckoo and the
Nightingale’’) and Milton ‘‘the rude Bird of Hate’’ (‘‘O Nightingale!’’). A
character in Machiavelli’s Mandragola explains that Saint cuckoo is ‘‘the most
honored saint in France’’ (4.9). The song with which Shakespeare ends Love’s
Labour’s Lost celebrates the delights of spring, but adds: ‘‘The cuckoo then, on
every tree, / Mocks married men; for thus sings he, / Cuckoo; / Cuckoo,
cuckoo: O, word of fear, / Unpleasing to a married ear!’’ (5.2.898--902).
Cup
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Cup
The most frequent symbolic sense of cup, one’s portion or lot in life, is
biblical; it is usually God who fills the cup. ‘‘Upon the wicked he shall rain
snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest: this shall be the portion
of their cup’’ (Ps. 11.6), but ‘‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence
of mine enemies; thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over’’
(23.5). The prophets often speak of the cup of fury, of consolation, of
astonishment and desolation. The Lord tells Jeremiah, for instance, ‘‘Take
the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the nations, to whom I
send thee, to drink it’’ (25.15). The cup might be a source of good or ill to
others. ‘‘Babylon hath been a golden cup in the Lord’s hands, that made all
the earth drunken’’ (51.7); ‘‘And the woman [Babylon] . . . [had] a golden cup
in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication’’
(Rev. 17.4).
In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus prays, ‘‘O my Father, if it be possible, let
this cup pass from me’’ (Matt. 26.39).
In modern literature, except for direct allusions to the overflowing cup of
Psalm 23, the ‘‘cup’’ is most often bitter. Shakespeare’s Albany promises, ‘‘All
friends shall taste / The wages of their virtue, and all foes / The cup of their
deservings’’ (Lear 5.3.303--05; but see Pericles 1.4.52). ‘‘How many drink the Cup /
Of baleful Grief,’’ Thomson asks, ‘‘or eat the bitter Bread / Of misery’’
(‘‘Winter’’ 334--36). As he meditates on an autumn scene, Lamartine, feels,
‘‘Now I would drain to the lees / This chalice mixed with nectar and gall: / At
the bottom of this cup where I drank my life / Perhaps there would remain a
drop of honey’’ (‘‘Autumn’’ 21--24). ‘‘Life’s enchanted cup but sparkles near the
brim,’’ says Byron; ‘‘His [Childe Harold’s] had been quaff ’d too quickly, and he
found / The dregs were wormwood’’ (Childe Harold 3.72--74). In this spirit is
Pushkin, in the final stanza of Eugene Onegin: ‘‘Blest is he who left life’s feast
early, / not having drained to the bottom / the goblet full of wine’’ (8.51).
See Wine.
Cypress
A distinctive feature of the Greek and Italian landscape, the tall, cone-shaped
cypress is mentioned only once in Homer, as one of the trees in Calypso’s
grove. But it early became associated with funerals and tombs, in part because
it is evergreen and thus naturally suggests eternal life, and perhaps because,
as Byron fancies, ‘‘’tis / A gloomy tree, which looks as if it mourn’d / O’er what
it shadows’’ (Cain 3.1.3--5). It became, as Spenser puts it, ‘‘the sign of all sorrow
and heaviness’’ and ‘‘signe of deadly bale’’ (note to ‘‘November’’ of Shepheardes
Calendar, and Virgils Gnat 216). Virgil mentions altars to the dead with black
cypress on them (Aeneid 3.64); see also Ovid, Tristia 3.13.21; Claudian, Rape of
Proserpine 2.108; Spenser, FQ 2.1.60). Lucan gives the cypress social status when
he writes that it is ‘‘witness to no plebeian grief’’ (3.442--43). Horace reminds
us that, when we die, none of the trees we have cultivated on our estate will
follow us to the grave, ‘‘except the hated cypress’’ (Odes 2.14.23). That may have
inspired Byron’s cynical line that the cypress is ‘‘the only constant mourner
o’er the dead’’ (The Giaour 287). When Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night sings,
‘‘Come away, come away death, / And in sad cypress let me be laid’’ (2.4.51--52),
he may be referring to a coffin of cypress wood rather than a bier strewn with
cypress branches.
49
Daffodil
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Corneille’s Chimène vows, ‘‘with my cypress I will overwhelm his laurels’’ (Le
Cid 4.2.1196). Tennyson, imagining that if his friend Hallam had not died he
would have married Tennyson’s sister, remembers: ‘‘But that remorseless iron
hour / Made cypress of her orange flower, / Despair of hope, and earth of thee’’
(In Memorium 84.14--16). (A bouquet of orange blossoms was often carried by
brides in Victorian England.)
In his Metamorphoses (book 10), Ovid tells the story of the boy Cyparissus
who loved a sacred deer but accidentally killed it, and who in his grief was
transformed into a cypress, to stand wherever there are mourners.
D
50
Daffodil
Throughout Europe and North America the daffodil is among the first flowers
of the year, often appearing while snow remains on the ground and gone
before many other signs of early spring arrive. Shakespeare’s Perdita calls for
‘‘daffodils, / That come before the swallow dares, and take [charm] / The winds
of March with beauty’’ (WT 4.4.118--20). As ‘‘Daffadowndillies’’ they show up in
‘‘April’’ of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar (140). Herrick laments their brevity:
‘‘Faire Daffadills, we weep to see / You haste away so soone’’ (‘‘To Daffadills’’
1--2).
Milton bids ‘‘Daffadillies fill their cups with tears’’ for drowned Lycidas
(150), though they would not have been blooming when he drowned (in
August). The most famous daffodils in English literature are the ten thousand
flowers dancing in the breeze along a lake that Wordsworth comes upon;
when he recollects them later, ‘‘then my heart with pleasure fills, / And
dances with the Daffodils,’’ but they seem to have no more specific symbolism
(‘‘I wandered lonely as a Cloud’’).
The name is misleading. It derives from asphodel, a very different flower; for
a time both ‘‘affodil’’ and ‘‘daffodil’’ were in use. Now the latter is restricted to
the Yellow Narcissus (Narcissus pseudo-Narcissus). Its symbolic resonances,
such as they are, should not be confused with those of either the asphodel or
narcissus.
See Asphodel.
Daisy
Chaucer correctly explains the etymology of ‘‘daisy’’ in The Legend of Good
Women: ‘‘wel by reson men it calle may / The ‘dayesye’ [day’s eye], or elles the
‘ye of day’’’ (F text 183--84); in Old English it appears as daeges ege. The flower
resembles a conventional depiction of the sun, often called the day’s eye itself,
and when the sun sets the ‘‘ray’’ of the daisy closes round the yellow
‘‘eye.’’
Chaucer says he loves the daisy most of all the flowers in the meadow
(41--42), and in the first of his ‘‘legends’’ he identifies it with Alceste (Alcestis),
the most faithful of wives. Perhaps because some of the other good women
were betrayed by their lovers, the daisy might have acquired the connotation
of unfaithfulness; Robert Greene mentions ‘‘the dissembling daisy, to warn
such light-of-love wenches not to trust every fair promise bachelors make
Dance
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
them’’ (A Quip for an Upstart Courtier); that connotation may account for
Ophelia’s giving away a daisy, among several other flowers, though she says
nothing about its meaning (Hamlet 4.5.181).
Wordsworth calls the daisy ‘‘The Poet’s darling’’ (‘‘To the Daisy’’ / ‘‘In youth
from rock to rock’’ 32), and it is true that English poets, at least, have often
mentioned daisies, though usually without a consistent symbolism.
Wordsworth devoted four poems to them, having sensed in them ‘‘some
concord with humanity’’ (‘‘To the Same Flower’’ 6).
In fourteenth-century France there was a brief cult of poetry, from which
Chaucer drew, mainly by Machaut, Froissart, and Deschamps, that praised the
marguerite (French for ‘‘daisy’’), where the flower, as in Chaucer, also stands for
a woman, named Marguerite. The name comes from Greek margarites (from
Persian), meaning ‘‘pearl’’; presumably the flower’s color struck French
observers as pearly.
Dance
In ancient literature as in modern almost any regular movement can be called
a dance. The goddess Dawn has dancing floors (Homer, Odyssey 12.3--4), perhaps
because the beams from the hidden sun seem to dance on clouds. War is a
dance: Ares dances ‘‘in the dance that knows no music’’ (Euripides, Phoenissae
791) and warriors are the ‘‘dancers of Enyo’’ (Nonnus 28.275). But Peace is also
‘‘queen of the dance’’ (Aristophanes, Peace 976).
The best established symbolic dance is the great cyclical pattern of the
heavenly bodies. Time is a movement, according to Plato, and the stars dance
in an intricate pattern (Timaeus 40c); the Athenian in Epinomis, attributed to
Plato, tells how the stars ‘‘move through the figures of the fairest and most
glorious of dances’’ (982e, trans. Taylor). Lucian’s ‘‘The Dance’’ extends the
metaphor (7). The fullest elaboration in English is Davies’s Orchestra, or, a Poem
of Dancing, which explains how Love formed the ‘‘turning vault of heaven,’’
‘‘Whose starry wheels he hath so made to pass, / As that their movings do a
music frame, / And they themselves still dance unto the same’’ (130--33); ‘‘Who
doth not see the measure of the moon? / Which thirteen times she danceth
every year, / And ends her pavan thirteen times as soon / As doth her brother’’
(281--84). Milton speaks of the ‘‘starry dance’’ and the ‘‘wandering fires that
move / In mystic dance’’ (PL 3.580, 5.177--78; see Comus 112--14). The traditional
‘‘dance of the Hours’’ is the course of the seasons, but it is an eternal dance;
so Milton imagines that ‘‘universal Pan / Knit with the Graces and the Hours
in dance / Led on the eternal spring’’ (4.266--68). Emerson calls it ‘‘the mystic
seasons’ dance’’ (‘‘Monadnoc’’ 63). ‘‘Once the hungry Hours were hounds /
Which chased the Day, like a bleeding deer,’’ Shelley writes, ‘‘But now --’’ in the
eternity of love, ‘‘Oh weave the mystic measure / Of music and dance and
shapes of light, / Let the Hours, and the Spirits of might and pleasure / Like
the clouds and the sunbeams unite’’ (PU 4.73--79).
Greek drama included dancing, and indeed probably arose from the dance;
our theatre term ‘‘chorus’’ meant ‘‘dance,’’ while ‘‘orchestra’’ meant the
‘‘dance floor’’ before the stage. As dancing has always been a part of
weddings -- we see this as early as the description of Achilles’ shield (Iliad
18.491--96) -- and as Shakespeare’s comedies end in weddings, they also often
end in dancing; Benedick concludes Much Ado by calling ‘‘Strike up, pipers,’’
51
Darkness
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Jacques absents himself from the weddings of As You Like It by saying ‘‘I am for
other than for dancing measures,’’ and even the mechanicals’ play in Midsummer Night’s Dream, though a tragedy of sorts, ends with a ‘‘bergomask’’
(5.1.347). Dancing in these instances is choral, communal, and thus an
obvious symbol of the uniting of the community around the couple. An
almost opposite meaning resonates from the Capulets’ masked ball, where
Romeo meets and dances with Juliet at the risk of his life.
In modern novels dances are often occasions for courtship, for coming of
age, and for significant discoveries, especially for the heroine. Natasha’s
development in Tolstoy’s War and Peace can be traced in part through her
dancing partners Pierre (1.20), Denisov (4.12), and, at the great ball, André
(6.14--17). There are several significant recognitions and misrecognitions, for
instance, at the balls of Jane Austen’s novels; the ball at Vaubyessard makes a
gap in Emma Bovary’s life in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
The solo dance of a woman, perhaps most beautifully rendered in Florizel’s
rapt praise of Perdita -- ‘‘when you do dance, I wish you / a wave o’ th’ sea, that
you might ever do / Nothing but that, move still, still so, / And own no other
function’’ (WT 4.4.140--43) -- became emblematic of what Yeats calls ‘‘unity of
being,’’ an unselfconscious harmony of mind and body, during the
nineteenth-century ‘‘aesthetic’’ movement. An interest in Salome’s dance (from
Matt. 14.6--11) can be traced through Mallarmé, Flaubert, Wilde, Symons, and
Yeats, who ends ‘‘Among School Children’’ with a rhetorical question: ‘‘O body
swayed to music, O brightening glance, / How can we know the dancer from
the dance?’’
For the Dance of Death, see under Death.
See Time.
Darkness
Daw
Dawn
52
see Light and darkness
see Raven
Poets since Homer have delighted in describing dawn in all its glory. Perhaps
as a reflection of a religious cult common to Indo-European cultures, dawn
has been personified as a young woman, Eos, Heos, or Auos in Greek, Aurora in
Latin; the names are related to English ‘‘east’’ and ‘‘Easter.’’ In the Greek myths
she is variously the daughter of Hyperion and Theia, the daughter of Helios,
the sister of Helios, the mother of the four winds and of Eosphoros (or Lucifer)
the morning star, and lover of Tithonos, Orion, Kleitos, or Ganymede. In
classical poetic descriptions her connection with Tithonos has prevailed, but
for the most part she is described with her own attributes: rosy fingers, a
saffron robe, dew, a golden throne, a chariot with two white horses, and
so on.
Twenty-two times, mainly in the Odyssey, Homer describes Dawn with the
identical line: ‘‘When the early-born rosy-fingered Dawn appeared.’’ The
epithet rhododaktylos is perhaps the most famous in Homer. Another fine one
is krokopeplos, ‘‘saffron-robed’’: ‘‘At that time when the dawn star [Heosphoros]
passes across the earth, harbinger / of light, and after him dawn of the saffron
mantle is scattered / across the sea . . . ’’ (Iliad 23.226--27, trans. Lattimore). In
the Odyssey once (12.4) Dawn has ‘‘dancing floors,’’ perhaps referring to clouds
Dawn
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
and mists through which sunbeams seem to dance. She is throned in gold at
Odyssey 22.197. Tithonos, granted immortality but not eternal youth, remains
in bed when Dawn arises: ‘‘Now Dawn rose from her bed, where she lay by
haughty Tithonos, / to carry her light to men and to immortals’’ (Iliad 11.1--2,
trans. Lattimore).
Virgil transfers the saffron color from robe to bed: ‘‘Soon early Dawn,
quitting the saffron bed / Of old Tithonus, cast new light on earth’’ (Aeneid
4.584--85, trans. Fitzgerald; identical to 9.459--60); ‘‘with pallid cheek Aurora /
Rises to leave Tithonus’ saffron bed’’ (Georgics 447, trans. Wilkinson). Aurora
has a red chariot in Virgil: ‘‘When Dawn tomorrow, borne from the Ocean
stream / On crimson chariot wheels, reddens the sky . . . ’’ (Aeneid 12.76--77,
trans. Fitzgerald). Euripides imagines Dawn with a single horse (Orestes 1004),
while Sappho seems to conceive her as on foot, and gives her golden slippers
(123). Ovid once (Met. 3.184) calls Dawn ‘‘purple’’ (purpureae Aurorae). (See
Purple, Saffron.)
Modern writers influenced by the classics liked to emulate the ancients in
dawn-descriptions. Here is Spenser, dutifully trying to get it all in: ‘‘Now when
the rosy fingred Morning faire, / Weary of aged Tithones saffron bed, / Had
spred her purple robe through deawy aire . . .’’ (FQ 1.2.7). Shakespeare achieves
some freshness with ‘‘the morn in russet mantle clad / Walks o’er the dew of
yon high eastward hill’’ (Hamlet 1.1.166--67). The hill is also a frequent convention in morning descriptions, as in Spenser’s ‘‘Phoebus fiery carre / In hast
was climbing up the Easterne hill’’ (FQ 1.2.1) and Pope’s ‘‘The Dawn now blushing on the Mountain’s Side’’ (‘‘Spring’’ 21). Collins has an ‘‘oriental’’ variant of
the Dawn goddess in his Persian Eclogues (1.13--14): ‘‘When sweet and odorous,
like an eastern bride, / The radiant morn resumed her orient pride. . . . ’’ It
neatly reminds us that ‘‘orient’’ comes from a Latin verb meaning ‘‘rise.’’ (See
East and west.)
Classical writers seem not to have personified evening or sunset, and there
are few ancient descriptions of it. Many modern writers, such as Shelley, have
been fascinated by it.
In Job 41.18, and in a note to the Authorized Version of Job 3.9, dawn is
called ‘‘the eyelids of the morning’’; the ‘‘eye’’ must be the sun. (See Sun.)
Blake echoes this phrase when he has spring look down ‘‘Thro’ the clear
windows of the morning’’ (‘‘To Spring’’).
From the equation of a lifespan to a day, dawn or morning is infancy or
youth. Shakespeare imagines his love in old age, ‘‘when his youthful morn /
Hath traveled on to age’s steepy night’’ (Sonnets 63). (More examples at East
and west.)
Dawn may stand for the moment of illumination, as when we say ‘‘it
dawned on me.’’ Wordsworth describes his struggle to compose a poem:
‘‘gleams of light / Flash often from the east, then disappear, / And mock me
with a sky that ripens not / Into a steady morning’’ (1805 Prelude 1.134--37).
Tieck writes, ‘‘Like dawn [Morgenrot] a blessed memory / Arises out of the dark,
silent night’’ (‘‘Improvised song’’ 4--5).
The ‘‘dawn song’’ is a genre that expresses the regret of lovers that the day
has come that must part them. It arose in twelth-century Provençal poetry:
the alba, French aube or aubade, all from Latin alba, ‘‘white,’’ presumably
modifying lux, ‘‘light’’; in German it is called the Tagelied, ‘‘day song.’’
53
Day
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Day
Day star
Death
54
see Dawn, East and west, Sun
see Star
Death is one of the great themes of literature, perhaps more frequent even
than love. The myths of many ancient peoples centered on death and the
afterlife. Egyptian guidebooks, such as The Book of the Dead (not the Egyptian
name for it), and the Sumerian story of the descent of the goddess Inanna to
the underworld, are the earliest written records. The Mesopotamian epic of
Gilgamesh deals largely with the king’s quest to find his dead friend Enkidu,
while Homer’s Iliad turns on Achilles’ grief for his friend Patroclus. Much
ancient poetry is lamentation or elegy. One of the most common terms for
‘‘human’’ is ‘‘mortal’’; what makes gods gods is their immortality. Descents to
the land of death are common epic features since the Odyssey; drawing on the
descent in book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante devotes the whole of his Divine
Comedy to a journey through death’s three realms.
Death may occasionally symbolize something else, but much more often
death is itself represented symbolically, usually as a person. In the brief space
of this dictionary we can trace only a few of the more common symbolic
features.
In Greek literature death (thanatos) is dark. The epithet melas (‘‘dark’’ or
‘‘black’’) modifies thanatos several times in Homer, and is found in Hesiod,
Pindar, and the other early poets. Death is a dark cloud (Iliad 16.350) or
shadow (a dozen times) or night: ‘‘dark night covered over his eyes’’ (5.310). A
dead soul is a ‘‘shade.’’ In Euripides death is ‘‘dark-robed’’ (Alcestis 843); in
Sophocles the ‘‘dark eyes’’ of Eurydice mean she is dead (Antigone 1302). Hades
(the realm) is dark as well (Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 29); no sun shines in it
(Odyssey 12.383). To die is to leave the light (Hesiod, Works 155, and see under
Sun).
Death is not fully personified in Homer except once where he and his
brother Sleep remove Sarpedon from the battlefield and spirit him off to Lycia
(Iliad 16.672--83). The god Hades usually supplies this personification, though
he is not death strictly but the lord of the underworld; but death can also be
called the ‘‘lord of corpses’’ (Alcestis 843--44).
In Latin literature death (mors) is also sometimes dark, and sometimes
pale (e.g., Horace 1.4.13--14). (Orcus, god of the underworld, is also pale in
Virgil’s Georgics 1.277.) In Tibullus Death’s head is shrouded in darkness
(1.1.70). The phrase ‘‘black clouds of death’’ appears in Statius (Thebaid 9.851),
and clouds continue to be a characteristic into modern times: ‘‘the cloude of
death’’ sits on the eyes of someone in Spenser (FQ 1.3.39), in Shakespeare
‘‘Dark cloudy death o’ershades his beams of life’’ (3H6 2.6.62), and Tennyson’s
Oenone calls out, ‘‘O death, death, death, thou ever-floating cloud’’ (Oenone
234).
Death is more frequently personified in Latin poetry, and is even considered
a god by Seneca and Lucan. From Homer and Hesiod (Theogony 756) comes the
idea that Death and Sleep are brothers, as in Aeneid 6.278. Death has a
dwelling and can be summoned from it; so Lucan: ‘‘Unbar the Elysian abodes
and summon Death / herself’’ (6.660--01, trans. Braund). Statius imagines
Death counting the dead shades for its master (Thebaid 4.528--29).
Death
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
In the Bible, of course, death is not a god, and it is only glancingly
personified. Death has an abode, sheol (translated as ‘‘Hades’’ in Greek), but it
is not described much beyond its having gates (e.g., Isa. 38.10, Matt. 16.18). The
Lord asks Job, ‘‘Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? or hast thou
seen the doors of the shadow of death?’’ (38.17) (‘‘shadow of death’’ occurs
nine times in Job). Homer has the phrase ‘‘gates of Hades’’ (Iliad 5.646, 9.312),
Lucretius has ‘‘gates of death’’ (3.67), Virgil gives Orcus a ‘‘vestibule’’ (Aeneid
6.273). ‘‘To be at death’s door’’ remains a cliché today.
Sheol is personified in Isaiah: ‘‘Therefore hell hath enlarged herself, and
opened her mouth without measure’’ (5.14). Hell and Death are never satisfied
(Prov. 27.20, Hab. 2.5). Orcus has a throat (fauces) in Virgil (Aeneid 6.273), and
jaws in Apuleius (Met. 7.7.4). These passages are the origin of the commonplace
‘‘the jaws of hell’’ and the notion of death as ravenous. ‘‘Death the devourer of
all the worlds delight’’ is Spenser’s description (Clorinda 49); he also writes of
the ‘‘dreadfull mouth of death, which threatned sore / Her to have swallow’d
up’’ (FQ 5.4.12). Death is a major character in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and one of
his prominent traits is his hunger for flesh: ‘‘he snuffed the smell / Of mortal
change on earth (10.272--73), he pines with ‘‘eternal famine’’ (597) and yearns
‘‘To stuff this maw’’ (601). Tennyson’s Light Brigade charges ‘‘Into the jaws of
Death, / Into the mouth of hell’’ (24--25).
The ‘‘second death,’’ an expression found only in Revelation (e.g., 2.11, 20.6),
is equivalent to the ‘‘lake of fire’’ or hell. The shade of Virgil tells Dante that
he shall hear howls of despair as each damned soul laments his second death
(Inferno 1.117). Christ, however, ‘‘hath abolished death’’ (2 Tim. 1.10). John of
Patmos envisages the time when ‘‘death and hell were cast into the lake of
fire. This is the second death’’ (Rev. 20.14). If death swallows the living, God
‘‘will swallow up death in victory’’ (Isa. 25.8; see 1 Cor. 15.54). ‘‘One short sleep
past,’’ Donne writes, ‘‘we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more, Death
thou shalt die’’ (‘‘Death be not proud’’).
The final chapter of Ecclesiastes has several striking images of dying and
death: ‘‘man goeth to his long home, and the mourners goeth about the
streets: / Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken [two
parts of an oil lamp], or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel
broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was’’
(12.5--7).
Death, a character in Euripides’ Alcestis, bears a sword to cut off the hair of
Alcestis (73) (normally done to a mourner rather than the dead). In later
literature it is usually a spear or ‘‘deathes eternall dart’’ (FQ 3.10.59); ‘‘And over
them triumphant death his dart / shook’’ (PL 11.491--92). Byron calls him ‘‘The
old archer’’ (Don Juan 4.95).
Since the Middle Ages death has often been portrayed in ghastly terms, as a
skeleton or mouldering corpse. Schiller, following Lessing’s essay ‘‘How the
Ancients Pictured Death,’’ writes that in Greece ‘‘No appalling skeleton was
standing / At the bedside of the dying one: / By a kiss the final breath was
taken / While a Genius let sink his torch’’ (1800 version 65--68).
It was during the Middle Ages that the ‘‘dance of death’’ or danse macabre
became a popular theme, probably in response to the bubonic plague or
‘‘Black Death’’; in it Death leads a dance of people of all ranks to the grave.
Scott sets ‘‘The Dance of Death’’ at Waterloo: on the eve of the battle
55
Deer
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
‘‘phantoms wheeled a revel dance / And doomed the future slain’’ (57--58).
Beddoes ends his play Death’s Jest-Book with a death dance. See also the poems
by Goethe and Anatole France and the play by Strindberg, all called The Dance
of Death. Paul Celan’s famous poem ‘‘Death-Fugue,’’ about the German death
camps, was first titled ‘‘Death-Tango.’’
‘‘Death circles on black wings,’’ Horace writes (Satires 2.1.58), and thus
enlists the imagery of ravens or vultures, ‘‘death-birds,’’ as Shelley was to
call them (Hellas 1025), for death itself. Statius expands: ‘‘Death, sent forth
from the Stygian dark, / Enjoyed the sky and as he flew o’erspread / The battle
field and called the warriors / To his black maw’’ (Thebaid 8.376--81, trans.
Melville). Milton likens the scenting of Death to ‘‘a flock / Of ravenous fowl’’
lured to a battlefield by the scent of ‘‘living carcasses’’ (10.273--77). (See Raven).
An evocative simile in Job has had a long legacy. ‘‘Thou shalt come to thy
grave in full age, like as a shock of corn cometh in in his season’’ (5.6); also
man ‘‘cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down’’ (14.2). ‘‘All flesh is grass,’’
Isaiah adds, which will wither (40.6--8). The lines from Job, if not Isaiah, would
seem to imply that death is a harvester, the Grim Reaper, and so he is
commonly portrayed as a skeleton with a scythe. (See Time.) Byron
philosophizes: ‘‘All things that have been born were born to die, / And flesh
(which Death mows down to hay) is grass’’ (Don Juan 1.1755--56).
Death is the great leveller: mighty conquerors are laid low no less than the
wretched of the earth. Horace’s pale Death ‘‘with impartial foot knocks at
poor men’s hovels and princes’ castles’’ (1.4.13--14). In this life, writes Spenser,
‘‘death is an equall doome / To good and bad, the common In of rest’’ (FQ
2.1.59). In the graveyard Hamlet ponders this fact: ‘‘Alexander died, Alexander
was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make
loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a
beer-barrel?’’ (5.1.201--05). Shirley writes, ‘‘Sceptre and Crown, / Must tumble
down, / And in the dust be equal made / With the poor crooked scythe and
spade’’ (‘‘The glories of our blood and state,’’ from Ajax and Ulysses). As Gray
famously puts it, ‘‘The paths of glory lead but to the grave’’ (‘‘Elegy’’ 36). Byron
wittily combines the agricultural imagery of the Bible with the political
connotation of leveling: ‘‘Death, the sovereign’s sovereign’’ is the ‘‘Gracchus of
all mortality, who levels, / With his Agrarian laws, the high estate / . . . /
Death’s a reformer, all men must allow’’ (Don Juan 10.193--200).
As Sophocles’ Antigone prepares for her death, she laments that she is to
have no wedding song; ‘‘I shall marry Acheron’’ (816); she cries, ‘‘O tomb, O
wedding chamber’’ (891). Shakespeare’s Capulet tells Paris, ‘‘the night before
thy wedding day / Hath Death lain with thy wife. . . . // My daughter he hath
wedded’’ (Romeo 4.5.35--39). ‘‘Death is the supple Suitor,’’ says Dickinson, ‘‘That
wins at last’’ (no. 1445). In ‘‘Behind the Coffin,’’ Blok describes a woman in a
black veil following the coffin of her betrothed, ‘‘As though . . . she arrayed
herself in a bridal veil against the dust and awaited another Bridegroom’’
(trans. Obolensky).
Deer
56
Deer have appeared in literature primarily as the object of the hunt, whether
literal or metaphorical. (See Hunting).
Desert
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
‘‘Deer’’ is the generic term, but many more specific terms arise in English
literature: ‘‘hart’’ or ‘‘stag’’ is the mature male (especially of the red deer),
‘‘hind’’ is the mature female, ‘‘fawn’’ is the young (especially of the ‘‘fallow’’
or pale brown deer), ‘‘buck’’ and ‘‘doe’’ are the male and female of the fallow
deer; ‘‘roe’’ is a species of small deer. In works devoted to the ‘‘love chase’’
this ample vocabulary allowed for many puns, notably on ‘‘hart’’ and ‘‘heart’’
(and the Middle English form of ‘‘hurt’’) and on ‘‘deer’’ and ‘‘dear.’’ Chaucer’s
Book of the Duchess, much of which takes place during a literal hunt, uses
‘‘hert’’ or ‘‘herte’’ 41 times in 1334 lines, usually with at least two senses.
Marvell’s ‘‘Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn’’ has these perhaps
overly clever lines: ‘‘Look how your huntsman here / Hath taught a fawn to
hunt his dear’’ and ‘‘quite regardless of my smart, / Left me his fawn, but took
his heart’’ (31--32, 35--36).
A striking if implicit use of the woman-as-deer metaphor, without a hunting context, comes in Wyatt’s poem that begins: ‘‘They flee from me that
sometime did me seek / With naked foot stalking in my chamber. / I have seen
them gentle, tame, and meek / That now are wild and do not remember / That
sometime they put themselves in danger / To take bread at my hand.’’ He
remembers a wondrous moment in the arms of his beloved, when she asked,
‘‘Dear heart, how like you this?’’
The stricken deer that dies apart from the herd sometimes carries symbolic
meanings. Shakespeare’s Jacques moralizes over ‘‘a poor sequest’red stag / That
from the hunter’s aim had ta’en a hurt / . . . / The wretched animal heaved
forth such groans / That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat / Almost
to bursting’’ (AYLI 2.1.33--38). In a Christian allegory Cowper writes, ‘‘I was a
stricken deer, that left the herd / Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt /
My panting side was charg’d, when I withdrew / To seek a tranquil death in
distant shades. / There was I found by one who had himself / Been hurt by
th’archers’’ (i.e., Christ) (The Task 3.108--13). The stricken deer is a favorite image
of Shelley’s, who applies it to himself; e.g., ‘‘then, as a hunted deer that could
not flee, / I turned upon my thoughts, and stood at bay, / Wounded and weak
and panting’’ (Epipsychidion 272--74; cf. Adonais 297). James Joyce told a friend
that the animal he most resembled was a deer. In Ulysses Stephen Dedalus, as
a dog runs towards him, thinks of himself as a deer: ‘‘I just simply stood pale,
silent, bayed about’’ (chap. 3).
Desert
Dew
see Forest
In the dry lands of the Old Testament dew is always welcome, as rain is
welcome (indeed dew is taken as a kind of rain); both fall from heaven, and
are taken as gifts or blessings of God, like manna. When Isaac blesses Jacob (in
disguise), he prays, ‘‘God give thee of the dew of heaven’’ (Gen. 27.28); Moses’
dying blessing includes, ‘‘Blessed of the Lord be his [Joseph’s] land, for the
precious things of heaven, for the dew’’ (Deut. 33.13). Zechariah at the end of
the Old Testament has the Lord promise that ‘‘the seed shall be prosperous;
the vine shall give her fruit, and the ground shall give her increase, and the
heavens shall give their dew’’ (8.12). (Dew is not mentioned in the New
Testament.)
57
Dew
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Dew was thought of as life-giving, indeed as life itself, death being dry, as
bones are dry. A phrase from Psalm 110.3, ‘‘thou hast the dew of thy youth,’’
might be based on the equation of youth with morning, when dew is found,
but it also suggests that dew is something young people have within them.
There is a parallel in Greek thought. Homer once calls newborn kids hersai,
‘‘dews’’ or ‘‘dewdrops’’ (Odyssey 9.222), and Aeschylus, perhaps in imitation of
Homer, once refers to the ‘‘tender dews (drosoi) of lions,’’ meaning their young
(Agamemnon 141). A famous passage of Isaiah seems to rest on the notion that
dew is a vital force: ‘‘Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body
shall they arise. Awake and sing, ye that dwell in dust: for thy dew is as the
dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead’’ (26.19).
In Greek cosmological myth, dew is both generative and nurturing: it seems
to fertilize flowers and pasturage, insects were thought to spring from it, the
cicada feeds on it. According to Hesiod the Muses pour ‘‘sweet dew’’ on the
tongues of princes at their birth to make them eloquent (Theogony 81--84). In
Euripides and other authors various things can be ‘‘dewy,’’ such as spring
water, if they are pure or blessed by the gods.
It is but a step from the blessing of dew to blessing as dew. So Shakespeare’s
Belarius asks, ‘‘The benediction of these covering heavens / Fall on their heads
like dew’’ (Cym. 5.5.350--51). As a symbol of grace from on high dew could be
ascribed to any lofty giver, as when Spenser hopes that Love ‘‘will streame /
some deaw of grace, into my withered hart’’ (‘‘Hymn in Honour of Beauty’’
26--27).
One of the great restorative blessings is sleep, which normally happens
during the night as dew falls, so not surprisingly sleep is sometimes likened
to dew. Spenser has ‘‘sweet slombring deaw’’ (FQ 1.1.36), Shakespeare ‘‘the
golden dew of sleep’’ (R3 4.1.83) and ‘‘the honey-heavy dew of slumber’’ (JC
2.1.230), and Milton ‘‘the timely dew of sleep / Now falling with soft
slumbrous weight inclines / Our eyelids’’ (PL 4.614--16).
Dew is usually thought of as silver, in part because of its association with
the moon. So Spenser: ‘‘Cynthia [the moon] still doth steepe / In silver deaw
his ever-drouping hed’’ (FQ 1.1.39). The assocation with the moon goes back at
least to the Greek lyrist Alcman, who in different fragments calls dew (ersa)
the daughter of Zeus and Moon and (as drosos) the son of Moon and Air.
If the moon brings dew, it was thought that the sun drinks it in the
morning. This notion underlies the allegory of Marvell’s ‘‘On a Drop of Dew,’’
where the sun takes pity on a homesick drop of dew and ‘‘exhales’’ it back to
the skies; it is also the basis of some of the imagery of Blake’s The Book of Thel.
In poetry dew seems to have a special affinity for the rose, though the sheer
number of roses in poetry may be one reason for it; there is sometimes an
implicit pun on the Latin word for ‘‘dew,’’ ros. ‘‘I’ll say she looks as clear / As
morning roses newly washed with dew,’’ says Shakespeare’s Petruchio (TS
2.1.172--73).
In Greek and Latin poetry dew is often a metaphor for tears. ‘‘Thickly fall
the tears whose pale dew she sheds,’’ writes Sophocles (Trachiniae 847--48). Ovid
has the phrase ‘‘the dew of tears’’ (lacrimarum rore) (Met. 14.708; see 10.360),
and Seneca writes, ‘‘her cheeks are made wet with constant dew’’ (Phaedra
381--82). In an elaborate conceit Shakespeare combines tears with rose: ‘‘but
see . . . / My fair rose wither -- yet look up, behold, / That you in pity may
58
Dice
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
dissolve to dew, / And wash him fresh again with true-love tears’’ (R2 5.1.7--10).
Milton develops the conceit a little differently: Dalila ‘‘with head declin’d /
Like a fair flower surcharg’d with dew, she weeps’’ (Samson Agonistes 727--28).
Shelley frequently identifies tears with dew, notably in Adonais.
Also common in Greek and Latin poetry is the comparison of dew with
blood. Agamemnon’s blood is a dew, in Clytemnestra’s wild imagination, and
she is the sown field (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1390--92). In Virgil’s Aeneid ‘‘the
rapid hooves scatter bloody dews’’ (12.339--40), while in Lucan’s Civil War there
is a ‘‘bloody dew from the gore of the dripping Medusa head’’ (9.698).
‘‘Dew’’ and ‘‘dewy’’ became such staples of Romantic and Victorian poetry -Keats has ‘‘etherial dew,’’ ‘‘pearliest dew,’’ and ‘‘nectarous dew’’ among nearly
thirty instances in Endymion alone -- that rebellion was inevitable. In ‘‘The Man
on the Dump’’ Wallace Stevens discards the traditional imagery of lyric poetry,
including his own early poems, and especially dew: ‘‘how many men have
copied dew / For buttons, how many women have covered themselves / With
dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads / Of the floweriest flowers
dewed with the dewiest dew. / One grows to hate these things except on the
dump.’’
See Cicada, Rain.
Dice
A die, or pair of dice, can represent both chance and fate: chance if the
emphasis is on the throw (assuming the dice are not ‘‘loaded’’), fate if on the
result, which is unalterable. The word ‘‘die’’ comes via French dé from Latin
datum, ‘‘what is given’’ or ‘‘fate.’’ ‘‘Human life is like shooting dice [ludas
tesseris],’’ a character in Terence’s Adelphoe says; ‘‘If the dice don’t turn up as
you hoped, you have to make the most of how they did’’ (739--41). As he
crossed the Rubicon, Julius Caesar famously said, ‘‘The die is cast’’ (see River).
Since then the image has seemed especially appropriate to the hazard and
fatefulness of battle. Spenser’s Knight describes his victory over a foe: ‘‘his
harder fortune was to fall / Under my speare: such is the dye of warre’’ (FQ
1.2.36). Shakespeare’s Richard III, in the midst of his final battle, defiantly
cries, ‘‘I have set my life upon a cast, / And I will stand the hazard of the die’’
(5.4.9--10).
Coleridge imagines Death and Life-in-death dicing for the ship’s crew in The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner: ‘‘the twain were casting dice; / ‘The game is done!
I’ve won! I’ve won!’ / Quoth she, and whistles thrice’’ (1834 version 196--98),
thus dooming the mariner to a purgatorial life amidst the dead fellow sailors.
Mallarmé’s mysterious poem, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (‘‘A throw
of dice will never abolish chance’’) seems to be about the act of thinking, or
writing a poem: like the captain of a ship on a stormy sea, the poet cannot
rely on skill or control alone but must yield to unpredictable chance.
Dog
Dogs have long aroused contradictory feelings. Words for ‘‘dog’’ in Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin literature frequently served as terms of abuse, as they still do
in modern languages. Abishai calls someone a ‘‘dead dog’’ in 2 Samuel 16.9;
Jesus enjoins us to ‘‘Give not that which is holy unto the dogs’’ (Matt. 7.6; see
also 1 Sam. 17.43, Rev. 22.15). A disgusting canine habit inspired the still
common saying, ‘‘As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his
folly’’ (Prov. 26.11, 2 Pet. 2.22). A similar habit led to Horace’s report that a
59
Dog star
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
man known for eating rotten olives and drinking sour wine was rightly called
‘‘the Dog’’ (Satires 2.2.56).
The indiscriminate mating often seen among dogs gave another edge to
insults. In Deuteronomy 23.18 ‘‘dog’’ means ‘‘sodomite.’’ In Homer dog-terms
are applied mainly to women or goddesses, with the distinct suggestion of
sexual looseness. In the Iliad Helen calls herself a ‘‘horrible dog [or bitch]’’
(6.344), Zeus tells Hera ‘‘there is nothing more doglike than you’’ (usually
translated ‘‘shameless’’) (8.483), Hera for her part later calls Artemis a ‘‘brazen
dog’’ (21.481). In the Odyssey Helen calls herself ‘‘dog-faced’’ (4.145), and
Agamemnon uses the same term for the faithless Clytemnestra (11.424).
According to Hesiod, Pandora was given the mind of a bitch (Works and Days
67). In later Greek ‘‘dog’’ was a common term for ‘‘prostitute’’ (e.g.,
Aristophanes, Knights 765). Catullus wants a ‘‘dirty adulteress’’ to blush on her
‘‘dog’s face’’ (42.16--17).
To go to the dogs, to die like a dog, to lead a dog’s life -- these and similar
phrases are common expressions of the miserable status of dogs. Many of
Shakespeare’s characters resort to dog-terms to express contempt and anger:
‘‘Out, dog! Out, cur!’’ (MND 3.2.65); ‘‘you bawling, blasphemous, incharitable
dog!’’ (Tempest 1.1.40); ‘‘You ruinous butt, you whoreson indistinguishable cur’’
(TC 5.1.28--29). ‘‘Bitch’’ and ‘‘son of a bitch’’ are such frequently heard insults in
English today that ‘‘bitch’’ has almost lost its original sense.
On the other hand, the dog has always been treasured for its loyalty. ‘‘Fido’’
(Italian for ‘‘faithful’’) is still considered the typical dog’s name, though it is in
fact rare. The first named dog in western literature is Odysseus’ dog Argus,
who provides perhaps the most touching recognition scene in the Odyssey:
‘‘There the dog Argos lay in the dung, all covered with dog ticks. / Now, as he
perceived that Odysseus [in disguise] had come close to him, / he wagged his
tail, and laid both his ears back; . . . // But the doom of dark death now closed
over the dog, Argos, / when, after nineteen years had gone by, he had seen
Odysseus’’ (17.300--02, 326--27, trans. Lattimore). Many ancient heroes and even
gods had dogs for hunting or just for companionship.
Both wild and domesticated dogs notably hunt in packs. Over a dozen
similes in Homer’s Iliad compare battle situations to hunting with dogs, the
quarry being a lion, a boar, or a hapless fawn. Ares and Mars are sometimes
portrayed as having dogs. Shakespeare’s Antony prophesies that Caesar’s spirit
will ‘‘Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war’’ (JC 3.1.273).
As both hounds that harry sinners and as symbols of the bestial side of
fallen human nature dogs belong to hell: Milton refers to ‘‘dogs of hell’’ and
‘‘hell hounds’’ (PL 10.616, 630), and his character Sin, like Scylla, is partly made
of dogs: ‘‘about her middle round / A cry of hell hounds never ceasing
barked / With wide Cerberian mouths full loud’’ (2.653--55); Milton is alluding
to Cerberus, the classical watchdog of Hades. In medieval allegories the devil
is sometimes likened to a dog, usually black. Wittily suggesting the urbanity
of the modern devil, Goethe has his Mephistopheles emerge from a poodle
(Faust I 1147ff.). If the devil is the hound of hell, God might be, as Francis
Thompson titles his best known poem, ‘‘The Hound of Heaven.’’
Dog star
60
see Star
Dolphin
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Dolphin
Dove
Homer mentions dolphins (Greek delphis or delphinos) only twice, once as prey
for Scylla (Odyssey 12.96) and once as a devouring sea-beast in a simile for
Achilles (Iliad 21.22), quite untypical of its later benign associations. The
Homeric Hymn to Apollo connects the dolphin, one of Apollo’s guises, with the
god’s oracle at Delphi (495--96); the etymology is questionable, though it is
possible that both words are related to delphys, ‘‘womb.’’ The Hymn to Dionysus
tells how the pirates who captured that disguised god leapt overboard when
he turned himself into a lion, whereupon they were turned into dolphins; it
is retold by Ovid in Metamorphoses (3.607--86).
The Greeks believed that dolphins like music -- Euripides calls them
‘‘oboe-lovers’’ (Electra 435--36) -- and so they escort ships on which music is
playing. With more plausibility, it was thought that a person might be saved
from drowning at sea by a dolphin, as Plato notes (Republic 453d). The most
famous example is the poet Arion, who, when about to be tossed overboard by
thieves, begs and gains the privilege of singing a last song, which attracts the
dolphins, who then rescue him; it is told by Herodotus (1.23--24) and Ovid
(Fasti 2.79--118), and cited by Spenser (FQ 4.11.23), Shakespeare (12N 1.2.15),
Shelley (Witch of Atlas 484), and many others. Another example is that of
Palaemon, son of Leucothea (Ovid, Met. 4.31; Statius, Thebaid 1.121, 9.331). The
sea nymph Thetis rides a dolphin (Met. 11.237); in Shakespeare it is a singing
mermaid (MND 2.1.150).
In Christian symbolism the dolphin means salvation or resurrection and is
sometimes linked with the whale of Jonah, himself a type of Christ; in
iconography the souls of the dead were portrayed as riding on the backs of
dolphins. Milton evokes both the Christian symbol and the classical link with
poets as he asks, ‘‘O ye dolphins, waft the helpless youth,’’ that is, Lycidas, the
drowned poet (‘‘Lycidas’’ 164). Keats imagines Lycidas in a cave of the Hebrides,
where dolphins come to pay devotion (‘‘Staffa’’ 31--33).
Perhaps because Nereids ride them (Plato, Critias 116e), or because the
beautiful nymph Galatea’s shell-chariot is portrayed as drawn by them, or
because they swim in groups, or because the sea itself is seen as the source of
life (and of Venus), dolphins are sometimes associated with love or generation.
Ovid calls the dolphin a ‘‘go-between in love’s intrigues’’ (Fasti 2.79). Gellius
claims that dolphins form amorous passions for attractive boys (6.8). Goethe
makes much of the erotic and generative connotations in Faust Part II where
Proteus changes himself into a dolphin and bids Homunculus climb aboard
(8316--20); after Galatea passes by, Homunculus throws himself into the sea in
a kind of sexual ecstasy. In Blake ‘‘jealous dolphins,’’ representing a jealous
lover, sport round his beloved (Visions of the Daughters 1.19). Yeats adopts the
dolphin as escort of dead souls but seems to take it also as the body or fleshly
vehicle of the soul, which may be purged and reincarnated in the sea:
‘‘Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood, / Spirit after spirit!’’ riding on the
‘‘dolphin-torn’’ sea (‘‘Byzantium’’ 33--34, 40; see also ‘‘News for the Delphic
Oracle’’).
It is a happy accident that ‘‘dove’’ rhymes with ‘‘love’’ in English, for the dove
has been the bird of love for as long as we have record. It was the bird of
Ishtar and Astarte, the Babylonian and Syrian love-goddesses, as well as of
61
Dove
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Greek Aphrodite and thus of Roman Venus. Their gentle cooing and apparent
faithfulness to their mates made doves, and especially turtle-doves, inevitable
symbols not only of love but of the kindred virtues of gentleness, innocence,
timidity, and peace.
The return of turtle-doves to Palestine in April was a sure sign (and sound)
of spring, as we see in Song of Solomon 2.12: ‘‘The flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in
our land.’’ ‘‘Turtle’’ by itself means the turtle-dove, not the reptile; its names
in Hebrew (tor), Greek (trugon), and Latin (turtur, whence ‘‘turtle’’) seem derived
from its call. In the same chapter of the Song (2.14) the beloved is summoned
as ‘‘my dove, that art in the clefts of the rock,’’ alluding to its preference for
dwelling on cliff-sides and in caves; it may be a different bird (yonati in
Hebrew, probably the rock dove) but it has much the same connotation. As a
term of endearment ‘‘dove’’ is found in Greek and Latin as well.
The earliest references to Aphrodite in Greek literature say nothing about
doves (and vice versa); in fact the birds that accompany the goddess in
Sappho’s great Ode to Aphrodite (early sixth century) are sparrows. In Homer
doves bring ambrosia to Zeus (Odyssey 12.63). But doves were associated with
the sites of the Aphrodite cult (especially Paphos and Amathus on Cyprus)
much as owls were with Athens. The ‘‘timid dove’’ who escapes a hawk in
Apollonius’ Argonautica (3.541--50) is identified as the ‘‘gentle bird’’ of Cypris (a
standard name for Aphrodite).
In Latin literature the link is routine. When two doves lead Aeneas to the
golden bough he knows them to be his mother Venus’ birds (Aeneid 6.190ff.).
Near the end of the Metamorphoses Ovid lists three gods’ birds, Juno’s peacock,
Jove’s eagle, and ‘‘Cytherea’s doves’’ (15.385--86) (Cytherea is another common
alternative for Venus/Aphrodite). Martial mentions ‘‘Paphian doves’’ (8.28.13),
Propertius the ‘‘doves of my lady Venus’’ (3.3.31), and so on. They are yoked to
Venus’ chariot in Apuleius (Met. 6.6.2). Chaucer describes doves flitting about
the head of Venus (Knight’s Tale 1962), Spenser has ‘‘Venus dearling dove’’ (FQ 4
Proem 5), and Shakespeare has ‘‘Venus’ doves’’ (MND 1.1.171), ‘‘Venus’ pigeons’’
(MV 2.6.5), and, like Martial, a ‘‘dove of Paphos’’ (Per 4 Gower 32). In the final
stanza of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, Venus, weary of the world, ‘‘yokes her
silver doves’’ to her chariot and flies to Paphos (1189--94). Ancient lovers gave
doves to their beloveds (e.g., Theocritus 5.96--97). As the bird of Venus the dove
occasionally represents lechery (as in Catullus 29.7--8), but that role is usually
played by Aphrodite’s other bird, the sparrow.
Aristotle wrote that doves are monogamous (Historia Animalium
9.7.612b33ff.), and faithfulness to one mate became part of the lore of doves,
especially of turtle-doves. Chaucer names ‘‘the wedded turtil, with hire herte
trewe’’ (PF 355). ‘‘As true as turtle to her mate’’ was a proverb by the
Renaissance; ‘‘so turtles pair / That never mean to part’’ (Shakespeare, WT
4.4.154--55).
When it is named in Homer, the dove (peleia) is usually accompanied by the
epithet ‘‘fearful’’ or ‘‘trembling’’ (treron), as it is in Apollonius much later. (But
it is possible that treron is an old word for ‘‘dove’’ itself, related to trugon,
‘‘turtle,’’ and so on.) In Homer and tragedy, too, the dove is often linked with
the hawk, eagle, or another bird of prey. When Hector loses his nerve and
flees Achilles, ‘‘As when a hawk in the mountains who moves lightest of
62
Dragon
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
things flying / makes his effortless swoop for a trembling dove . . . // so Achilles
went straight for him in fury’’ (Iliad 22.139--43; trans. Lattimore). A typical
omen is the sight of ‘‘a high-flown eagle, [which] carried a tremulous dove’’
(Odyssey 20.243). The chorus of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes fears the
besieging army as an ever-timorous (pantromos) dove fears serpents for her
nestlings’ sake (292--94). In Euripides’ Andromache, the Trojans turn their backs
in flight ‘‘like doves seeing a hawk’’ (1140--41).
It is a widespread image in Latin literature. Omen and simile combine in
Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘‘So easily / A hawk . . . / Will strike a soaring dove high in a
cloud / And grip her as he tears her viscera / With crooked talons’’ (11.721--23).
Ovid has ‘‘thus the lamb the wolf, the deer the lion, / the doves on trembling
wing flee the hawk’’ (Met. 1.505--06).
Another connotation derives from the Bible. Noah sends a dove forth three
times to find out how far the waters of the Flood have receded (Gen. 8.8--12);
the second time the bird returns with a fresh olive leaf in its beak, a sign that
the waters have shrunk enough to reveal olive groves. In classical tradition the
olive came to represent peace, and so had the dove -- Horace calls it
inbellem . . . columbam, ‘‘unwarlike dove’’ (Odes 4.4.31--32) -- and that symbolism
seconded the connotation of the dove in the Noah story as confirming the
new covenant of the Lord. Thus hope was joined with peace. (See Olive.)
Jesus enjoins his followers to be ‘‘wise as serpents, and harmless as doves’’
(Matt. 10.16). The Church father Tertullian called the dove the ‘‘animal of
simplicity and innocence’’ (De Baptismo 8). In passages of great future
importance to Christian imagery, all four Gospels describe the spirit of God as
‘‘descending like a dove’’ on Jesus at his baptism (e.g., Matt. 3.16). The dove
came to symbolize the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, as we see in
countless medieval and Renaissance paintings of the Trinity or the
Annunciation. In Genesis ‘‘the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters’’ (1.2). To those Christians inclined to take the Spirit of God as dovelike
it was significant that the Hebrew verb translated as ‘‘moved’’ (AV) occurs later
(Deut. 32.11) as ‘‘fluttereth,’’ used of an eagle over her young; that led to the
idea that the Spirit incubated the face of the waters. That idea underlies
Milton’s famous address to the Spirit, who ‘‘with mighty wings outspread /
Dove-like sat’st brooding on the vast abyss / And madest it pregnant’’ (PL
1.20--22). Hopkins’s sonnet ‘‘God’s Grandeur’’ ends, ‘‘the Holy Ghost over the
bent / World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.’’
Two passages from the Psalms -- ‘‘Oh that I had wings like a dove! for then I
would fly away, and be at rest’’ (55.6) and ‘‘Though ye have lien among the
pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her
feathers with yellow gold’’ (68.13) -- inspired the title of Henry James’s novel
The Wings of the Dove, whose main character, Milly Theale, is dovelike in her
gentleness and power to comfort.
Dragon
Dream
see Serpent
Dreams are a ubiquitous feature of ancient, medieval, and modern literature
beginning with Enkidu’s dream in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Agamemnon and
Achilles have dreams in the Iliad, Penelope and Nausicaa in the Odyssey,
Aeneas and Dido in the Aeneid; Jacob dreams of the ladder to heaven and the
63
Dream
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promise of the Lord; the stories of Joseph and Daniel turn on dreams and the
art of dream interpretation; three of Aeschylus’ surviving plays have significant dreams; we could add examples endlessly. In older literature dreams are
very often prophetic, and their message may be straightforwardly literal or
couched in a dark symbolism that demands a decipherer. Very often they are
sent by the gods. It is thus often impossible to distinguish between a dream
and a vision, which in turn might be either a waking dream (or trance) or a
real heaven-sent revelation.
The symbols in a dream or vision may draw from any of the traditional
meanings that this dictionary presents, or they may refer to particular
situations unique to the dreamer and interpretable only in context. Dreams
are the occasions for interpolated tales within larger narratives; the tales
may be told in a different mode, usually more symbolic or allegorical, and
they may bear oblique and subtle connections to their frameworks. As
dreams are seldom symbols in themselves, but rather gates into the realm of
symbols, this entry will be much briefer than the subject might seem to
deserve.
In the Middle Ages many whole works were dreams, notably the dream
allegories, of which the French Romance of the Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and
Jean de Meun is the leading example; it begins with a defense of the truth of
dreams, and the rest of the long poem is, in Chaucer’s translation, ‘‘such a
swevenyng [dream] / That lyked me wonders wel’’ (26--27). Dream allegories in
English include Pearl; Langland’s Piers Plowman; Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess,
House of Fame, and Parliament of Fowls; and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The most
influential ancient source of dream narratives is Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis,
‘‘The Dream of Scipio,’’ along with a commentary on it by Macrobius.
The formulaic phrase for introducing a dream in English literature was
‘‘methinks’’ or ‘‘methought,’’ which does not quite mean ‘‘I think’’ or ‘‘I
thought’’ but rather ‘‘it seems/seemed to me,’’ hence ‘‘I see/saw as in a dream
or vision’’ (sometimes ‘‘me seems/seemed’’ was used). Chaucer, for example,
introduces the dream within The Book of the Duchess: ‘‘thys was my sweven. / Me
thoghte thus: that hyt was May’’ (290--91). Eve uses ‘‘methought’’ four times in
recounting her dream to Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost (5.35--91).
There are ancient conventions about dreams and where they come from.
They are often sent by gods, as when Zeus sends a destructive dream to Agamemnon in Homer’s Iliad (2.1--34); the Dream is personified and obeys Zeus’s
command like any servant, and then takes the form of Nestor in the dream.
Athena sends a dream-figure to Penelope in the guise of her sister (Odyssey
4.795--841). In Homer also we find the two mysterious gates of dreams, the
gate of ivory (elephas), though which deceptive dreams pass, and the gate of
horn (keras), through which true ones pass (Odyssey 19.560--67); the gates are
‘‘explained’’ through puns on elephairomai, ‘‘deceive,’’ and kraino, ‘‘fulfill.’’ Virgil
adds to the mystery by having Aeneas and the Sibyl depart the underworld
(Hades) through the gate of ivory. Since the underworld is the realm of Death,
brother of Sleep, it may be appropriate that it has those gates, but it raises
questions about the truth of the prophecies Aeneas hears in the underworld
that he should leave by the dubious exit. Perhaps, since he and the Sibyl are
not dreams, or shades, but still alive, they may be considered false dreams
themselves, that is, not really dreams.
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Dream
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Ovid has an elaborate description of the Cave of Sleep, where empty dreams
lie about in great number; at Iris’ behest Sleep summons Morpheus (‘‘Shaper,’’
from Greek morphe) to impersonate Ceyx in his wife Alcyone’s dream (Met.
11.592--675). This account is the main source of Spenser’s similar story, where
Archimago sends a sprite down through the bowels of the earth to Morpheus’
house to wake him and order a false dream; Morpheus summons one from his
‘‘prison dark’’ and the sprite returns with it through the ivory gate (FQ
1.1.38--44).
It is tempting to speculate that there is a deep similarity between the
experience of dreaming and the rapt state of attentiveness that ancient oral
poetry and song elicited, the ‘‘charm’’ or ‘‘spell’’ (kelethmos) that Odysseus casts
over his audience (Odyssey 11.334); if that is so then the fact that dreams play
so large a part in literature should not surprise us. The notion that a play
enacted on a stage is a kind of dream, an ‘‘insubstantial pageant,’’ is evoked by
Shakespeare and other playwrights (Tempest 4.1.155). Robin Goodfellow concludes A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for instance, by calling himself and his
fellow actors ‘‘shadows’’ (‘‘shadow’’ and ‘‘shade’’ were often synomyms for
‘‘dream’’) and inviting the audience to take the whole play as a dream
(5.1.414--19). Since a play or any other work of literature was an imitation of
life, life itself could be taken as a dream. ‘‘We are such stuff / As dreams are
made on,’’ Prospero says, ‘‘and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep’’ (Tempest
4.1.156--58).
It does not need the analogy with story and drama, of course, to set one
thinking that life is a dream; looked at from one’s old age, life’s brevity and
the evaporation of life’s illusions readily suggest the equation. Pindar wrote,
‘‘man is a shadow’s dream’’ (Pyth. 8.95--96); ‘‘shadow’’ (skia) might mean ‘‘shade’’
here, a shade being a ghost, in which case there is a suggestion that our lives
are dreamt by the dead. Walther von der Vogelweide wondered if he had
dreamt his own life: ‘‘ist mir mı̂n leben getroumet?’’ (‘‘Owê war sint verswunden’’ 2). Petrarch wrote in a letter to Colonna that his life seemed ‘‘a light
dream, a most fleeting phantasm.’’ Calderón gave his view in his most famous
play, La Vida es Sueño (‘‘Life is a Dream’’): its leading character, Segimundo,
concludes that ‘‘all of life is a dream, / and dreams are dreams’’ (2.2186--87).
Poe went one better by concluding (and echoing his title) that ‘‘All that we see
or seem / Is but a dream within a dream.’’
Poe in part expressed the Romantic view, inherited by psychoanalysis, that
dreamers enter a deeper or truer reality than the world of consciousness or
reason, that ‘‘gleams of a remoter world / Visit the soul in sleep,’’ as Shelley
put it in ‘‘Mont Blanc’’ (49--50). Shelley wonders if death, that resembles sleep,
might be the portal to truth. After his entranced hearkening to the nightingale, Keats asks, ‘‘Was it a vision or a waking dream? / Fled is that music: -Do I wake or sleep?’’ The first of Yeats’s collected poems laments the loss of
the ancient world of dreams, ‘‘old earth’s dreamy youth’’ (‘‘Song of the Happy
Shepherd’’ 54), and one of the last poems reviews his works and concludes
‘‘when all is said / It was the dream itself enchanted me’’ (‘‘The Circus
Animals’ Desertion’’ 27--28). In conferring great, if equivocal, value on the
dream in the face of rationalist disparagement, the Romantics were restoring
it to its ancient prestige, though without the divine agency that guaranteed it.
In the wake of Freud, many twentieth-century writers (notably the surrealists)
65
Dust
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
have exploited the dream in many ways; Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, for instance, is
(perhaps) one long dream.
Dust
see Clay
E
Eagle
66
In classical literature the eagle is the king of birds and the bird of the king of
gods. Homer calls it ‘‘dearest of birds’’ to Zeus (Iliad 24.311); Pindar calls it
‘‘king of birds’’ and ‘‘eagle of Zeus . . . leader (archos) of birds’’ (Olymp. 13.29, Pyth.
1.9--11); Aeschylus also calls it ‘‘king of birds’’ (Agamemnon 113); Euripides calls
it the ‘‘herald of Zeus’’ (Ion 159). Theocritus names the eagle ‘‘the aegis-bearer
of Zeus’’ (26.31); Virgil and Ovid call it ‘‘Jove’s armor-bearer’’ (Iovis armiger,
Aeneid 5.255, 9.563, Met. 15.386), the armor here referring to the lightning
bolt; Horace dubs the bird ‘‘minister of lightning’’ (ministrum fulminis, 4.4.1).
(Pliny in Natural History 10.4.15 says that the eagle is immune to
thunderbolts.)
Homer also says that the eagle is the ‘‘most perfect’’ (teleiotaton) of birds
(Iliad 8.247, 24.315), by which he probably means most perfect for omens, Zeus
being the ‘‘perfecter’’ or ‘‘accomplisher’’ of events. Several omens involving
eagles are sent by Zeus in the Iliad (e.g., 12.200ff.) and the Odyssey (e.g., 2.146ff.)
and eagle omens are common in Greek and Latin literature thereafter.
According to Ovid, it is in the guise of his own eagle that Jupiter abducts
Ganymede (Met. 10.157ff.), whereas in Virgil (Aeneid 5.255) and Apuleius (Met.
6.15.2) Jupiter sends the eagle to do it.
The eagle, particularly the sea-eagle (haliaietos), by which the ancients may
have meant the osprey, was thought to be particularly keen-sighted. We still
say ‘‘eagle-eyed’’; Shakespeare has ‘‘eagle-sighted eye’’ (LLL 4.3.226). Pliny tells
how eagles can stare at the sun: they force their young to look at it and if
they flinch or weep they are expelled from the nest (Natural History 10.3.10).
Many Latin writers, such as Lucan in his Civil War 9.902ff., repeat this legend,
as does Thomson in ‘‘Spring’’ (1728 version) 702--09. The ‘‘royal egle,’’ according
to Chaucer, ‘‘with his sharpe lok perseth the sonne’’ (PF 330--31); Spenser
writes of the ‘‘Eagles eye, that can behold the Sunne’’ (FQ 1.10.47); Blake bids
us ask ‘‘the wing’d eagle why he loves the sun’’ (Visions 3.12).
Psalm 103 contains the cryptic line, ‘‘so that thy youth is renewed like the
eagle’s’’ (5); combined with classical passages associating the eagle with the
sun, this line led to the legend in medieval bestiaries that eagles in old age fly
toward the sun to singe their wings and burn the film from their eyes and
then plunge into a fountain or sea. ‘‘As Eagle, fresh out of the ocean wave, /
Where he hath lefte his plumes all hory gray, / And deckt himselfe with
fethers youthly gay, / Like Eyas [young] hauke mounts up unto the skies’’
(Spenser, FQ 1.11.34). A famous passage of Milton’s Areopagitica varies the
legend to make the sun and fountain one: ‘‘Methinks I see her [England] as an
eagle muing [moulting] her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at
the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the
Eagle
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
fountain itself of heavenly radiance.’’ Blake follows Milton: the eagle ‘‘lifts his
golden beak to the pure east; / Shaking the dust from his immortal pinions to
awake / The sun that sleeps too long’’ (Visions 2.26--28); so does Shelley: ‘‘the
eagle, who . . . could nourish in the sun’s domain / Her mighty youth with
morning’’ (Adonais 147--49).
One of Homer’s omens is the sight of a flying eagle carrying a struggling
serpent (Iliad 12.200ff.). In that struggle the snake wins, as it does in the
related simile in Aeschylus, Choephoroe 247ff. Virgil gives a different outcome
in his simile: ‘‘As when a golden eagle flapping skyward / Bears a snake as
prey -- her feet entwined / But holding fast with talons, while the victim, /
Wounded as it is, coils and uncoils / And lifts cold grisly scales and towers
up / With hissing maw; but all the same the eagle / Strikes the wrestler snake
with crooked beak / While beating with her wings the air of heaven’’ (Aeneid
11.751--56; trans. Fitzgerald). Ovid has a similar image twice in the Metamorphoses (4.36ff., 714ff.), and Spenser has a ‘‘Gryfon’’ and a dragon struggling in
flight at FQ 1.5.8. The image is central to the symbolism of Shelley’s Revolt of
Islam; see also his Alastor 227--32. Blake engraved a drawing of it on plate 15 of
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. According to the Norse legend told in the Prose
Edda of Snorri, an eagle perched in the great tree of Yggdrasill defends it
against a great serpent lying among the roots.
The eagle is frequently contrasted with the dove. According to Horace,
‘‘fierce eagles do not hatch unwarlike doves’’ (4.4.31--32). ‘‘Our songs avail
against the weapons of Mars,’’ one of Virgil’s shepherds sings, ‘‘as much, they
say, as Chaonian doves when an eagle comes’’ (Eclogues 9.11--13). Their incompatibility is so well established by Chaucer’s time that his Criseyde can say
that ‘‘everich egle [shal] ben the dowves feere [mate or companion]’’ before she
forgets Troilus (Troilus 3.1496). Shakespeare’s Coriolanus boasts ‘‘That like an
eagle in a dove-cote, I / Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles’’ (Cor 5.6.114--15).
(Frequently, however, it is the hawk that preys on the dove, as at Aeneid
11.721ff.)
Sometimes in Greek literature it is not clear if the eagle or the vulture is
meant. The bird associated with Prometheus’ torment is sometimes taken to
be a vulture, though of course it is Zeus who sends his ‘‘winged hound’’
(Aeschylus, Prometheus 1022).
In 104 bc Gaius Marius assigned the eagle to the legions as their special
badge, whereupon it became the emblem of the Roman Empire; they are
mentioned by Propertius (4.1.95). The Soothsayer in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline
reports a vision in which ‘‘I saw Jove’s bird, the Roman eagle,’’ sign of the
‘‘Roman host’’ (Cym 4.2.346--52). It has been adopted by many armies and
states since then, including the United States. When Dante ascends to the
sphere of Jupiter, he sees a vast eagle composed of shining souls and symbolic
of divine justice as well as the universal terrestrial empire (Paradiso cantos
18--20).
The eagle also stands for John the Evangelist, based on the correspondence
of the four gospel-writers to the four ‘‘living creatures’’ of Ezekiel chapter 1,
one of which is an eagle; John is the most soaring and visionary of the four
evangelists. As D. H. Lawrence puts it in the opening of ‘‘St John,’’ ‘‘John, oh
John, / Thou honourable bird, / Sun-peering eagle. / Taking a bird’s-eye view /
Even of Calvary and Resurrection.’’
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Earth
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For the same reasons the eagle was adopted by Romantic poets as a symbol
of the poet himself, or of his imaginative powers. Shelley’s soul ‘‘in the rapid
plumes of song / Clothed itself, sublime and strong; / As a young eagle soars
the morning clouds among’’ (‘‘Ode to Liberty’’ 6--8). Lamartine addresses
‘‘Enthusiasm, conquering eagle,’’ as ‘‘I tremble with a holy zeal’’
(‘‘L’Enthousiasme’’); Hugo opens an ode by exclaiming, ‘‘The eagle, it is genius’’
(‘‘Ode 17’’). ‘‘No sooner does the divine word touch his keen hearing,’’ according to Pushkin, ‘‘than the poet’s soul starts like an eagle that has been
roused’’ (‘‘The Poet,’’ trans. Obolensky).
Earth
East and west
68
see Nature
East is the direction or the quarter of the sky where the sun, moon, and stars
rise; west is where they set. Terms for these directions in other languages
often reflect these definitions. The Homeric word for ‘‘east,’’ eos, also means
‘‘dawn,’’ while ‘‘west,’’ zophos, means ‘‘gloom’’ or ‘‘dusk’’; Odysseus says Ithaca
lies ‘‘toward the zophos,’’ while the neighboring islands lie ‘‘toward the eos and
the sun’’ (Homer, Odyssey 9.26). A later Greek word for ‘‘east,’’ the noun anatole,
also means ‘‘rising’’; the verb anatello can mean ‘‘give birth to’’ or ‘‘bring to
light’’; ‘‘Anatolia’’ is still in use in English to refer to Asia Minor (Turkey), so
called because it lies to the east of Greece. Greek hesperos and Latin vesper
mean both ‘‘evening’’ and ‘‘west.’’ The Latin participle oriens means ‘‘rising
(sun)’’ and ‘‘east’’ (whence English ‘‘orient’’), while occidens means ‘‘falling’’ or
‘‘setting (sun)’’ and ‘‘west’’ (whence ‘‘occident’’). The ‘‘firmament,’’ says Chaucer,
‘‘hurlest al from est til occident’’ (Man of Law’s Tale 295--97); evoking the Latin
sense, Pope has ‘‘Aurora heav’d her orient head’’ (Iliad 19.1). German
Morgenland (‘‘morning-land’’) means the ‘‘East’’ or ‘‘Orient,’’ while Abendland
(‘‘evening-land’’) means the ‘‘West’’ or ‘‘Occident.’’ In English, to ‘‘orient’’ or
‘‘orientate’’ oneself is, literally, to find the east. ‘‘North’’ is akin to words in
other European languages meaning ‘‘left,’’ which is where north is when one
is oriented.
If humans are seen as ephemeral beings, creatures of a day, then their life
follows the pattern of the sun. One infers from the sailing directions in the
Odyssey that to reach Hades, the realm of the dead, one sails westward, or
northwestward, following the path of the setting sun into the zophos; in Hades
there is no sun. Tennyson captures the metaphor nicely in his ‘‘Ulysses’’ -- ‘‘my
purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western
stars, until I die’’ (59--61) -- though the last clause is almost redundant. A
character in Theocritus asks, ‘‘Do you think my sun has set?’’ (1.102).
Shakespeare rather pedantically correlates one’s age with the stages of the sun
by attributing age to the sun: at noon the sun resembles ‘‘strong youth in his
middle age’’ but later ‘‘Like feeble age he reeleth from the day’’ and sets
(Sonnets 7); in a greater sonnet he writes, ‘‘in me thou seest the twilight of
such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west, / Which by and by black night
doth take away’’ (73). Gray writes, ‘‘Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone’’ (‘‘Spring’’
49). Arnold brings out the mythical dimension in his phrase, ‘‘western shores,
death-place of the day’’ (‘‘Cromwell’’ 112).
What Thomson calls the ‘‘cheerful morn of life’’ (Winter 7) begins in the
east, in ‘‘Birth’s orient portal,’’ as Shelley puts it (Hellas 202). Henry King
Elm
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
laments, ‘‘At night when I betake to rest, / Next morn I rise neere my West /
Of life, almost by eight houres saile, / Then when sleep breath’d his drowsie
gale’’ (‘‘Exequy’’ 97--100). Wordsworth’s ‘‘Intimations’’ ode exploits the full
diurnal cycle: our soul is ‘‘our life’s Star’’ that ‘‘Hath had elsewhere its setting’’
(59--60), but we must travel ‘‘daily farther from the East’’ until we see our
natal light ‘‘fade into the light of common day’’ (71, 76); at the conclusion the
speaker still appreciates ‘‘The innocent brightness of a new-born Day’’ but
notes that ‘‘The clouds that gather round the setting sun / Do take a sober
colouring from an eye / That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality’’ (197--201).
Byron, with his usual breezy deflation, speaks of the coming of coughs and
wrinkles before ‘‘the sun / Of life reach ten o’clock’’ (Don Juan 10.60--61).
There is tradition with ancient roots of the ‘‘westering’’ of empire or the
spirit, as if they followed the celestial bodies. The orient is the origin -- ex
oriente lux, as the proverb has it -- but light and power have been passing
westward, from Asia, to Greece, to Rome, to France or England, to America.
Virgil’s Aeneid, a prime source of this myth, tells how Aeneas leads a remnant
of Troy, the city of Anatolia destroyed by the Greeks, past Greece to the destined homeland of Italy or Hesperia, the Western Land. Medieval legends
made descendants of Aeneas into founders of other European states, such as
Brutus the eponymous founder of Britain. As stars stand for the glory of states
or their leaders (see Star), Queen Elizabeth was celebrated as ‘‘that bright
Occidental star’’ (Dedicatory Epistle to the King James Bible). Berkeley’s line,
‘‘Westward the course of empire takes its way,’’ has often been quoted, especially in America (‘‘Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in
America’’). Timothy Dwight believed in it: ‘‘All hail, thou western world! by
heaven design’d / Th’example bright, to renovate mankind. / Soon shall thy
sons across the mainland roam; / And claim, on far Pacific shores, their home’’
(Greenfield Hill 2. 707--10).
In his long poem Liberty, Thomson traces liberty’s progress from Egypt,
Persia, and Phoenicia to Greece and Rome, then to the heavens (during the
dark ages), then back down to Italy, then through northern Europe to Britain;
Britons, ‘‘with star-directed prow,’’ will conquer the oceans (4.424). Collins’s
‘‘Ode to Liberty’’ briefly rehearses a similar itinerary and ends, ‘‘Thou, Lady,
thou shalt rule the West!’’ (144). Gray notes the rather abrupt westering of
poetry from Greece, to Rome, and then to Albion (‘‘Progress of Poesy’’).
Herbert expounds the westering of the Church, from Egypt, to Greece, to
Rome, to Germany, and to England. ‘‘The course was westward, that the sunne
might light / As well our understanding as our sight’’ (17--18). But sin has
followed the same path, corrupting the Church, till ‘‘Religion stands on
tip-toe in our land, / Readie to passe to the American strand’’ (235--36).
See Dawn, Sun, West wind.
Elm
The elm tree is mentioned in Homer (Iliad 21.350), though with no particular
significance, and it often appears in Latin, European, and English poetry as a
prominent, dignified, shady tree. Gray speaks of the ‘‘rugged elms’’ of the
country churchyard (Elegy 13).
The elm’s main symbolic meaning depends on its use as a support for vines:
Chaucer calls it ‘‘The piler [pillar] elm’’ (PF 177), and Spenser makes that more
explicit with ‘‘The vine-prop Elme’’ (FQ 1.1.8). Elm and vine together stand for
69
Emmet
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
husband and wife. It has been the practice in Italy for millennia to train vines
up elms (see Virgil, Georgics 1.2, 2.221), and it seems to have been a common
expression in Latin to ‘‘marry’’ (maritare) the vine to a tree. Two wedding songs
by Catullus are the prime source for this image in poetry. Addressing the new
bride, he writes ‘‘just as the limber vine / Enfolds trees planted beside it, / He
will be enfolded in / Your embrace’’ (61.102--05). In the second song, the young
men’s chorus sings to the maidens: ‘‘Just as the unwed vine (vidua . . . vitis) that
grows on naked ground / Can never raise herself, never produce ripe grapes,
. . . // But if she happens to be joined to a husband elm (ulmo . . . marito)’’ she will
be tended and fruitful, so a maiden must find a husband (62.49--58, trans. Lee).
(Ben Jonson included a translation of this passage in his masque Hymenaei
749--64.)
Horace (e.g., 2.15.4), Juvenal, Ovid, and other Latin poets used the same
metaphor, and it became commonplace in European poetry after the
Renaissance. Shakespeare’s Adriana says to the man she thinks is her husband,
‘‘Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine’’ (CE 2.2.174). Shakespeare alters the
vine to ivy once, where Titania, winding Bottom in her arms, says, ‘‘the female
ivy so / Enrings the barky fingers of the elm’’ (MND 4.1.42--43). Garcilaso has a
disillusioned variant, where a spurned lover complains that his ivy is clinging
to another wall and his vine to another elm (‘‘Egloga primera’’ 136--37); and so
does Góngora: ‘‘That lovely vine / that you see embracing the elm / divides its
leaves discreetly / with the neighboring laurel’’ (‘‘Guarda corderos’’ 17--20).
Milton has Adam and Eve, before the Fall, doing their rural work: ‘‘they led
the Vine / To wed her Elm; she spous’d about him twines / Her marriageable
arms, and with her brings / Her dow’r th’adopted Clusters, to adorn / His
barren leaves’’ (PL 5.216--20). As late as Tennyson we find the image: ‘‘we two /
Were always friends, none closer, elm and vine’’ (The Princess 2.315--16).
See Ivy, Oak.
Emmet
Evening
Evening star
Eye
70
see Ant
see East and west
see Star
The most prominent and expressive of facial features as well as the organs of
sight, eyes appear in literature more often than any other parts of the body.
Their appearances are most often literal or metanymical (e.g., ‘‘in their eyes’’
means ‘‘in their sight’’), especially in love poetry, where for centuries the
convention reigned that love enters through the eyes of the lover, very often
because (now metaphorically) the eyes of the beloved ‘‘darted’’ a killing or
inflaming glance. ‘‘Those eyes of yours have inveigled themselves through my
own eyes into the depths of my heart,’’ says a character in Apuleius, ‘‘and are
kindling in my marrow the keenest of flames’’ (Met 10.3, trans. Walsh).
Guillaume de Lorris describes the god of love as shooting him ‘‘through my
eye and into my heart’’ (Romance of the Rose 1692). Petrarch tells how ‘‘Love
found me altogether disarmed, / And the way open through my eyes to my
heart’’ (Rime 3). Sidney’s Astrophil is full of praise for Stella’s eyes -- Nature’s
chief work (7), where Cupid shines (12), which make infinite arrows for Cupid
Falcon
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
beneath two bows (brows) (17), whose beams are joys (42), and so on. After
centuries of this image, all we know for truth, as Yeats has it in ‘‘Drinking
Song,’’ is that ‘‘Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye.’’
So susceptible are eyes that Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream can apply a
juice to them to make their owners fall in love with the next creature they
behold.
Eyes express thought and feeling. ‘‘Your eyes were not silent,’’ Ovid writes
(Amores 2.5.17); Medea has ‘‘crime in her eyes’’ (Tristia 2.526); ‘‘Her eyes flashed
lightning,’’ says Propertius (4.8.55). A warrior in Spenser casts his ‘‘eye flaming
with wrathfull fyre’’ (FQ 1.5.10). A sonnetizing character in Shakespeare nicely
names ‘‘the heavenly rhetoric of thine eyes’’ (LLL 4.3.55). Eyes not only flash
lightning but display all weathers, shining like the sun, clouding over, raining
tears. They express jealousy if they turn green -- Shakespeare has ‘‘green-eyed
jealousy’’ MV 3.2.110) (see other instances under Green) -- or if they turn
‘‘whally,’’ Spenser’s unusual word: Lechery’s goat has ‘‘whally eies (the signe of
gelosy)’’ (FQ 1.4.24); looking askance, with ‘‘wanton eyes,’’ may have a similar
rhetoric (FQ 3.1.41). Disdain for death casts a ‘‘cold eye’’ in Yeats’s ‘‘Under Ben
Bulben.’’
Plato writes of ‘‘the eye of the soul’’ (Republic 533d; cf. 527e), and Aristotle
uses that phrase to define ‘‘intelligence’’ (Nicomachean Ethics 1144a30). Ovid says
of Pythagoras that the ‘‘things that nature kept from mortal sight / His
inward eye explored’’ (Met. 15.63--64, trans. Melville). Hamlet and Horatio each
use the phrase ‘‘mind’s eye’’ (1.2.185, 1.1.115); ‘‘my soul’s imaginary sight /
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view’’ (Sonnets 27; cf. 113).
Blindness, then, sometimes bespeaks wisdom or inner sight. Homer is said
to have been blind, and blind Milton invokes him and others as precedents for
himself: ‘‘Blind Thamyris, and blind Maeonides [Homer], / And Tiresias and
Phineus prophets old’’ (PL 3.35--36). Oedipus, famous for his perspicacity, defies
the blind Tiresias, but when he learns the soothsayer was right, Oedipus
plucks out his eyes. Lear is spiritually blind, but it is Gloucester in the parallel
plot whose eyes are stamped out.
Eyes are central to Hoffmann’s tale ‘‘The Sandman’’: a man said to be the
sandman, who puts sand in the eyes of a child to make it sleep, is really an
evil magician, who demands the eyes of the child; later he turns up as a
telescope salesman, and he has a hand in making a lifelike automaton whose
false eyes seem to speak.
The sun, the moon, and occasionally the stars are said to be, or to have,
eyes: see Sun, Moon. Dante calls the island of Delos the place where ‘‘the two
eyes of the sky’’ were born, i.e., Apollo and Artemis/Diana, the sun and the
moon (Purgatorio 20.132).
F
Falcon
Fall
see Hawk
see Autumn
71
Fame or glory
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Fame or glory
72
Like a few other entries in this dictionary (e.g., Death, Dream), fame or glory
is a concept that seldom serves as a symbol of something else but is itself
often symbolized in distinctive conventional ways in western literature.
Words meaning ‘‘fame’’ are usually derived from roots meaning ‘‘hear’’ or
‘‘say,’’ since before modern times a person’s fame depended almost entirely on
the heard or spoken word. Homer’s term for it, kleos, derives from the IndoEuropean root kleu-, which also yields Greek kluo, ‘‘I hear,’’ klutos, ‘‘heard-of,
famous,’’ Kleio (whence Latin Clio), the muse of epic poetry, and several other
words. The English derivatives of kleu- are ‘‘loud’’ and ‘‘listen.’’ In Sanskrit the
same root generates sravah, ‘‘fame’’ (in the Rigveda), while in Slavic it produces
slava, ‘‘fame’’ (and slovo, ‘‘word, epic tale’’). These words are closely associated
with epic poetry, which was the chief vehicle of glory in ancient times. Latin
fama, which passes through French into English as ‘‘fame,’’ is related to fari,
‘‘to speak,’’ and fatum, ‘‘utterance, something spoken by a god or oracle,’’
which yields English ‘‘fate.’’ An Old English word for ‘‘fame’’ is blaed (as in
Beowulf 1761), which can mean ‘‘breath’’ as well; it is related to blawan, ‘‘blow,’’
and blaest. Latin gloria is of uncertain origin.
Unlike kleos in Homer, fama in Virgil is sometimes a debased version of
poetic fame. Virgil personifies Fama, usually translated as ‘‘Rumor,’’ as a bird
with an eye on every feather and just as many tongues and ears (Aeneid
4.181--83). Shakespeare follows him in the Induction to 2 Henry 4, where
Rumor is ‘‘painted full of tongues.’’ Fame may also be dismissed as mere
breath, fickle and evanescent air, at least on earth. ‘‘Worldly renown is
nothing other than / a breath of wind,’’ Dante writes, ‘‘that blows now here,
now there, / and changes name when it has changed its course’’ (Purgatorio
11.100--02, trans. Mandelbaum). If an enemy speaks one’s praise, Shakespeare’s
Aeneas says, ‘‘That breath fame blows’’ (TC 1.3.244). ‘‘What’s Fame?’’ Pope asks:
‘‘a fancy’d life in others’ breath’’ (Essay on Man 4.237). Byron notes that ‘‘love of
glory’s but an airy lust’’ (Don Juan 4.101.2). Great fame may require that breath
be blown through a trumpet. Spenser speaks of the ‘‘trump of fame’’ and
‘‘fame in her shrill trump’’ (Sonnets 29 and 85); Beattie disdains the
‘‘obstreperous trump of Fame’’ (Minstrel 1.2.6); Dryden writes, ‘‘Fame is the
trumpet, but your smile the prize’’ (Epistle 4.18). Clio is also a trumpeter. See
under Trumpet for more examples.
Poets have claimed the privilege of conferring true fame on those who
deserve it, including themselves. The bard Demodocus in Homer’s Odyssey sings
the klea andron, the ‘‘famous deeds of men’’ (8.73). Some of these deeds, in
fact, were brought about by the gods so that bards might sing them: Troy was
destroyed, according to Alcinous, ‘‘for the sake of a song for those to come’’
(8.580), while Helen says that Zeus brought misery to her and Paris so they
will be the subject of song (Iliad 6.357). Sappho warns a woman that she will
be forgotten because she has no share in ‘‘the roses of Pieria’’ (the Muses) (Frag.
55). Virgil hopes his poem will preserve the memory of Nisus and Euryalus
(Aeneid 9.446--49). Horace notes that many brave men lived before Agamemnon
but, lacking a Homer, they descended unmourned into the darkness (Odes 4.9).
Petrarch claims that ‘‘our study’’ (poetry) makes men immortal through fame
(Rime 104). In Sonnet 8 Milton offers to requite a gentle act of a conquering
soldier by employing the ‘‘charms’’ of poetry to grant him fame. Poetry, says
Foscolo, ‘‘defeats the silence of ten thousand years’’ (‘‘On Sepulchers’’ 233--34).
Field
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In Homer, Virgil, and other classical poets, fame rises to heaven, and the
famous one becomes a star. Several examples of this imagery are given under
Star. We may then speak of ‘‘the clear sky of fame,’’ as Falstaff does (2H4
4.3.49), or ‘‘the heaven of fame,’’ as Shelley does (‘‘Ode to Liberty’’ 10).
Fame or Rumor, usually personified as female, may have a house; as Ovid
describes it, it stands on the highest peak, has a thousand openings, and is
built throughout of reverberating bronze (Met. 12.39--63). Chaucer develops
this idea at length in The House of Fame. A grander and nobler version is
Shelley’s temple in Canto 1 of Laon and Cythna, where the great poets and
thinkers of the past dwell together.
The word ‘‘glory’’ has lent itself more readily to Christian redefinition -heavenly glory, to go to glory, and so on -- than ‘‘fame’’ has. In English, at
least, ‘‘glory’’ often suggests a heavenly light, as it does in Wordsworth’s
‘‘Intimations’’ ode, and has served as a synonym of ‘‘halo.’’ The haloes over
the saints in paintings, then, represent their fame in heaven.
Field
Fire
see Plow, Seed
Fire is so important to human life and comes in so many forms -- the sun and
stars, lightning, volcanoes, sparks from flint, burning logs on a hearth,
candles, oil lamps, conflagrations of a city or forest -- that its symbolic
meanings in literature are as manifold as the forms a flame may take. Indeed
to Heraclitus its ever-changing shapes suggested that it is the arche or
fundamental substance of the world, the fire that Hopkins celebrates in ‘‘That
Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’’: ‘‘Million-fuelèd, nature’s bonfire burns on.’’ The
meanings of fire are not only manifold but sometimes ambiguous: what
warms can burn, what illuminates can dazzle and blind. Fires are found on
earth, in heaven, in hell, and in purgatory; they bring life and death; they can
kill by burning up or by burning out.
Here we shall detail only a few senses: the fire of the Lord in the Bible, the
fire of purgatory, the Promethean fire of culture or intellect, and the fire of
passion (lust and anger).
Like Zeus and Jupiter, the God of the Old Testament sends lightning, ‘‘fire
from the Lord out of heaven’’ (Gen. 19.24), but he is much more intimately
linked to other forms of fire. He descends upon Mt. Sinai in fire (Exod. 19.18),
the sight of his glory was like ‘‘devouring fire’’ (24.17), his angel speaks in a
burning bush (3.2) while the Lord himself ‘‘spake unto you out of the midst of
the fire’’ on the mountain (Deut. 4.12), ‘‘For the Lord thy God is a consuming
fire, even a jealous God’’ (4.24). The wrath of the Lord shall burn the wicked,
says Isaiah, ‘‘as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the
chaff’’ (5.24), ‘‘and the people shall be as the fuel of the fire’’ (9.19). From this
it is but a step to the ‘‘hell fire’’ with which Jesus threatens one who calls his
brother a fool (Matt. 5.22), the ‘‘lake of fire’’ which is the ‘‘second death’’
(Rev. 20.14--15). These fires of wrath are also purifying, for they destroy
only the wicked, the chaff. Daniel and his companions are unsinged in the
‘‘burning fiery furnace’’ (Dan. 3.26). Jesus, John the Baptist prophesies, ‘‘shall
baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire’’; he will purge the threshing
floor and ‘‘burn up the chaff’’ (Matt. 3.11--12). A more benign fire is in the
flames of Pentecost, ‘‘cloven tongues like as of fire,’’ that descended on the
73
Fire
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polyglot crowd and let them speak with ‘‘other tongues’’ to each other
(Acts 2).
It is a commonplace that hell is full of fire, but it is worth noting that the
most celebrated literary hell, Dante’s Inferno, is not fiery at its center; it is icy
cold, for the worst sins, those of malice rather than passion, are cold-blooded.
On the highest terrace of his Purgatorio, however, the lustful walk in fire, but
this is ‘‘the fire that refines’’ (26.148), a line that Eliot quotes in The Waste Land
(427). Eliot also strikingly combines the fires of Pentecost with those of purgatory in ‘‘Little Gidding’’: ‘‘The dove descending breaks the air / With flame
of incandescent terror / Of which the tongues declare / The one discharge
from sin and error. / The only hope, or else despair / Lies in the choice of pyre
or pyre -- / To be redeemed from fire by fire.’’ The fire that destroys Rochester’s
house, and blinds Rochester himself, in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre completes
a long skein of significant fire imagery; it is purgatorial, cleansing the Byronic
hero of his past sins.
Prometheus is the ‘‘Fire-Bringer’’ in Greek mythology, fire stolen in a fennel
stalk from Olympus and given to the miserable mortals below, Prometheus’
creatures, who had lived like ants in dark caves. Fire is thus both a real boon,
crucial for a truly human life, and a synecdoche for all cultural attainments,
spelled out by Aeschylus in Prometheus Bound: star-lore, numbers, letters,
domestication of animals, seamanship, medicine, divination, mining, indeed
‘‘every art of mortals is from Prometheus’’ (447--506). The Promethean fire in
mortals should lead them to scholarly study, but as Berowne and his friends
in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost discover, it is women’s eyes that ‘‘sparkle
still the right Promethean fire; / They are the books, the arts, the academes’’
(4.3.347--49).
The fire of passionate love and jealousy is one of the most widespread
symbols in literature. Perhaps its earliest appearance is in a fragment (31) by
Sappho, quoted by Longinus, in which she says ‘‘a subtle fire has crept beneath
my flesh’’ at the sight of her beloved with a man. In Catullus’ imitation of this
poem (51) a ‘‘thin flame’’ penetrates his limbs. Horace also imitates it, in Odes
1.13, where he is ‘‘consumed by slow fires within.’’ At Venus’ command Cupid
‘‘inflames’’ (incendat) Dido with love for Aeneas (Aeneid 1.660); fire imagery
recurs until it becomes literal at her suicide’s pyre. Ovid’s Medea conceives a
powerful fire for Jason (Met. 7.9). Seneca has Phaedra’s nurse urge her to
control her flames for Hippolytus (Phaedra 165). The metaphor is amusingly
elaborated in Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose: ‘‘The more a man
gazes on what he loves, the more his heart is fried and basted with lard’’
(2345--46). With more decorum one of Spenser’s characters tells of a time
‘‘when corage hott / The fire of love, and joy of chevalree, / First kindled in my
brest’’ (FQ 1.2.35). After the Fall, Adam feels Eve’s beauty ‘‘inflame my sense /
With ardor to enjoy thee’’ (Milton, PL 9.1031--32). In Racine’s Phèdre the queen
‘‘recognized Venus and her terrible flames’’ but could not repel her; now she
wishes to hide her ‘‘flame so black’’ from the light (277, 310). Keats’s Porphyro
rides across the moors ‘‘with heart on fire / For Madeline’’ (Eve of St. Agnes
75--76).
As early as Callimachus ‘‘fire’’ (pyr) could also mean the object of one’s
passion (Epigrams 27.5). Horace tells a young man in the throes of love that he
is ‘‘worthy of a better flame’’ (flamma) (Odes 1.27.20); this ode may have inspired
74
Flood
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Petrarch to address his beloved dolce mio foco (‘‘my sweet fire’’) (Rime 203) and
Boccaccio to name his lady Fiammetta (‘‘Little Flame’’) in some of his sonnets.
The same use of ‘‘flame’’ is found in a few English poems of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, as in this from Marvell’s ‘‘The Garden’’: ‘‘Fond
lovers, cruel as their flame, / Cut in these trees their mistress’ name’’ (19--20).
We still use the phrase ‘‘old flame’’ for a former lover.
In Greek and Latin literature one could also burn with anger or pride. The
chorus of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus warns Antigone and Ismene ‘‘not to
burn too much’’ over the fate of their father (1695). The youth of Aristophanes’
Clouds are enjoined to ‘‘burn’’ (with shame and anger, presumably) when they
are mocked (992). Since then the flames of wrath are almost as common as
those of love.
In the Iliad warriors are fiery. ‘‘They saw Idomeneus like a flame in his
strength’’ (13.330); ‘‘Thus they fought in the guise of a bright fire’’ (18.1). Fire
images blend with images of brightness, such as dazzling light from helmets
and shields (13.341--42) or the glare of a baleful star (5.5--6), and come to a
brilliant climax with the simile that likens Achilles’ appearance to a signal
flare sent up by a beleaguered city (18.207--14) -- an obvious foreshadowing of
Troy’s fate. Fire is even personified as Hephaestus, who fights on behalf of
Achilles against the River Scamander (book 21).
A Latin phrase ferrum flammaque, ‘‘iron and flame,’’ means ‘‘total
destruction’’; we would say ‘‘fire and sword.’’ Priam, for instance, sees Asia
falling in fire and sword (Juvenal 10.266).
Fire might symbolize passion of any sort, any warmth of feeling, even
human life itself. Both Jane Eyre and Rochester are fiery characters -Rochester appreciates Jane’s ‘‘soul made of fire’’ (chap. 24) -- whereas the
virtuous St. John Rivers is ‘‘cold as an iceberg’’ (chap. 35); many of the novel’s
intimate and emotional moments take place by the fireside. When Gradgrind,
in Dickens’s Hard Times, asks his daughter Louisa if she is willing to marry
Bounderby, she has been so defeated by his educational methods that she
agrees, but as she agrees she notices the ‘‘languid and monotonous smoke’’
from the Coketown chimneys, a symbol of her life, and she adds, ‘‘Yet when
the night comes, Fire bursts out, Father!’’ (1.15). (See Salamander, Volcano).
Flood
Flower
see Sea
Flowers, first of all, are girls. Their beauty, their beauty’s brevity, their
vulnerability to males who wish to pluck them -- these features and others
have made flowers, in many cultures, symbolic of maidens, at least to the
males who have set those cultures’ terms. The most obvious evidence is girls’
names. Daisy, Heather, Iris, Lily, Rose, and Violet remain common in English
today; Susan comes from Hebrew Shoshannah, meaning ‘‘lily’’; less common are
Flora (Latin for ‘‘flower’’) and Anthea (Greek for ‘‘flowery’’). Plant names,
whether a flower is implied or not, are also frequent: Daphne (Greek for
‘‘laurel’’), Hazel, Holly, Ivy, Laurel, Myrtle, Olive. With rare exceptions, such as
Hyacinth and Narcissus (from the Greek myths), boys are not given flower
names. ‘‘Custom hath been, time out of mind / With Rose or Lily to compare /
Our favourite maid!’’ So George Crabbe begins ‘‘The Flowers,’’ which likens a
dozen more flowers to different types of maids.
75
Flower
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Two of the earliest Greek poems, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the
Hesiodic Catalogues of Women, make the connection between girls as flowers
and their being plucked, raped, or snatched away. In the Hymn, Persephone is
gathering flowers of various kinds and sees a ‘‘marvelous radiant flower,’’ the
narcissus, and as she reaches for it she is abducted by Hades; she herself has a
‘‘flower-like face’’ (8). According to the Catalogues (19), Zeus sees Europa
gathering flowers in a meadow, disguises himself as a bull, and tricks her by
breathing forth a crocus. Moschus in Europa repeats the flower-picking motif,
as Ovid does in Metamorphoses 5 when tells the story of Proserpina
(Persephone).
In Euripides’ Ion, Creusa tells Apollo, who has abducted her: ‘‘You came with
hair flashing / Gold, as I gathered / Into my cloak flowers ablaze / With their
golden light’’ (887--90, trans. Willetts). Similarly Helen is gathering flowers
when Hermes snatches her away (Euripides, Helen 243--46). So is Oreithyia
when Boreas abducts her, according to a fragment of Choerilus.
Milton makes the metaphor explicit when he compares Eve to Proserpina:
‘‘where Proserpin gath’ring flow’rs / Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis / Was
gather’d’’ (PL 4.269--71). Later, some distance from Adam, Eve is supporting the
drooping flowers, ‘‘Herself, though fairest unsupported Flow’r, / From her best
prop so far, and storm so nigh’’ (9.432--33), when Satan appears as the serpent.
When Adam sees that she has fallen he drops the garland of roses he has
made for her (9.892) and tells her she has been ‘‘deflow’r’d’’ (9.901).
The word ‘‘deflower’’ for ‘‘deprive of virginity’’ has been in English since the
Middle Ages (from Late Latin deflorare), and in many languages ‘‘flower,’’
‘‘rose,’’ ‘‘cherry,’’ and the like are terms for the hymen or maidenhead.
Another prominent source of this symbolism is Catullus’ choral wedding
song: ‘‘Just as a flower that grows in a garden close, apart, / Unbeknown to
sheep . . . ; / Many boys have longed for it and many girls: / But when its bloom
is gone [defloruit], nipped off by a fingernail, / Never boy has longed for it and
never girl: / A maid too while untouched is dear the while to kin; / But when
with body smirched she loses her chaste bloom [florem], / She’s neither
pleasing then to boys nor dear to girls’’ (62.39--47, trans. Lee). Ben Jonson
incorporated a translation of this passage in his masque Hymenaei.
Ovid advises young women to pluck the flower before age overtakes them
(Art of Love 3.79--80). At the end of All’s Well that Ends Well the King asks Diana,
‘‘If thou beest yet a fresh uncropped flower / Choose thou thy husband and I’ll
pay the dower’’ (5.3.327--28). During the Golden Age, according to Lovelace,
‘‘Lasses like Autumn Plums did drop, / And Lads indifferently did crop / A
Flower, and a Maiden-head’’ (‘‘Love Made in the First Age’’ 16--18).
Blake in ‘‘The Sick Rose’’ succinctly restates the metaphor, with echoes of
Milton’s version of Eve’s fall. In his Visions of the Daughters of Albion, the brave
heroine Oothoon accepts an invitation by a marigold to pluck it, whereupon
she herself is raped by Bromion; like the plucky marigold, however, she
recovers from the rape and remains a virgin in her spirit.
Robert Frost finds life in the girl-plucked-while-plucking-flowers motif in
‘‘The Subverted Flower.’’
We speak of the ‘‘bloom’’ of youth of either sex, though more frequently of
girls. The transience of a girl’s beauty is frequently stated in floral terms, as in
Herrera’s advice: ‘‘Don’t be proud, Leucippe, of your beauty, / For you will not
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Flower
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be lovely always, / For the lily loses its colors, / The rose loses its beauty and
its fragrance, / And the green tree its blossoms’’ (Egloga 77.301--05). According
to Spenser, ‘‘that faire flowre of beautie fades away, / As doth the lilly fresh
before the sunny ray’’ (FQ 3.6.38). It is a proverb that the fairest flower soonest
fades; Milton invokes it in the opening of ‘‘Death of a Fair Infant’’: ‘‘O Fairest
flower, no sooner blown but blasted.’’
And of course anything not eternal, such as life itself, can seem no more
lasting than a flower. ‘‘A life was but a flower,’’ as the pages sing in As You Like
It (5.3.28). The prime source of this thought is Isaiah: ‘‘All flesh is grass, and
all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: / The grass withereth,
the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it’’ (40.6--7; cf. 1
Peter 1.24). The metaphor is reversed in Hugo’s line, ‘‘the flower passes like
life’’ (‘‘Regret’’ 23).
All these themes appear together in Capulet’s cry over the young Juliet,
apparently dead: ‘‘There she lies, / Flower as she was, deflowered by him
[death]’’ (RJ 4.5.36). They are united in a different way in the ‘‘gather ye
rosebuds’’ theme common in Cavalier poetry. (See Rose.)
‘‘Flower’’ can also mean the highest or most excellent of a type, as when
one speaks of a ‘‘flower of courtesy’’ or ‘‘the flower of Europe for his chivalry’’
(Shakespeare, RJ 2.5.43, 3H6 2.1.71). As the ‘‘choice’’ or ‘‘pick’’ of a kind,
‘‘flower’’ came to refer to select short poems gathered into a bouquet or posy
(itself from ‘‘poesy’’) and circulated as an anthology. ‘‘Anthology’’ is from
Greek anthologia, ‘‘gathering of flowers’’; it was translated into Latin as
florilegium, occasionally used in English. The Greek poet Meleager compiled a
set of epigrams that he called Stephanos, ‘‘Garland,’’ and likened each poet to a
flower. A collection of excerpts from Apuleius was called Florida. Gascoigne
wrote a collection called A Hundred Sundry Flowers; a sixteenth-century French
anthology bore the typical title Les Fleurs de Poésie Françoyse. In an elaboration
of this metaphor, Shelley offers his poem Epipsychidion to Emily: ‘‘Lady mine, /
Scorn not these flowers of thought, the fading birth / Which from its heart of
hearts that plant puts forth / Whose fruit, made perfect by thy sunny eyes, /
Will be as of the trees of Paradise’’ (383--87). Baudelaire’s deliberately shocking
if mysterious title, Les Fleurs du Mal (‘‘Flowers of Evil’’), plays not only on the
equation of poem to flower but evokes Christian devotional works where
flowers are virtues or prayers.
There is a traditional language of flowers and herbs, with various dialects,
according to which each flower is assigned a meaning. Some of these meanings, if they are prominent in literature, may be found under various plant
names in this dictionary. Shakespeare’s Ophelia knows them well, even in her
madness: ‘‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance -- pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts,’’ and so on (Hamlet 4.5.175--77).
Perdita passes out appropriate flowers at the sheep-shearing festival in The
Winter’s Tale 4.4.73 ff.). In the eighteenth century Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
wrote about a secret flower code for sending love messages in the Turkish
harem, and the notion appealed to many writers of Europe. The Romantics
sometimes looked on flowers as nature’s speech, or as speakers themselves,
with silent messages intelligible only to those initiated in nature’s mysteries.
Friedrich Schlegel begins a poem, ‘‘Flowers, you are silent signs’’ (‘‘Variations’’).
The most famous Romantic flower is the mysterious ‘‘blue flower’’ of Novalis’s
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novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, which seems to symbolize a primordial
harmonious realm, accessible only in dream, as well as a woman’s face. Not
just poems but a poet might be a flower, as in Lamartine: ‘‘The flower falls
while yielding its odors to the zephyr; / To life, to the sun, these are its
farewells; / As for me, I die; and my soul, at the moment it expires, / Is
emitted like a sad and melodious sound’’ (‘‘L’Automne’’).
Another tradition may be singled out as the ‘‘Flowers of Paradise,’’ lists or
catalogues of flowers growing in a garden or bower of love. The earliest is in
the Iliad, where Zeus and Hera make love on a bed of clover, crocus, and
hyacinth (14.347--49). Spenser’s Garden of Adonis has a myrtle grove with
‘‘wanton ivy,’’ eglantine, caprifole, hyacinth, narcissus, amaranthus, and other
flowers into which lovers were transformed (FQ 3.6.43--45; for Spenser’s other
flower catalogues see Virgil’s Gnat 665--80 and Muiopotmus 187--200). In the
‘‘blissful bower’’ of Milton’s Paradise are found laurel, myrtle, acanthus, iris,
rose, jessamine (jasmine), violet, crocus, and hyacinth (PL 4. 690--703).
Classical rhetoricians recognized a level of style they called ‘‘flowery’’
(antheron or floridum). An embellishment or ornament of speech has been
called a flower, as in the phrase ‘‘flowers of rhetoric.’’ An orator is ‘‘one that
hath phrases, figures and fine flowers / To strew his rhetoric with’’ (Jonson,
Sejanus 2.419--20). We still speak of a flowery speech or florid prose.
Flower entries in this dictionary: Almond, Amaranth, Asphodel, Crocus,
Daffodil, Daisy, Hyacinth, Lily, Marigold, Mistletoe, Pansy, Poppy, Purple
flower, Rose, Sunflower, Violet.
See also Garden, Seed.
Flute
Fly
78
see Pipe.
Flies, not surprisingly, are usually considered unpleasant, disease-ridden, and
evil. A swarm of flies is the fourth of the ten plagues Moses sends upon the
Egyptians (Exod. 8.21--31). Egypt was known for its flies, especially when the
Nile was in flood, and Isaiah even calls Egypt itself a fly (7.18). One of the
terms for Satan, or ‘‘the prince of the devils,’’ was Beelzebub (Matt. 12.24),
which has been translated as ‘‘lord of the flies’’ (whence the title of Golding’s
novel about the source of evil).
Homer brings out another feature of the fly: ‘‘the boldness of the fly /
which, even though driven away from a man’s skin, / persists in biting out of
relish for human blood’’ (Iliad 17.570--72). In Renaissance emblem books the fly
is sometimes a symbol of persistence or pertinacity. That sense may lie behind
Sartre’s decision to substitute flies for the relentless Eumenides or Furies in
his play about Orestes, Les Mouches (‘‘The Flies’’)
In English poetry ‘‘fly’’ is the generic term for any winged insect, and as
such (like ‘‘insect’’) it symbolizes ephemerality. Indeed, as Bacon writes, ‘‘There
are certain Flies that are called Ephemera that live but a day’’ (Sylva sec. 697).
The chorus of Milton’s Samson Agonistes speaks of ‘‘the common rout’’ of men
who ‘‘Grow up and perish, as the summer fly’’ (675--77). Tennyson in an even
bleaker mood sees in ‘‘men the flies of latter spring, / That lay their eggs, and
sting and sing / And weave their petty cells and die’’ (In Memoriam 50.10--12). Its
ephemerality makes it a poignant presence in Dickinson’s ‘‘I heard a Fly
buzz -- when I died’’ (no. 465). (See Insect.)
Folding star
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The fly could also mean any insignificant thing, as in Chaucer’s ‘‘I counte
hym nat a flye’’ (Reeve’s Tale 4192). ‘‘As flies to wanton boys, are we to th’ Gods,’’
says Shakespeare’s Gloucester; ‘‘They kill us for their sport’’ (Lear 4.1.36--37).
But if people are like flies in the brevity of their life, then perhaps flies are
like people in their interior lives, which might seem long to them. So Blake
asks a fly whom he has brushed away, ‘‘Am not I / A fly like thee? / Or art not
thou / A man like me? / . . . / If thought is life / And strength & breath; / And
the want of thought is death; // Then am I / A happy fly, / If I live, / Or if I die’’
(‘‘The Fly’’). Shelley speculates in a note to Queen Mab (8.203) that time is subjective, a function of our consciousness. ‘‘Perhaps the perishing ephemeron,’’
he concludes, ‘‘enjoys a longer life than the tortoise.’’
Shelley also once likens his verses, ill received, to a fly: ‘‘What hand would
crush the silken-winged fly, / The youngest of inconstant April’s minions, /
Because it cannot climb the purest sky / Where the swan sings, amid the sun’s
dominions?’’ (Witch of Atlas 9--12). (See Swan.) For other examples of this
metaphor see under Butterfly.
Folding star
Foot
Forest
see Sheep
see Path
Forests used to be places of danger to a degree difficult to appreciate today,
when for modern city-dwellers they are retreats or playgrounds; perhaps only
arctic forests or tropical jungles retain something of the fearful vastness and
strangeness they once implied. Forests are traditionally dark, labyrinthine,
and filled with dangerous beasts.
The earliest literature is sometimes structured on the contrast between city
and wilderness. The Gilgamesh epic, for instance, moves from the walls of Uruk
to the pastures of Enkidu and thence to the great cedar forest of the monster
Humbaba. Euripides’ Bacchae sets the civic order of Thebes, in the person of
King Pentheus, against the wooded mountain Cithaeron, where the maenads
dance to the alien god Dionysus.
To be ‘‘lost in the woods,’’ or ‘‘not yet out of the woods,’’ remain common
phrases. It is there that one loses one’s way or path, which taken allegorically
has meant to wander in error or sin. So Dante finds himself in a selva oscura or
dark wood at the opening of the Inferno, and Spenser sends the Redcross
Knight and Una into ‘‘the wandring wood,’’ the den of Error, where the trees
shut out heaven’s light (FQ 1.1.7,13). Bunyan’s pilgrim progresses through ‘‘the
wilderness of this world’’; Shelley, following Dante, goes forth ‘‘Into the wintry
forest of our life’’ (Epipsychidion 249). Hawthorne’s character ‘‘Young Goodman
Brown’’ leaves his wife, Faith, to go into the forest where he has an experience
that leaves his faith shattered. The natural basis of this symbolism is seconded
by the ancient notion that ‘‘wood’’ (Greek hyle, Latin silva) is fundamental
matter, the lowest stuff -- hence Dante’s punishment of suicides, who treated
their bodies as mere matter, is to imprison them in, or change them into,
trees (Inferno 13).
Roman writers treated their country estates as restorative havens from the
corruption and pettiness of urban life, but those estates were not primarily
forests, which remained forbidding. Shakespeare in several plays uses the
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natural world -- the forest of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the forest
of Arden in As You Like It -- as sites of reversal of city relationships and restoration of right order. With Romanticism a new appreciation of wildness
emerges, especially forests, mountains, and seashores, sometimes with religious intensity. Coleridge recalls how he pursued ‘‘fancies holy’’ through
untrodden woods and there found ‘‘The spirit of divinest Liberty’’ (‘‘France: An
Ode’’ 11, 21). Wordsworth claims ‘‘One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach
you more of man; / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can’’ (‘‘The
Tables Turned’’ 21--24). In Germany the forest, especially the Black Forest,
became a symbol not only of the true naturalness of life but also of the
‘‘roots’’ of the German nation. Wanderers and huntsmen abound in the poems
and stories of the period. The Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales often turn on forest
adventures; dwarves and gnomes and other woodland creatures know things
and do things townsfolk cannot. The Grimms published a journal called Old
German Forests, which linked the forests to the true German culture.
In ancient times the myth of Arcadia countered the more frightening and
realistic image of the forest. In book 8 of Virgil’s Aeneid Aeneas meets the
Arcadians at the site of future Rome, and their simple forest life stands, perhaps, both for the natural roots of Rome and for what has been lost with the
building of the great city. Much of American literature deals with the theme
of the ‘‘virgin land,’’ through which brave (usually male) explorers and fighters
penetrate, leaving civilization behind; their more primitive life serves as a
standard for judging the life of (usually female) settled society; but sometimes
there is a feeling that the conquest of the American wilderness is a rape of
the land and an unjust slaughter of the ‘‘savages’’ (the word comes ultimately
from Latin silva), or that to ‘‘go native’’ is itself false or dangerous.
See Nature.
Fort
Fountain
80
see Siege
In classical literature, fountains or springs (Greek krene, Latin fons) are sacred
to the Muses and sources of poetic inspiration. According to Hesiod, the Muses
on Mt. Helicon ‘‘dance about the violet-colored spring’’ and bathe in ‘‘the
Horse’s Spring [Hippocrene]’’ or the streams of Permessus and Olmeius
(Theogony 3--6); Hesiod, whose home was the village of Ascra on Helicon’s
slopes (in Boeotia), was later reputed to have drunk from the Hippocrene
himself. A later story had it that the Hippocrene was created by Pegasus’
stamping hoof (Callimachus, Aitia frag. 2.1; Ovid, Met. 5.256--64). (See Horse.)
Moschus claims that Homer and Bion were both nourished by fountains,
Homer by Pegasus’ spring, Bion by Arethusa (‘‘Lament for Bion’’ 77); Arethusa
is in the harbor of Syracuse in Sicily, the homeland of pastoral poetry.
Lucretius says ‘‘I love to draw near the untouched fountains [of Pieria] and
drink from them’’ (1.927--28); Pieria, on the north slope of Olympus in
Macedonia, was the original home of the Muses, whence they moved to
Helicon. Horace addresses the Muse ‘‘who delights in clear springs’’ (1.26.6--7).
Virgil tells how Gallus had wandered by the Permessus but one of the Muses
led him to Helicon, where he was taught to sing like Hesiod (Eclogues 6.64--73).
Propertius makes this distinction of sources more explicit when he turns from
love poetry and vows to sing of warfare in the epic mode, ‘‘But as yet my
Fox
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songs are ignorant of Ascran springs: / Love has but laved them in Permessus’
stream’’ (2.10.25--26, trans. Shepherd).
Theocritus, after drinking from a spring in the muse-like Nymphs’ cave
somewhere in Sicily, gratefully addresses them as ‘‘Castalian Nymphs, who
hold steep Parnassus’’ (Idylls 7.148) -- Castalia being yet another spring, also
sacred to Apollo and the Muses, on Parnassus near Delphi; Milton calls it
‘‘th’inspir’d / Castalian Spring’’ (PL 4.273--74).
Jonson’s ‘‘clear Dircaean fount / Where Pindar swam’’ is the river Dirce at
Thebes, where Pindar was a swan (‘‘Ode Allegoric’’ 19--20). (See Swan.)
If holy springs confer fame on a poet, at least one poet, Horace, promised to
confer fame on an unknown spring, in the ode beginning ‘‘O fountain of
Bandusia’’ (3.13); the spring has never been located! And if Homer was nourished by a fountain, he has become one himself for all succeeding poets:
‘‘Maeonides [Homer], from whose perennial fount / The mouths of poets are
moistened with Pierian waters’’ (Ovid, Amores 3.9.25--26). (See River.)
Although just what spring belonged to what genre of poetry was not consistently sorted out by the ancients, it is a little odd that the anthology
Englands Helicon (1600) should be devoted to pastoral poetry. Milton is safer in
addressing ‘‘O Fountain Arethuse’’ in his pastoral elegy ‘‘Lycidas’’ (85); he
remains vague, however, in Paradise Lost, where he says he still wanders
‘‘where the Muses haunt / Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill’’
(3.27--28), and later where he mentions ‘‘th’ inspired / Castalian spring’’
(4.273--74) without saying what it inspired. Pope gives his famous advice to
young poets: ‘‘A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing; / Drink deep, or taste not
the Pierian Spring’’ (Essay on Criticism 215--16), ‘‘Pierian’’ here referring to the
Muses, wherever the spring may be. Gray rightly invokes ‘‘Helicon’s
harmonious springs’’ in ‘‘The Progress of Poetry: A Pindaric Ode’’ (3).
See Sea.
Fox
As a symbol of cunning or trickery the fox is inscribed in our language: Old
English foxung meant ‘‘wile’’ or ‘‘craftiness,’’ while today we try to ‘‘outfox’’ an
opponent. It goes back, of course, to the Greeks. Solon accuses his political
opponents of walking ‘‘with the steps of the fox’’ (Loeb 10.5); Pindar praises
the wrestler Melissos for the boldness of a lion ‘‘but in skill he is a fox, which
rolls on its back to check the eagle’s swoop’’ (Isth. 4.47--48, trans. Race);
Aristophanes several times uses ‘‘foxiness’’ to mean ‘‘trickery’’ (e.g., Lysistrata
1270). The lion-fox contrast becomes standard. Lucretius asks why lions are
innately violent and foxes cunning (3.742); Horace describes someone as a
‘‘crafty [astuta] fox masquerading as a noble lion’’ (Satires 2.3.186). Mocking the
part of the timorous lion in the mechanicals’ play, Shakespeare’s Lysander
says, ‘‘This lion is a very fox for his valour’’ (MND 5.1.231). Another famous
contrast comes from Archilochus: ‘‘The fox knows many things, the hedgehog
one -- a big one’’ (118 Edmonds).
Chaucer and Spenser call the fox ‘‘false,’’ Spenser also ‘‘wily’’ and ‘‘maister
of collusion’’ (SC, ‘‘May’’ 219). Shakespeare’s Venus urges Adonis to hunt ‘‘the
fox which lives by subtlety’’ rather than the dangerous boar (Venus and Adonis
675). The title character of Jonson’s Volpone, or, The Fox is as cunning as his
name suggests (from Italian volpe, from Latin vulpes). It is as an emblem of
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Frankincense and myrrh
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cunning that Dante introduces the fox in his allegorical pageant of the history of the church in Purgatorio; there it stands for heresy, a greater danger
than forthright violence (32.118--23).
Foxes are protagonists in many fables from Aesop to modern times; the
most famous is the fox and the grapes, the origin of the phrase ‘‘sour grapes.’’
There is a rich tradition of medieval tales about Reynard the Fox (French
Renard, German Reinecke).
The Bible does not bring out the cunning of foxes -- the Hebrew word for it
might also mean ‘‘jackal’’ -- but a passage from the Song of Solomon, ‘‘Take us
the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines’’ (2.15), has bred many allegorical
interpretations, and might also lie behind Dante’s fox (taking the garden-vineyard in the Song as the church). The Little Foxes is the title of a play by
Lillian Hellman.
Frankincense and
myrrh
Frankincense is an aromatic gum resin drawn from the frankincense tree. The
word means ‘‘best incense’’: the adjective was applied to plants and trees of
highest quality (‘‘frank-myrrh’’ is attested). That sense of ‘‘frank’’ derived from
its sense ‘‘free (of impurities)’’ or ‘‘noble,’’ both in turn from the ethnic word
‘‘Frank’’ (Latin Francus), for the Franks were the freemen or nobles of Gaul,
which they had conquered. Its Hebrew name lebonah (whence Greek libanos,
libanotos) means ‘‘white (stuff),’’ as the best incense was white when crushed
into a powder. It was burned during sacrifices (Lev. 2.1--2; Herodotus 1.183;
Aristophanes, Clouds 426). Its main source in ancient times was Arabia Felix,
especially the region of modern Yemen and Oman. When the Queen of Sheba
(in Yemen) visited Solomon she brought great quantities of spices (1 Kgs 10.10);
Jeremiah refers to ‘‘incense from Sheba’’ (6.20), while Virgil imagines Venus’
temple in Paphos warm with ‘‘Sabaean incense’’ (Sabaeo / ture, Aeneid 1.416--17).
Milton compares the perfumes of Eden with ‘‘Sabaean odours from the spicy
shore / Of Arabie the blest’’ (PL 4.162--63).
Ovid says the phoenix feeds on the ‘‘tears [gum] of frankincense’’ (turis
lacrimis) and ‘‘juice of amomum’’ (Met. 15.394); repeated by Dante (Inferno
24.110).
Myrrh (Hebrew mor, Greek smyrna, murra) is an aromatic gum produced by
the myrrh tree, which also grew in Arabia, among other places. According to
the Bible it was used as incense, as perfume, and in embalming corpses. Its
taste is bitter, but it was sometimes mixed into wine; such a mixture was
offered to Jesus on the cross (Mark 15.23). Frankincense and myrrh appear
together three times in the Song of Solomon, and they make two of the three
gifts the wise men bring to the infant Jesus (Matt. 2.11). That gold is the third
indicates how costly the two resins were. Its use in embalming lies behind the
metaphor with which Scève addresses his beloved: ‘‘you will be for me the
incorruptible Myrrh / against the worms of my mortality’’ (‘‘La blanche
aurore,’’ Délie).
See also Ovid’s tale of Myrrha (Met. 10.298--518).
Frog and toad
If frogs and toads are distinguished at all, frogs are usually distinctively
raucous, though benign, while toads are distinctively ugly, venomous, and evil.
There is something of a tradition in classical literature where frogs are a
kind of comic chorus, notably in Aristophanes’ The Frogs, where they are, in
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Fruit
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fact, the chorus. (Two other Greek comedies, now lost, had the same title.)
Moschus laments that Bion the poet is now silent while ‘‘it was decreed by
the Nymphs that a frog may sing forever’’ (‘‘Lament for Bion” 107). Virgil notes
that among the signs of a storm we hear ‘‘the frogs in the mud croak their
ancient quarrel” (Georgics 1.378), possibly an allusion to Aristophanes’ frogs,
who mocked Dionysus with their croaking skills.
Frogs are one of the ten plagues Moses brings upon Egypt (Exodus 8.1--15).
John of Patmos sees ‘‘three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth
of the beast”; they are ‘‘the spirits of devils” (Rev. 16.13--14). Horace describes a
witch’s potion that includes ‘‘the blood of a hideous toad” (or ‘‘frog”: Latin
rana) (Epodes 5.18). ‘‘Toad” by itself (Latin rubeta) is used by Juvenal to mean its
poison (Satires 1.69--72). A venomous toad is the first ingredient to be tossed
into the three witches’ pot in Macbeth (4.1.6--9). The biblical and classical
sources combined in the Middle Ages to make toads (and sometimes frogs)
symbols of the devil or of several sins, especially gluttony and avarice. Milton’s
Satan was found ‘‘squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve” (PL 4.800). Three
times Shakespeare’s Richard III is called a poisonous toad, and of these twice a
‘‘bunch-backed toad” (R3 1.2.245, 1.3.245, 4.4.81).
In folktales, especially German, princes and occasionally princesses are
enchanted as frogs until the spell is broken by a kiss or another act of love. As
small animals, frogs and toads have lent themselves to allegories and fables
(Aesop, La Fontaine, and others), as well as to the comic epic attributed to
Homer, The Battle of the Frogs and the Mice.
Fruit
see Apple
G
Gall
Garden
see Bile, Wormwood
The two most influential gardens in western literature are both biblical: the
garden of Eden and the ‘‘garden enclosed’’ of the Song of Solomon (4.12).
‘‘And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden’’ (Gen. 2.8) -- ‘‘Eden’’
by tradition means ‘‘delight’’ or ‘‘luxury’’ -- with a river and pleasant trees
bearing edible fruit (9--10). When Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge
they were expelled from the garden, and human history began. Nothing is
said about regaining the garden until Isaiah writes, ‘‘For the Lord shall
comfort Zion . . . and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like
the garden of the Lord’’ (51.3), whereafter it looms large in messianic hopes.
Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is this garden called Paradise. ‘‘Paradise’’
comes from Greek paradeisos, which the writers of the Septuagint (Greek Old
Testament) used to translate ‘‘garden’’ in Genesis; the Greek word comes from
Old Persian pairi-daeza, ‘‘around-wall,’’ ‘‘enclosure,’’ and then ‘‘park’’ or
‘‘garden.’’ Late Hebrew pardes, borrowed from Persian, is used three times in
the Old Testament for various other gardens or orchards, including the one in
the Song of Solomon (4.13). In the New Testament ‘‘paradise’’ is the heavenly
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Garden
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kingdom. Jesus tells one of those crucified with him, ‘‘Today shalt thou be
with me in paradise’’ (Luke 23.43). John of Patmos is told by Christ to say, ‘‘To
him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst
of the paradise of God’’ (Rev. 2.7).
The garden of the Song is metaphorical and erotic: ‘‘A garden enclosed is
my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed’’ (4.12); ‘‘I am come
into my garden, my sister, my spouse’’ (5.1); ‘‘My beloved is gone down into his
garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies’’ (6.2).
Perhaps as far back as Sumerian literature the word for ‘‘garden’’ has stood for
the body of a woman; Greek kepos and Latin hortus were occasionally used to
refer to a woman’s sexual parts. The frank eroticism of the Song, however, was
a difficulty for both Jewish and Christian theologians. Though it was thought
to be a wedding song of Solomon and a Shulamite woman, it was taken
allegorically as the wedding of God with Israel or of Christ with the soul, the
church, or the Virgin Mary. ‘‘Thou, O Virgin, art a garden enclosed,’’ St.
Ambrose wrote, ‘‘preserve thy fruits.’’ Some Protestant theologians were so
embarrassed by the Song as to argue that it had only an allegorical meaning,
like a code or rebus. The sensual language of the song, in any case, entered
into Christian liturgy and then into literature. A poem attributed to Donne,
for example, addressed to the Virgin, begins ‘‘O Frutefull garden, and yet
never tilde.’’
But the garden continued its literary life as both setting for and symbol of
love encounters. Shakespeare makes the ancient equation explicit when he
urges his friend to have children: ‘‘many maiden gardens, yet unset
[unplanted], / With virtuous wish would bear your living flowers’’ (Sonnets 16);
and more elaborately his Venus invites Adonis: ‘‘I’ll be a park, and thou shalt
be my deer: / Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale; / Graze on my
lips; and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie’’
(Venus and Adonis 231--34). Many other literary gardens stand for the erotic or
sensual life without such explicit mappings, such as the Garden of Pleasure in
The Romance of the Rose, the Bower of Bliss in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (2.12), or,
less explicitly, the garden where Julien seduces Mme de Re nal in Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black. As Guyon violently eradicates the Bower of Bliss, the boy
Wordsworth violates the ‘‘dear nook’’ where hazels grow, a ‘‘virgin scene’’
(‘‘Nutting’’ 16--21). A larger context for this symbolism, of course, is the
ancient tradition of a ‘‘married land’’ (Hebrew beulah), or ‘‘virgin land’’ to be
conquered and ‘‘planted.’’ (See Nature.)
The significance of gardens also overlaps with that of bowers, groves,
orchards, and other pleasant places. In a tradition beginning with the
garden of Alcinous in Homer’s Odyssey 8, the locus amoenus, Latin for ‘‘pleasant
place’’ or ‘‘pleasance,’’ is given increasingly elaborate descriptions. Some of the
conventions (shady trees, a spring or brook, flowers, birds) entered Christian
accounts of the garden of Eden.
Isaiah’s prophecy that Zion will become the garden of the Lord seems
ultimately to lie behind the scene in Shakespeare’s Richard II where the
Gardener uses terms from statecraft to describe his duties, after which his
assistant asks why they should keep the garden orderly ‘‘When our sea-walled
garden, the whole land, / Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers chocked up, / Her
fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined, / Her knots [flower beds]
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Garden
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disordered, and her wholesome herbs / Swarming with caterpillars?’’
(3.4.43--47). To Hamlet this world (and Denmark in particular) is ‘‘an unweeded
garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature / Possess it
merely [entirely]’’ (1.2.135--37).
The ‘‘plot’’ of the Bible -- from the loss of the earthly Eden in the third
chapter of Genesis to the promise of the heavenly Jerusalem in the final
chaper of Revelation -- is also the plot, much more succinct, of Milton’s
Paradise Lost. ‘‘Of man’s first disobedience,’’ it begins, ‘‘and the fruit / Of that
forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our
woe, / With loss of Eden, till one greater Man / Restore us, and regain the
blissful seat’’ (1.1--5); it ends, after Michael tells Adam, ‘‘[thou] shalt possess / A
Paradise within thee, happier far,’’ as Adam and Eve ‘‘Through Eden took their
solitary way’’ (12.586--87, 649). This pattern, with the interiorization of the lost
Eden, governs the plots of many works of modern literature. Wordsworth’s
autobiographical epic The Prelude begins with an Edenic moment -- ‘‘O there is
blessing in this gentle breeze / That blows from the green fields’’ (1.1--2) -- and
soon describes his Edenic childhood in gardenly terms: ‘‘Fair seed-time had my
soul, and I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear, / Much favoured in
my birthplace, and no less / In that beloved vale to which erelong / I was
transplanted’’ (1.305--09). He passes through the wilderness of political commitments and disaffections, loses and regains his imagination (book 11), and
ends by vowing that he and Coleridge will teach others ‘‘how the mind of
man becomes / A thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which
he dwells’’ (13.446--48; all 1805 version). Coleridge’s ‘‘Kubla Khan’’ draws heavily
on Milton’s Eden (book 4) for the description of Xanadu, the emperor’s walled
pleasure garden, which is lost (it seems) through warfare, but which might be
regained in music by a poet who has ‘‘drunk the milk of Paradise.’’ Keats’s
many bowers for escaping the fever and fret of the world include poetry itself,
‘‘All lovely tales,’’ things of beauty that ‘‘still will keep / A bower quiet for us’’
(Endymion 1.1--24). Burnett’s The Secret Garden is not alone among children’s
books that center on a secret paradise. T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets begins with an
evocation of a rose-garden, ‘‘our first world,’’ where ‘‘the leaves were full of
children,’’ (‘‘Burnt Norton’’ sec. 1) and concludes with the hope that we may
hear again ‘‘the children in the apple tree’’ and ‘‘arrive where we started / And
know the place for the first time’’ (‘‘Little Gidding’’ sec. 5).
A contributor to this pattern is the classical tradition of retirement from
the tumult of civic affairs to the quiet solitude of farm or garden. Virgil’s
description of an ideal garden and a worthy old gardener who feels as wealthy
as kings (Georgics 4.116--48) has had a large influence. Probably the greatest
meditation on gardens in English is Marvell’s ‘‘The Garden,’’ where the speaker
turns his back on the ‘‘uncessant Labours’’ of public endeavor, embraces
repose, solitude, and the ‘‘wond’rous Life’’ of lovely green and luscious fruits
that drop about his head, and feels like Adam in ‘‘that happy Garden-state’’
before the Fall. In the famous ending of Voltaire’s Candide this tradition
culminates: abandoning the world about which he had philosophized in vain,
Candide insists, Il faut cultiver notre jardin, ‘‘We must dig in our garden.’’
Candide labors, whereas Marvell’s speaker just picks up fallen fruit: this
contrast in effect repeats the debate between nature and art (artifice) that
often took place in and about gardens. A brief but charming example is the
85
Ghost
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exchange between Perdita and Polixenes in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale
(4.4.79--103). How to lay out a real garden was much debated as well, from the
Renaissance through the Romantic era, and a good deal of cultural history is
refracted in the development from the more ‘‘artificial’’ and geometrical style
of the Italian and (especially) the French gardens to the more ‘‘natural,’’ less
‘‘planned’’ look of the English garden.
A book of poems, finally, might be called a ‘‘garden,’’ as the individual
poems are ‘‘flowers’’. (See Flower.) Examples range from one of Goethe’s Roman
Elegies, which introduces the set -- ‘‘Here my garden is planted, here I tend the
flowers of Love’’ -- to Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.
See Seed, Serpent
Ghost
Glass
see Mirror
Glory
see Fame or glory
Goat
86
see Bat
The pastoral economies of the ancient Mediterranean depended on goats as
well as sheep, especially for milk. It was a goat, or goat-nymph, Amaltheia,
that nursed the infant Zeus, and one of Zeus’s epithets in Homer, aigioxos,
usually translated ‘‘aegis-bearing,’’ may instead be derived directly from aix,
‘‘goat’’ (Pope translates it ‘‘goat-nurs’d’’ at Odyssey 9.330 = 9.275 in the Greek).
Goat’s milk is still a common food in Greece and elsewhere in the region.
Aside from nourishing Zeus, goats have another claim on literary history,
for the word ‘‘tragedy,’’ Greek tragoidia, seems to mean ‘‘goat-song,’’ or
‘‘performance by a goat-singer.’’ Just how goats came into it remains a
mystery: perhaps men in goat dress sang and danced, or a goat was sacrificed
to Dionysus the patron of tragedy, or a goat was given as a prize for the best
performance (the opinion of Horace in Ars Poetica 220).
In classical as well as Hebrew culture goats were offered as sacrifices. The
most symbolically interesting of these was the scapegoat. As it is explained in
Leviticus, the priest is to take two goats and decide by lot to sacrifice one as a
sin offering but let the other live and ‘‘let him go for a scapegoat into the
wilderness’’; before it is let free ‘‘Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the
head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of
Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins, putting them upon the
head of the goat, and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the
wilderness’’ (16.10, 21). There is reason to believe that some of the abuse of
Christ during the Passion is derived from scapegoat rituals in use at the time.
‘‘Scapegoat’’ is used by literary critics to refer to characters such as Malvolio in
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or Shylock in Merchant of Venice who are banished
from society, or at least excluded from the comic reconciliation, at the
end.
Goats are proverbially lecherous. Horace calls one libidinosus (Epodes 10.23).
Spenser depicts Lechery riding on a bearded goat (FQ 1.4.24). A ‘‘lecherous’’
‘‘whoremaster,’’ according to Shakespeare’s Edmund, has a ‘‘goatish
disposition’’ (Lear 1.2.124--28); Iago links goats with monkeys and wolves as
exemplars of lust (Othello 3.3.403--04; see also 4.1.263).
Gold
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Pan, the Greek goat-god, was notably randy, and he seems to have lent some
of his physical and moral traits to Christian depictions of the devil, such as
his beard, the ‘‘goatee.’’
‘‘To separate the sheep from the goats’’ means to ‘‘distinguish the good
from the evil.’’ The phrase comes from Matthew 25.31--46, which describes the
Last Judgment; the goats are the sinners, and are damned. (See Left and right,
Sheep.)
‘‘Goat,’’ now the generic term, once meant the female, with ‘‘buck’’ reserved
for the male; in the fourteenth century ‘‘he-goat’’ and ‘‘she-goat’’ came into
use, then ‘‘billy-goat’’ and ‘‘nanny-goat’’; a young goat is a kid.
Gold
Gold is the first of metals. ‘‘Gold, like fire blazing / in the night, shines
preeminent amid lordly wealth,’’ says Pindar (Olymp. 1.1--2). Its beauty and
purity gave it divine status in biblical as well as classical culture; untarnishable and thus immortal, it belongs to the gods -- ‘‘gold is the child of
Zeus’’ (Pindar, frag. 222). Hera, Artemis, and Eos (Dawn) have golden thrones,
Hera a golden chariot, Zeus and Apollo golden whips, Iris golden wings, Zeus
golden scales, Artemis and Ares golden reins, Calypso and Circe golden
‘‘zones’’ (girdles), and Aphrodite herself is golden, all in Homer. The gods sit in
council on a golden floor, drinking out of golden cups (Iliad 4.2--3), Aphrodite
leaves her father’s golden house (Sappho, ‘‘Ode’’ 8), ‘‘Ye golden gods’’ is an
interjection in Aristophanes (Frogs 483). The tabernacle of the Israelites is to
have ‘‘a mercy seat of pure gold’’ and ‘‘two cherubims of gold’’ (Exod. 25.17--18),
while the New Jerusalem is ‘‘pure gold,’’ and ‘‘the street of the city was pure
gold’’ (Rev. 21.18, 21).
‘‘Golden’’ is applied to whatever is best or most excellent, such as the
golden rule, the golden verses of Pythagoras, or the golden mean. The last of
these is found first in Horace, who recommends neither daring the deep nor
hugging the shore but cultivating the auream . . . mediocritatem (2.10.5). There
was a golden race, who ‘‘lived like gods, with carefree heart, remote from toil
and misery,’’ according to Hesiod (Works and Days 112--13); in Ovid the time this
race lived becomes the golden age. (See Metal.)
The sun is golden -- Pindar again has ‘‘the golden strength of the sun’’ (Pyth.
4.144), while Shakespeare has the sun’s ‘‘gold complexion’’ (Sonnets 18) -whereas the moon is silver. ‘‘Sol gold is, and Luna silver we threpe [assert],’’
says Chaucer’s Canon Yeoman (826). Yeats ends his ‘‘Song of Wandering
Aengus’’ with ‘‘The silver apples of the moon, / The golden apples of the sun.’’
It was an ancient belief that gold was begotten by the fire of the sun and that
veins of gold in the earth slowly burned what they touched. Blake demands,
‘‘Bring me my Bow of burning gold’’ (Milton 1.9).
Gold burns in another sense, for it is a spiritual danger, a cause of
wickedness. The faithless Israelites built a golden calf, idolators made idols of
gold. Propertius observes that ‘‘Religion is vanquished, all men worship gold’’
(3.13.47). Aeneas cries, ‘‘To what, accursed lust for gold, do you / not drive the
hearts of men?’’ (Virgil, Aeneid 3.56--57). Horace notes that gold has broken
through city gates where force failed (3.16.9--18). Shakespeare’s Romeo calls it
‘‘saint-seducing gold’’ (1.1.214) and ‘‘worse poison to men’s souls’’ than the
drug he has just bought from the apothecary (5.1.80). In King Lear’s view,
‘‘Plate sin with gold, / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks’’
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Goose
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(4.6.165--66). ‘‘Judges and Senates have been bought for gold,’’ says Pope (Essay
on Man 4.187). Byron observes that the Age of Gold was the age ‘‘When gold
was yet unknown’’ (Don Juan 6.436).
A medieval Latin saying, ‘‘All that shines is not gold,’’ is repeated by
Chaucer’s Canon Yeoman: ‘‘But al thyng which that shineth as the gold / Nis
nat gold’’ (962--63); Cervantes’ Sancho Panza (Don Quixote 2.33); the scroll in the
golden casket of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (2.7.65); and many others.
Goose
Wild migrating geese are mentioned casually twice by Homer, and once he
likens a warrior among enemies to a vulture among geese (Iliad 17.460).
Domestic barnyard geese, however, play a significant symbolic part in the
Odyssey. While visiting Menelaus and Helen, Telemachus sees a mountain eagle
carrying a white goose from a yard; Helen interprets the omen to mean that
Odysseus will return home and take revenge on the suitors (15.160--78). The
same meanings are elaborated in Penelope’s dream, in which twenty tame
geese are killed by a mountain eagle, who then speaks, telling her he is her
husband and the geese her suitors (19.535--53). The suitors have been fattening
themselves idly in Odysseus’ house; they will be no match for the eagle.
Geese may seem foolish, hapless, or helpless. ‘‘Goose’’ means ‘‘fool’’ or ‘‘silly
one’’ in several modern languages, and Chaucer uses the adjective ‘‘goosish’’ of
people who dream things that never were (Troilus 3.583). But the Romans were
grateful to the geese of the Capitol, whose honking warned the citizens of a
surreptitious attack by the Gauls in 390 bc. The event is alluded to in Virgil’s
Aeneid 8.655; Ovid mentions it in Metamorphoses 2.539 and Fasti 1.453. Ovid also
refers to geese as good guards: they are ‘‘more sagacious than dogs’’ (Met.
11.599; see also 8.684). In his catalogue of birds Chaucer lists ‘‘The waker goos’’
(Parliament of Fowls 358); and Sidney may suggest this virtue when he names
‘‘the Goose’s good intent’’ as characteristic (First Eclogues 10.80).
Since at least the seventeenth century the phrase ‘‘all his geese are swans’’
has meant ‘‘he sees his things or deeds as greater than they are.’’ It lies
behind Byron’s quip about the poet Landor, who ‘‘has taken for a swan rogue
Southey’s gander’’ (Don Juan 11.472), and perhaps behind Stevens’ ‘‘Invective
against Swans,’’ which begins, ‘‘The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks.’’
(See Swan.)
The source of nursery rhymes called ‘‘Mother Goose’’ can be traced to
seventeenth-century France (‘‘Mère Oye’’) and perhaps farther back to a
German ‘‘Fru Gosen.’’
When Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus muses on his time in France he recalls a
young Irishman who was a ‘‘Son of a wild goose’’ (Ulysses, ‘‘Proteus’’). The wild
geese were Irishmen who emigrated to France or Spain after defeats by the
English, especially the Battle of the Boyne in 1690.
Grain
see Bread
Grape
see Wine
Grasshopper
88
see Cicada
Green
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Green
The Greek word translated as ‘‘green’’ or ‘‘yellow-green,’’ chloros (whence
English ‘‘chlorophyll’’), had a broader range of meanings than the color, just
as our ‘‘green’’ can mean ‘‘unripe’’ or ‘‘naı̈ve’’ without a color reference.
Though it is cognate with English ‘‘yellow’’ and ‘‘gold,’’ the primary sense of
Greek chloros may have been ‘‘sappy’’ or ‘‘having sap,’’ and hence ‘‘vital’’ or
‘‘vigorous.’’ The Greeks associated life and youth with moisture (water, blood,
juice, sap, semen, and so on) and old age and death with dryness. Homer calls
freshly cut or unseasoned wood chloros as we call it green (e.g., Odyssey 9.379).
Euripides speaks of ‘‘green flowers’’ (Iphigenia at Aulis 1297), and in other Greek
poets we find dew, tears, honey, wine, and even blood all modified by chloros.
The Latin word for ‘‘green,’’ viridis (whence English ‘‘verdant’’), could also
mean ‘‘youthful’’ or ‘‘vigorous’’ as well as ‘‘naı̈ve,’’ but it does not seem to have
had the wide range of chloros. On the other hand its likely kinship to other
Latin words suggests an older sense like ‘‘sappy’’ or ‘‘juicy’’: vir, ‘‘man’’ or
‘‘male’’ (whence English ‘‘virile’’ and ‘‘virtue’’) as source of semen; ver, ‘‘spring’’
(whence English ‘‘vernal’’) as the season of sap or moist life; virga, ‘‘green
twig,’’ whence virgo, ‘‘virgin.’’ Virgil speaks of ‘‘green youth’’ (viridique iuventa)
in Aeneid 5.295, and Catullus worries about a ‘‘girl in her greenest flower’’
(viridissimo . . . flore puella) who might go astray (17.14).
English ‘‘green’’ itself is related to ‘‘grow’’ and ‘‘grass.’’
The primary association of the color green, of course, is the herbage and
foliage of nature, especially in spring and summer. In April, Chaucer says, the
mead is clothed ‘‘With newe grene’’ (TC 1.157). Thomson cries, ‘‘gay Green! /
Thou smiling Nature’s universal Robe!’’ (Spring 83--84). Gardens are green, as
Marvell’s ‘‘The Garden’’ memorably reports: ‘‘No white nor red was ever seen /
So am’rous as this lovely green’’; withdrawn into the garden, the poet’s meditating mind reduces everything ‘‘To a green thought in a green shade’’ (17--18,
48). (Virgil also has a ‘‘green shade’’ in Eclogues 9.20.) ‘‘‘Tis the green wind of
May time / That suddenly wakes,’’ according to Clare (‘‘Spring Wind’’). Dylan
Thomas’s famous opening lines, ‘‘The force that through the green fuse drives
the flower / Drives my green age,’’ begin an account of a more violent kinship
with nature. Midsummer, according to Wallace Stevens, ‘‘is the natural tower
of all the world, / The point of survey, green’s green apogee’’ (‘‘Credences of
Summer’’); in several poems Stevens plays the green of nature against the blue
of art or imagination. (See Blue.) The prominence of green in the medieval
poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may derive from a popular belief in a
‘‘green man’’ representing the cycle of the seasons.
Spenser says that ‘‘greene is for maydens meete’’ (SC ‘‘August’’ 68), as a sign
of their youth and unripeness. From here it is a step to the meaning of
‘‘green’’ as ‘‘naı̈ve,’’ ‘‘gullible,’’ or ‘‘foolish,’’ as we found in the Catullus passage
above. Shakespeare’s Polonius tells his daughter Ophelia, ‘‘Pooh, you speak like
a green girl’’ (Hamlet 1.3.101); Cleopatra recalls ‘‘My salad days, / When I was
green in judgment’’ (AC 1.5.73--74); Iago connects ‘‘folly and green minds’’
(Othello 2.1.244). Shelley writes of a disease that pierced ‘‘Into the core of my
green heart’’ (Epipsychidion 263).
A disease called ‘‘green sickness’’ (chlorosis) in the sixteenth century afflicted
young people, usually girls, at puberty; unhealthy desires were attributed to
it, and hence frustration. It seems to have been a kind of anemia, and the pale
green was perhaps mainly due to the absence of a healthy reddish color.
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Grotto
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When Juliet resists her father’s plan to marry her to Paris, he shouts ‘‘Out, you
green-sickness carrion! out, you baggage!’’ (RJ 3.5.156), and shouts more truly
than he knows. Falstaff thinks failure to drink strong wine produces ‘‘a kind
of male green-sickness’’ (2H4, 4.3.93). Viola tells the Duke that Olivia ‘‘never
told her love . . . : she pin’d in thought, / And with a green and yellow
melancholy / She sat like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief’’ (12N
2.4.111--16). Perhaps this is why Armado says ‘‘Green indeed is the color of
lovers’’ (LLL 1.2.86).
Consonant with this sense is the connection of green with envy and
jealousy. Romeo thinks of the ‘‘envious moon’’ as a pale maid, ‘‘sick and
green’’ before Juliet’s sun (RJ 2.2.4--8). Portia speaks of ‘‘green-eyed jealousy’’
(MV 3.2.110), while Iago brings it about by warning Othello: ‘‘O, beware my
Lord of jealousy; / It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock / The meat it
feeds on’’ (Othello 3.3.165--67). Blake’s nurse in Songs of Experience (‘‘Nurse’s
Song’’) listens to the children at play and ‘‘The days of my youth rise fresh in
my mind, / My face turns green and pale.’’ Envy and jealousy, according to the
humor theory, are a function of yellow bile or gall, Greek chole (related to
chloros), but the origin of this use of ‘‘green’’ may be Homer’s use of chloros as a
frequent epithet of deos, ‘‘fear’’ -- ‘‘Green fear took hold of them’’ (Iliad 7.479).
As with the green sickness, green seemed the right color for a man when the
blood drained from his face.
Because it is the color of young vegetation and springtime, green is
sometimes also the color of hope, especially the Christian hope of salvation
(though more often hope is blue). Green is found in Dante’s Purgatorio, the
realm of hope (as opposed to hell, where hope is abandoned, and heaven,
where hope is unnecessary). Even in this life, Dante says, no one is so lost that
eternal love cannot return, ‘‘as long as hope has a green flower’’ (3.135). Two
angels appear in garments ‘‘as green as newborn leaves’’ and with green wings
to guard the valley of the rulers (8.28--29), and when Beatrice appears at the
top of the mountain she wears a green cape (30.32). Sor Juana de la Cruz
dismisses worldly hope as delusory, but it is also green, and those who are in
its grip look through ‘‘green spectacles’’ (‘‘A la esperanza’’).
Green is often the color of the sea. Shakespeare’s Macbeth despairs that the
sea will not wash off Duncan’s blood but rather the blood will make ‘‘the
green one red’’ (2.2.62). Antony vaunts that he has sent ships to found cities
‘‘o’er green Neptune’s back’’ (AC 4.14.58). Neptune is ‘‘green-ey’d’’ in Milton’s
early Vacation Exercise (43); in Paradise Lost fish ‘‘Glide under the green Wave’’
(7.402).
Perhaps because it is the color of vegetation, which changes with the
season, green is sometimes the color of inconstancy, as we find in Chaucer’s
‘‘Against Women Unconstant,’’ and in the Squire’s Tale (646--47), in both places
contrasting with the blue of faithfulness. Spenser’s Lechery wears ‘‘a greene
gowne’’ (FQ 1.4.25).
Grotto
Gull
90
see Cave
A gullible person is a gull; he can be gulled or duped or tricked. The relation
of this set of words with the name of the seabird is unclear. ‘‘Gull’’ sometimes meant a young unfledged bird of any sort (Shakespeare uses it in this
Hair
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
sense occasionally), hence perhaps a naïve person, easily fooled. The verb
‘‘gull’’ could also mean ‘‘cram’’ or ‘‘gorge’’ (into someone’s gullet), hence
perhaps to feed falsehoods to a dupe, to make a dupe swallow something.
Shakespeare’s Malvolio is called a gull by those who ‘‘practice’’ on him (12N
3.2.66) and by himself: he was ‘‘made the most notorious geck [fool] and gull /
That e’er invention play’d on’’ (5.1.342--43). Emilia screams at Othello ‘‘O gull,
O dolt,’’ after he has strangled Desdemona (Othello 5.2.164). A character in
Dickens is described as ‘‘the blundering cheat -- gull that he was, for all his
cunning’’ (Martin Chuzzlewit, chap. 28).
The Italian verb for ‘‘gull’’ is uccellare, from uccello, ‘‘bird.’’ Machiavelli uses it
in Mandragola 1.3, where Callimaco plots to ‘‘bird’’ Nicia so he can bed his
wife.
Joyce implicitly evokes the verb as he has Leopold Bloom throw a crumpled
paper ball among the gulls looking for a meal. But they don’t go for it. ‘‘Not
such damn fools,’’ Bloom thinks. The ball was made of a leaflet advertising a
religious revivalist. Neither Bloom nor the gulls are so easily gulled (Ulysses
8.152 Random House).
H
Hair
Cutting off or tearing off a portion of one’s hair is a sign of grief or mourning
in classical literature. At the news of Patroclus’ death Achilles tears his hair
(Homer, Iliad 18.27), and at Patroclus’ funeral Achilles’ companions all drop a
lock of their hair onto the corpse (23.135--36); as she witnesses Hector’s death
Hecuba tears out her hair (22.405--06), and she and Andromache tear their
hair when his body is brought back to Troy (24.710--11). Orestes leaves two
locks of hair, for the river Inachus and his father, in the opening of Aeschylus’
Libation Bearers (6--8); early in Sophocles’ Electra, Orestes announces that he will
leave cuttings from his hair at Agamemnon’s grave (51--53); see also Euripides’
Electra 90--91. In Euripides’ Alcestis, Death himself tells Apollo he will cut off
Alcestis’ hair as he takes her to Hades’ house (73--76), a speech that may have
inspired the famous moment in Virgil’s Aeneid when Iris descends to Dido on
her pyre and cuts off a lock of her hair to take to the underworld (4.698--99).
The Bible is less clear about this custom, but it seems to be implicit in a few
passages, e.g., where the Lord forbids men to mourn for those ‘‘in this land”
and to ‘‘make themselves bald for them” (Jer. 16.6), or where the Lord calls on
Jerusalem: ‘‘Cut off thine hair, O Jerusalem, and cast it away, and take up a
lamentation on high places” (Jer. 7.29).
Behind this tradition lies the widespread belief that hair is an expression of
life, youth, strength, or fertility. The secret of Samson’s strength is his long
hair (he is a Nazorite who has taken a vow not to cut it); only when his seven
locks are removed can he be subdued (Judges 16). It was, and remains, a sign
of willing humility or unwilling humiliation to shave the head of a man or a
woman. A gift or theft of a lock of a woman’s hair is an obvious symbolic act,
one which Pope exploits in his mock-epic The Rape of the Lock. Ibsen’s Hedda
Gabler, cold and destructive, envies Thea Elvsted’s abundant hair and
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Halcyon
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
threatens to burn it; she does burn Thea’s ‘‘child,’’ the book manuscript of
Thea’s lover.
If abundant hair is a sign of fertility, women in most western societies have
been expected to cover or tie up their hair when appearing in public lest they
be taken as sexually licentious. The loosening of hair, deliberate or not, and
the tying or dressing of it, have been exploited by many writers to reveal inner
states or future actions of their heroines. Racine’s Phèdre asks who has tied up
her hair in ‘‘knots’’ (1.3.159--60), knots that stand for her impossible and illicit
passion for Hippolyte; near the end, her guilt at causing his death makes her
hair stand on end (4.6.1268). Shelley’s Beatrice Cenci, staggered by her rape at
her father’s hands, asks, ‘‘How comes this hair undone? / Its wandering strings
must be what blind me so, / and yet I tied it fast’’ (Cenci 3.1.6--8); at the play’s
conclusion, calmly facing execution for her father’s murder, she asks her
stepmother to ‘‘bind up this hair / In any simple knot’’ (5.4.160--61). Escaping
ringlets may signify innocent sexual exuberance, as it does with Pauline in
Balzac’s La peau de chagrin (p. 253 Pléiade), though later her dishevelled (épars)
hair will express something less innocent. Maggie Tulliver’s undisciplined hair
in George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss -- ‘‘But her hair won’t curl all I can do with it,’’
her mother complains (1.2) -- expresses her natural and impetuous personality.
A prototype of this hair is Eve’s in Milton’s Paradise Lost: she ‘‘Her unadorned
golden tresses wore / dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved’’ (4.305--06).
Like Eve’s, a woman’s hair in literature is often golden, whereby it may
represent not only sexuality but beauty and wealth. Spenser complains of his
lady’s guile in dressing her golden tresses under a net of gold in order to
entangle men’s eyes ‘‘in that golden snare’’ (Amoretti 37). Bassanio describes
Portia’s hair as ‘‘A golden mesh t’entrap the hearts of men’’ (MV 3.2.122). It
may suggest an angelic nature, as Lucie Manette’s does in Dickens’s A Tale of
Two Cities, or it may be deceitful, as Rosamond Vincy’s ‘‘wondrous’’ hair traps
Lydgate in Eliot’s Middlemarch.
Phaedrus’ description of occasio or opportunity as ‘‘bald, hairy on the
forehead, nude at the back’’ (Fables 5.8), gave rise to the advice to seize time or
opportunity ‘‘by the forelock.’’ Rabelais reports that ‘‘Chance wears all her
locks in front, and once she has passed you by, you cannot recall her. For the
back of her head is bald, and she never turns back’’ (Gargantua and Pantagruel
1.37, trans. Cohen). Spenser asks the spring to tell his love ‘‘the joyous time
will not be staid / Unlesse she doe him by the forelock take’’ (Amoretti 70).
Othello will ‘‘take the safest occasion by the front’’ to be reconciled with
Cassio (3.1.50). To quote The Cenci again, a plotter urges ‘‘we take fleet occasion
by the hair’’ (5.1.38), a disturbing echo of Beatrice, ‘‘whom her father
sometimes hales / From hall to hall by the entangled hair’’ (3.1.44--45). But
Goethe playfully announces that lovers worship one goddess above all the
gods and goddesses, Gelegenheit or Opportunity: ‘‘one day she appeared to me,
as a dark-haired / Girl: an abundance of locks tumbled down over her brow, /
Shorter ringlets entwined her delicate neck, and unbraided / Hair rose boldly
in waves over the crown of her head. / And I knew her, I seized her as she
went hurrying by me . . . ’’ (Roman Elegies 6.127--31, trans. Luke).
Halcyon
92
The halcyon is a semi-mythical Greek seabird with a plaintive cry, identified
with the kingfisher. The original form of the name in Greek is alkuon, but the
Harbor
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h got attached when it was thought that the word was made of two roots, hal(‘‘sea’’) and kuo- (‘‘breed’’); that surmise derives from the belief that the bird
builds its nest on the sea. To do so it must have calm weather, and so, as
Simonides puts it, ‘‘in the winter months Zeus / admonishes fourteen days, /
the wind-forgetting season / mortals call it, the holy time of childrearing
for the dappled / halcyon’’ (508). Aristotle quotes these lines where he explains
that the halcyon builds its nest and breeds during the week before and after
the winter solstice (Historia Animalium 542b15); these two weeks became
known as the alkuonides hemerai or ‘‘halcyon days’’ -- a period of tranquillity.
When Poseidon proposes peace to the birds of Aristophanes, he offers them
‘‘rainwater in the pools / and halcyon days forever’’ (Birds 1593--94). Theocritus
predicts ‘‘halcyons shall lay the waves and sea to rest’’ (7.57).
Ovid devotes much of book 11 of the Metamorphoses to the story of Ceyx and
Alcyone. Changed into halcyons, they still mate and raise their young; for
seven days Alcyone broods on her nest floating on the waters. The seas are
calm, for Aeolus forbids the winds to go abroad (11.743--49). Several other
poets mention them, e.g., Virgil, who calls them ‘‘pleasing to Thetis’’ the
sea-nymph (Georgics 1.399).
Shakespeare’s Joan of Arc predicts, ‘‘Expect Saint Martin’s summer [in
November], halcyon days, / Since I have entered into these wars’’ (1H6
1.2.131--32). Halcyons are the ‘‘Birds of Calm’’ that ‘‘sit brooding on the
charmed wave’’ at the birth of Christ (Milton, ‘‘Nativity’’ 68).
Harbor
Harp, lyre,
and lute
see Sea, Ship
There has been a good deal of confusion for centuries over just what stringed
instruments were meant by several Hebrew, Greek, and Roman words. We will
not attempt to sort it all out here, as for our purposes the associations of
certain words are more important than philological accuracy.
Angels play harps: that seems well established. ‘‘Harp’’ is the usual word in
English Bible translations for Hebrew kinnor and Greek kithara. Yet the former
probably and the latter certainly were kinds of lyre, that is, the strings passed
partly parallel to a box or shell sounding board. ‘‘Lyre’’ does not appear in
either Testament of the Authorized Version.
According to Genesis the kinnor was invented by Jubal, son of Lamech (4.21).
David was ‘‘a cunning player on an harp’’ (1 Sam. 16.16), and the Psalms
attributed to him are to be sung to the harp, or sometimes to a harp and
another instrument called a nebel in Hebrew. The nebel is usually translated as
‘‘psaltery’’ but may well have been a harp! (‘‘Psalm’’ and ‘‘psaltery’’ are derived
from a Greek verb meaning ‘‘pluck’’ or ‘‘twang.’’) It was common for prophets
to prophesy with a ‘‘harp’’ (e.g., 1 Chro. 25.6). The kithara, rendered ‘‘harp’’ in
the Authorized Version, is the instrument of the angels, as we read at several
points in Revelation (5.8, 15.2); with characteristic thoroughness its author
writes, ‘‘and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps’’ (14.2).
The lyre was one of several similar stringed instruments of ancient Greece.
The lyra, the standard lyre, is not named in the Iliad or Odyssey, where the
bards and Apollo play a phorminx, and others play a kitharis, both usually
translated as ‘‘lyre’’ in English. Both probably had four strings, whereas the
later lyra usually had seven. Sappho sometimes calls her lyre a barbiton, which
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Harp, lyre, and lute
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
had longer strings; Horace refers to the ‘‘Lesbian barbiton’’ in his first ode. They
may all have been plucked with a pick or plektron; none was bowed. The
Homeric Hymn to Hermes tells in detail how the clever young Hermes ‘‘was the
first to make a singer of a tortoise’’ by turning its shell into the sounding
board of the first lyre (24--54), which he eventually gave to Apollo. Horace calls
Mercury the ‘‘father of the curved lyre’’ (1.10.6), but Apollo becomes its patron
god (see Plato, Republic 399d--e). ‘‘Tortoise’’ (Greek chelys, Latin testudo) was a
common synecdoche for the lyre among both Greek and Roman poets (Sappho
18, Euripides’ Alcestis 446--47; Virgil’s Georgics 4.464, Horace 1.32.14). This is ‘‘the
corded Shell’’ of Dryden’s ‘‘Song for St. Cecilia’s Day’’ (17) and the ‘‘Enchanting
shell!’’ of Gray’s ‘‘Progress of Poesy’’ (15).
‘‘Lyric’’ poetry was originally poetry sung to the lyre, and occasionally to the
oboe or shawm (Greek aulos). Alexandrian scholars settled on a canon of nine
great lyric poets: Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon,
Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides; sometimes Corinna was added. Lyric song
might be choral, such as the songs between episodes of tragedy, or it might be
solo, a monody. It could be set in a great variety of meters and be about a
great variety of subjects; it might be a song of praise for a victor in the games,
a wedding hymn (epithalamion), a love song, an inspirational patriotic anthem,
or even a story, if it is brief. The greatest lyric poet was the legendary
Orpheus, who was so skillful on his lyre that he could charm animals and
make trees and rocks move.
In the opening of his First Pyth., Pindar praises his lyre as the pacifier of all
violence: ‘‘Even Ares the violent / Leaves aside his harsh and pointed spears /
And comforts his heart in drowsiness’’ (10--12; trans. Bowra). (Gray imitates
these lines in ‘‘Progress’’ 17--19). By contrast, according to Aeschylus, war is
‘‘danceless, lyreless’’ (Suppliants 681). Horace could refer to his ‘‘unwarlike lyre’’
(imbellisque lyrae) (1.6.10), and in his final ode he tells how Apollo rebukes him
with his lyre for wishing to speak of battles and conquered cities (4.15.1--2);
many poets found ‘‘lyric’’ fitter to express love or other personal feelings than
for rousing young men to their martial duty. It is a little jarring, then, to find
Byron, who admired Horace, speaking of ‘‘the warlike lyre’’ (‘‘Elegy on
Newstead’’ 89).
At times, indeed, the lyre stood for a certain genre of poetry in opposition
to that of the flute, trumpet, or other instrument. So Marino, in his sonnet in
honor of Torquato Tasso, gives pipe, lyre, and trumpet as the three kinds of
poetry Tasso wrote.
The word ‘‘harp’’ is Germanic in origin, and first appears in a Latin text by
the sixth-century bishop Venantius Fortunatus: ‘‘the Roman lyre and the
barbarian harp praise you’’ (Carmina 7.8.63). In Beowulf the scop or bard sings to
the hearpe. But Fortunatus’ distinction was often blurred: Aelfric glossed
‘‘hearpe’’ as lyra, and in medieval Latin cithara was used to translate both. In
later English poetry ‘‘harp’’ is still preferred as the instrument of the angels
and of David, but occasionally we find ‘‘David’s lyre’’ (e.g., Cowley, Davideis
1.26). Byron begins one of his Hebrew Melodies with ‘‘The harp the monarch
minstrel swept,’’ but soon it also becomes ‘‘David’s lyre.’’ Orpheus is usually
given his proper lyre, his ‘‘Orphean lyre’’ (Milton, PL 3.17; Wordsworth, 1805
Prelude 1.233), but sometimes it is ‘‘Orpheus’ lute’’ (Shakespeare, 2GV 3.2.77).
Even Apollo gets a lute in Love’s Labours Lost (4.3.340), while in the Athens of
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Harvest
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Theseus a eunuch offers (in vain) to sing to a harp (MND 5.1.45). Coleridge
gives harps to angels and lyres to the muse and to Alcaeus, but he translated
Pindar’s phorminx as ‘‘harp,’’ no doubt to alliterate with ‘‘hymn’’ (trans. of
Second Olympic). Bowles’s poem ‘‘The Harp, and Despair, of Cowper’’ makes
Cowper’s instrument a lyre, and once even ‘‘Fancy’s shell,’’ never a harp.
The word ‘‘lute’’ is ultimately from Arabic; the instrument became
fasionable from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. There were ancient
equivalents (the strings, often just two or three, passed over a long neck
where they could be stopped), but they were less common than lyre and harp.
As interest in Germanic and Celtic bards grew in the eighteenth century it
was understood that ‘‘harp’’ was the better term for their instrument, but
even in ‘‘The Bard’’ Gray used ‘‘harp’’ (28) or ‘‘lyre’’ (22) as the rhyme or
alliteration dictated. Blake’s bards are almost always harpers, but once in a
while they get a lyre. Scott generally gave his Scottish minstrels harps. After
the distinction between ‘‘romantic’’ and ‘‘classic’’ spread from Germany to
England, Wordsworth in effect returned to Fortunatus’ distinction: in his 1815
Preface he writes of ‘‘the classic lyre or romantic harp,’’ and in ‘‘To the
Clouds’’ he asks, ‘‘Where is the Orphean lyre, or Druid harp, / To accompany
the verse?’’ (60--61).
Victor Hugo stages a debate between ‘‘La Lyre et la Harpe’’ for the soul of
the young poet, the classical lyre urging him to withdraw from the world’s
miseries and pursue poetic fame, beauty, and pleasure, the Christian harp
summoning him to comfort the afflicted and praise God; the result is a compromise wherein the poet will write in a classic manner on Christian themes.
However unwarlike, the lyre struck more than one early bard as rather like
a bow. (Indeed the earliest harps are bows with several strings.) When the
disguised Odysseus finally gets to handle his bow, he ‘‘looked it all over, / As
when a man, who well understands the lyre and singing, / easily, holding it
on either side, pulls the strongly twisted / cord of sheep’s gut, so as to slip it
over a new peg, / so, without any strain, Odysseus strung the great bow. / Then
plucking it in his right hand he tested the bowstring, / and it gave him back
an excellent sound like the voice of a swallow’’ (Odyssey 21.405--11, trans.
Lattimore). The philosopher Heraclitus offers ‘‘the bow and the lyre’’ as models
for the nature of things, held together through contrary tensions (frag. 51,
cited in Plato, Symposium 187a). Pindar, in the ode quoted above, tells his lyre
that ‘‘Your shafts enchant the souls even of the gods’’ (12).
See Aeolian harp, Pipe, Trumpet.
Harvest
see Autumn
Haven
see Sea, Ship
Hawk
In the traditional hierarchy of birds the hawk, falcon, and kindred predators
rank just below the eagle. In Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls ‘‘the royal egle’’ is
named first among the ‘‘foules of ravyne,’’ followed by the ‘‘tiraunt’’ or
‘‘goshauk,’’ the ‘‘gentyl faucoun [falcon],’’ the ‘‘sperhauk [sparrowhawk]’’ and
the ‘‘merlioun [merlin]’’ (a kind of falcon) (323--40). In the absence of an eagle,
Spenser suggests, the hawk is king: ‘‘the soring hauke did towre, / Sitting like
the King of fowles in majesty and powre’’ (FQ 6.10.6). (See Eagle.)
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Heliotrope
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Hamlet can tell a hawk from a handsaw (2.2.379), but in literature by and
large there is little difference between a hawk and a falcon, and the sport of
falconry is also called hawking.
Homer once calls the hawk (Greek kirkos) the swift messenger of Apollo
(Odyssey 15.526); Virgil once calls the hawk (Latin accipiter) ‘‘holy’’ and his commentator Servius explains it was sacred to Mars. Little has been made,
however, of these divine connections.
Hawk and falcon are emblems of swiftness. When Achilles begins his
pursuit of Hector, Homer likens him to a hawk ‘‘who moves lightest of things
flying’’ (Iliad 22.139). The Argo sails ‘‘like a hawk which rides the breeze swiftly
through the high air’’ (Apollonius, Argonautica 2.935, trans. Hunter). Sidney
describes a flight as ‘‘More swift then falcon’s stoope to feeding Falconer’s call’’
(Fourth Eclogues 73.58).
The typical prey of the hawk is the dove. In the Iliad passage Hector is
compared to one; in another simile Aeschylus imagines ‘‘hawks not far behind
doves’’ (Prometheus 857); for yet another chase Ovid offers this: ‘‘As doves on
fluttering wings flee from a hawk, / And as a hawk pursues a fluttering dove, /
So did I run, so fiercely he gave chase’’ (Met. 5.604--606, trans. Melville). In a
version of the peaceable kingdom, Spenser has the lion and the lamb consort,
‘‘And eke the Dove sate by the Faulcons side’’ (FQ 4.8.31). (See Dove.) But other
prey will do: Chaucer’s sparrowhawk is ‘‘The quayles foo’’ while the merlin
seeks the lark (338--40), in Spenser ‘‘A fearfull partridge’’ flees ‘‘the sharpe
hauke’’ (FQ 3.8.33), while in both authors the heron is also a quarry: Chaucer
calls a falcon a ‘‘heroner’’ (TC 4.413), Spenser has ‘‘a cast of Faulcons make
their flight / At an Herneshaw [heron]’’ (FQ 6.7.9).
Certain technical terms from falconry are common in Renaissance writers.
‘‘To tower’’ is to mount up in preparation for a strike, ‘‘stoop’’ means ‘‘swoop’’
(noun or verb) onto a quarry or descent (descend) to the lure, the ‘‘pitch’’ is
the height the bird towers, the ‘‘place’’ is the highest pitch, and the ‘‘point’’ is
the position to the windward of the quarry around which the falcon circles.
In one of the eerie portents of Macbeth’s murder of Duncan, ‘‘A falcon,
towering in her pride of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at, and kill’d’’
(2.4.12--13). In another metaphorical scene, Henry tells Gloucester, ‘‘what a
point, my lord, your falcon made / And what a pitch she flew above the rest’’
(2H6 2.1.5--6). At the fall of nature, according to Milton, ‘‘The bird of Jove,
stooped from his airy tower, / Two birds of gayest plume before him drove’’ (PL
11.185--86). Hawks and falcons are usually kept hooded until they are loosed
for the chase; Byron makes wicked use of this practice among his bird similes
for contemporary poets: ‘‘And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing, / But like
a hawk encumber’d with his hood’’ (Don Juan Dedication 13--14).
The opening of Yeats’s ‘‘The Second Coming’’ is justly famous: ‘‘Turning and
turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer.’’ It is an
omen, an augury, of the coming anarchy as the aristocracy loses its
command.
Heliotrope
Heron
96
See Sunflower
A heron is sent by Athena as a sign of success to Odysseus and Diomedes on
their night foray (Iliad 10.275), and the sight or sound of the bird (Greek
Holly
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
erodios probably referred to several species) remained a good omen in the
ancient world (cf. Plutarch, Moralia 405D). In the Bible, however, it is named
only in lists of unclean ‘‘abominations’’ (Lev. 11.19, Deut. 14.18).
The heron does not seem to have acquired a consistent range of symbolic
meanings in literature; indeed it is featured in literature only seldom. Its
striking appearance, its slow and solitary hunting in marshes, and its graceful
flight have sometimes suggested nobility, freedom, and the beauty of nature.
The German poet Platen writes, ‘‘Wine, that sets us free, fledges our hearts; /
A heron [Reiher] I fly off’’ (‘‘O nimm die Rosen auf’’ 8). In Jewett’s well-known
story ‘‘A White Heron,’’ the girl Julie offers to find the heron’s nest for a
hunter--ornithologist, but in the end, perhaps inspired by its freedom, she
cannot bring herself to do so. Jeffers, in ‘‘People and a Heron,’’ likens a
swarm of people on the beach to gulls, but when they leave a heron comes,
‘‘a lone bird,’’ ‘‘dearer to me than many people.’’ Herons (or hernes) frequent
Yeats’s poems and plays, notably in the brief play Calvary, where it may
stand, mysteriously, for Christ, though ‘‘God has not died for the white
heron.’’
Holly
Honey
Horn
Horse
There are several types of holly, including ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ varieties; in
combination with other plants (mistletoe, ivy) they may have been used in
pagan fertility ceremonies. But its chief distinctive trait is that it is evergreen:
as the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has it, the ‘‘holyn bobbe’’ or
holly cluster carried by the Green Knight is ‘‘goodliest in green when the
groves are bare’’ (206--07). As such it was thought appropriate to Christmas and
New Year’s Day, the season of death and renewal of life. For centuries it has
been the distinctive Christmas plant, at least in Britain, as the carol ‘‘The
Holly and the Ivy’’ reminds us; there the blossom, berry, prickle, and bark of
the holly all stand for characteristics of Jesus Christ. It was so common by the
mid-nineteenth century that Dickens’s Scrooge wishes everyone who says
‘‘Merry Christmas’’ were ‘‘buried with a stake of holly through his heart’’ (A
Christmas Carol, ‘‘Stave I’’), while the Ghost of Christmas Past has ‘‘a branch of
fresh green holly in its hand’’ (‘‘Stave II’’).
Its evergreen character also suits funerals or graves. Don Quixote comes
across a group of mourners carrying holly branches (1.13), while Victor Hugo
announces to his dead daughter that he will bring heather and green holly
(houx vert) to her grave (‘‘Demain, dès l’aube,’’ from Les Contemplations).
see Bee
see Dream
It is difficult to appreciate today how thoroughly we depended on horses
before the railways of the nineteenth century and especially the automobile
of the twentieth. The horse was the chief beast of travel, work, hunting, and
war. Even the vehicles which displaced it were described in equine terms -‘‘iron horse’’ and ‘‘horseless carriage’’ -- while ‘‘horsepower’’ is still the measure
of engines. Many proverbial phrases, such as ‘‘ride a high horse,’’ ‘‘ride
roughshod over,’’ ‘‘flog a dead horse,’’ ‘‘look a gift horse in the mouth,’’ ‘‘spur
someone on,’’ ‘‘horse of a different color,’’ ‘‘dark horse,’’ and ‘‘straight from the
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Horse
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horse’s mouth,’’ are still in common use; in America many say ‘‘Hold your
horses’’ or even ‘‘Whoa!’’ who have never ridden a horse.
Horses are ubiquitous in literature until recent times. Greek and Roman
warriors fight from horse-drawn chariots, knights ride on steeds and do
chivalrous deeds (‘‘chivalry’’ is from Old French chevalerie, from cheval, ‘‘horse’’),
the cavalry charges enemies or rescues friends (‘‘cavalry’’ has a similar
etymology), and every hero’s horse has a name, from Achilles’ horse Xanthos,
who speaks (Iliad 19.404ff.), to Don Quixote’s ‘‘hack’’ Rosinante. In more recent
literature horses (and unicorns) have been the heroes of their own stories: e.g.,
Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty.
The most common metaphorical horses are those that draw the chariot of
the sun, the moon, etc. (See Dawn, Moon, Night, and especially Sun.)
Probably the most influential symbolic horses are those that Plato describes in
his simile for the soul. The soul is a union of three parts, a charioteer
(judgment or reason) and two horses, one of which is noble and obedient
(honor or mettle), the other base and disobedient (appetite or will) (Phaedrus
246a--b, 253c--54e); the charioteer must learn the difficult art of managing two
different steeds (‘‘manage’’ in its earliest English sense referred only to horses).
Whether driving several or riding one, the reason could be disobeyed or
overthrown by the willful, bestial, or irrational part of the soul. So Euripides’
Hippolytus, whose name means something like ‘‘horse-looser,’’ is killed when
his horses bolt at the sight of a monster, ultimately the doing of Aphrodite,
whom Hippolytus had scorned. Marlowe’s enamored Leander chaffs at the bit:
‘‘For as a hot, proud horse highly disdains / To have his head controlled, but
breaks the reins, // . . . so he that loves, / The more he is restrained, the worse
he fares’’ (Hero and Leander 625--29). ‘‘Most wretched man,’’ Spenser writes,
‘‘That to affections does the bridle lend!’’ (FQ 2.4.34); Guyon learns to resist
temptation, ‘‘brydling his will’’ (2.12.53). Milton has the phrase, ‘‘give the reins
to grief’’ -- to let an emotion have its head, as it were (Samson Agonistes
1578).
It is thus a witty decision on Swift’s part to make his rational beings horses
(the Houyhynhnms) and his bestial ones humans (the Yahoos) (Gulliver’s Travels,
book 4). The traditional equation remains common nonetheless, even in Swift:
the narrator of his Tale of a Tub confesses he is ‘‘a Person, whose Imaginations
are hardmouth’d, and exceedingly disposed to run away with his Reason,
which I have observed from long Experience, to be a very light Rider, and
easily shook off’’ (sec 9). Rochester reads Jane Eyre’s face and tells her, ‘‘Reason
sits firm and holds the reins, and she will not let the feelings burst away and
hurry her to wild chasms’’ (Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre chap. 19). But Dickens
plays with it in Hard Times, as Bitzer, the boy who embodies the ‘‘rational’’
teaching methods of Gradgrind, defines a horse correctly as ‘‘Quadruped.
Graminivorous. Forty teeth,’’ etc., in the opening, but in the end, having
grown up all head and no heart, he is outwitted by a real horse who refuses
to obey him.
A variant of this image is the ‘‘manage’’ of government, where the leader
rides the city or populace. Jupiter assigns the winds to Aeolus, who knows
‘‘when to tighten and when to loosen their reins’’ (Virgil, Aeneid 1.63; see
Lucan 7.124ff.). Dante denounces abject Italy for its empty saddle, even though
98
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Justinian has mended its bridle (codified its laws): ‘‘see how this beast turns
fierce / because there are no spurs that would correct it’’ (Purgatorio 6.88--96,
trans. Mandelbaum). Shakespeare’s Claudio wonders whether ‘‘the body politic
be / A horse whereon the governor doth ride, / Who, newly in the seat, that it
may know / He can command, lets it straight feel the spur’’ (MM 1.2.159--62).
When Richard II submits to Bolingbroke he invokes a mythical precedent of
bad horsemanship: ‘‘Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaeton, / Wanting the
manage of unruly jades’’ (R2 3.3.178--79); it is a symbolically charged moment
when Bolingbroke rides Richard’s favorite horse (5.5.77--94). Vigny’s Moses asks
God, ‘‘Let someone else bridle the steed of Israel’’ (‘‘Moses’’ 55, trans.
Blackmores). The hero of the ‘‘western’’ is typically a lone horseman who is at
one with an extraordinary horse; his enemies, though they also ride horses,
are typically horse-thieves.
According to the myth, Pegasus the flying horse was beloved of the Muses
because he created the spring Hippocrene on Mt. Helicon by stamping the
ground with his hooves, after which he flew up to heaven. Propertius calls the
Muses the daughters of Pegasus (3.1.19); Dante addresses one of the Muses as
Pegasea as he invokes her aid (Paradiso 18.82). In the Renaissance the horse
became an emblem of the poet’s ambition, a symbol common enough for
ambitious Milton to claim, ‘‘above the Olympian hill I soar, / Above the flight
of Pegasean wing’’ (PL 7.3--4). Concerning poetry Pope recommends judgment
as a balance to wit or imagination: ‘‘’Tis more to guide than spur the Muse’s
steed; / Restrain his Fury, than provoke his speed; / The winged Courser, like a
gen’rous Horse, / Shows most true Mettle when you check his Course’’ (Essay on
Criticism 1.84--87).
There is a striking recurrent trope about the Trojan horse, the ‘‘wooden
horse’’ by which the Greeks infiltrated and destroyed Troy (Odyssey 8.493).
Aeschylus calls the Greeks the ‘‘young of the horse’’ (Agamemnon 825) and Virgil says the horse ‘‘bore armed infantry in its heavy womb’’ (Aeneid 6.516) -- or
in Dryden’s translation, the horse was ‘‘pregnant with arms’’ (see also 9.152).
Dante varies the trope in saying that the horse caused a breach through
which ‘‘the noble seed of the Romans escaped’’ (Inferno 26.60).
See Ass.
Hours
Humor
see Seasons
The Greeks and other ancients considered life to depend on fluids in the body;
youth is moist, age is dry, death is desiccation. Homer speaks of a liquid called
aion, which is occasionally indistinguishable from tears (e.g., Odyssey 5.152)
and is more often something like ‘‘vital juice’’ or ‘‘life fluid’’; it later acquired
more abstract meanings: ‘‘life,’’ ‘‘age,’’ ‘‘eternity’’ (English ‘‘eon’’ is a derivative).
Blood, sweat, semen, and milk were all taken as potent with human life,
and life could be enhanced by anointing with oil, rubbing with the sweat of
an animal, drinking wine, and bathing in blood. Urine and other secretions
such as bile or phlegm became indices of human health.
Hippocrates, in The Nature of Man 4, describes four chumoi or fluids -- blood,
phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile -- the balance or proportion of which
determines human health and sickness. Pain or illness is the excess or defect
99
Hunting
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of one of them. They were correlated with the four elements -- earth, water,
air, and fire -- and with the four qualities -- hot, cold, moist, dry; phlegm, for
example, is coldest and wettest, and thus related to water.
In Latin the term for chumos is umor or humor, and ‘‘humor’’ is the English
term (its original sense as fluid remains in another English borrowing,
‘‘humid’’). The medical theory, elaborated by Latin and medieval European
writers, held sway well into the nineteenth century, as Byron’s death by
medicinal bleeding may remind us.
Many terms still current in English, or only recently obsolete, depend on
the theory. One’s ‘‘temperament’’ is one’s particular mixture of humors;
‘‘temper’’ can mean ‘‘temperament’’ but more often ‘‘proper temperament’’ or
‘‘composure,’’ as when one is ‘‘out of temper’’ or ‘‘loses one’s temper.’’ A
‘‘distemper’’ is a disease or disorder: Milton speaks of ‘‘distempers foul’’ (PL
4.118). A synonym of ‘‘temperament’’ is ‘‘complexion’’: Chaucer writes of his
Frankeleyn, ‘‘Of his complexioun he was sangwyn’’ (CT Pro. 333); later it was
thought that skin color reflected one’s inner complexion.
‘‘Sanguine’’ is still in use today to mean ‘‘cheerful’’ or ‘‘hopeful,’’ sometimes
‘‘courageous’’; a sanguine temperament is dominated by blood (Latin sanguis),
which is hot and wet, and marked by a ruddy appearance; it is associated with
air. Besides the Frankeleyn Shakespeare’s Mercutio and Beatrice are sanguine.
(See Blood.)
‘‘Phlegmatic’’ still means ‘‘dull’’ or ‘‘sluggish,’’ but also ‘‘calm’’ or ‘‘even-tempered’’; a phlegmatic character has too much phlegm (Greek and Latin
phlegma). Sidney complains to Patience, with her ‘‘leaden counsels,’’ that he
can never take ‘‘In thy cold stuff a phlegmatic delight’’ (Astrophel 56). Jane
Austen’s character Mary Bennett might be taken as phlegmatic.
‘‘Choleric’’ means ‘‘irascible,’’ ‘‘hot-tempered,’’ from ‘‘choler’’ (Greek and
Latin cholera) or bile (hot and dry, hence fiery). Synonyms are ‘‘bilious’’ and
‘‘splenetic’’ (from ‘‘spleen’’). (See Bile.)
‘‘Melancholic’’ means ‘‘sullen,’’ ‘‘sad,’’ or ‘‘dejected’’; it comes from an excess
of melancholy or black bile (cold and dry, hence earthy). The ‘‘humors black’’
of Milton’s Samson Agonistes 600 are melancholy. (See Melancholy.)
In the 1590s in England ‘‘humor’’ seems to have been in great fashion, a fad
Shakespeare mocks through his character Nym, whose every line has the word
in it (MW 1.3). ‘‘Humor’’ could mean ‘‘temperament.’’ To be in ‘‘good humor’’
(or just ‘‘in humor’’) is to be in good temper, in proper balance. Ben Jonson
wrote two comedies, Every Man in his Humour and Every Man out of his Humour,
whose titles remind us that comedies since Menander have turned on
characters of a particular temperament or humor: the miser, the grouch, the
angry old man, the braggart soldier, the passionate lover, the cowardly
servant. Literary critics sometimes use ‘‘humor’’ to refer to such characters
themselves. The pattern in most comedies is the return of the ‘‘humorous’’
character to his or her proper humor, or the expulsion of the bad humor;
‘‘humor’’ is thus the comic counterpart of the tragic hamartia, ‘‘flaw’’ or (more
properly) ‘‘error.’’
Hunting
100
The hunt or chase has been a male preoccupation for thousands of years. It
not only provided food and excitement, but (as Xenophon argued in his
Cyropaedia) it was the best training for war. Indeed some of the acts of warfare
Hunting
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
in epic seem little different from hunting, as the similes tell us: Achilles
chases Hector three times around Troy, ‘‘chasing him, as a dog in the mountains who has flushed from his covert / a deer’s fawn follows him through the
folding ways and the valleys’’ (Homer, Iliad 22.189--90, trans. Lattimore), and
Aeneas pursues Turnus as a hunting dog pursues a stag (Virgil, Aeneid
12.750--51). Siegried is a great hunter (in the Old High German Nibelungenlied),
but he is killed by Hagen whose sign or device is a boar. (The stag and the
boar are the two highest or noblest quarries.) ‘‘As the stag flees before the
dogs / The pagans took flight before Roland,’’ according to the Old French Song
of Roland (1874--75).
Hunting, and the scars that come of it, may be rites of passage into manhood or marks of personal identity. The scar that almost betrays the disguised
Odysseus, for instance, came from a boar that he killed even as it gored him
(Odyssey 19.388--466). Or hunts may be occasions of fateful or fatal events, as
when Dido and Aeneas, seeking shelter from a storm during a hunt, make
love in a cave (Aeneid 4.160--72), or when the Calydonian boar hunt, which the
maiden Atalanta wins, leads to the death of Meleager (told by Ovid, Met.
8.260--444). Ahab’s maniacal pursuit of the white whale, to which many
symbolic meanings accrue, leads to catastrophe (Melville, Moby-Dick).
The theme of the hunter hunted is common, in part for its satisfying formal turn or reversal. Agamemnon, who angered Artemis (goddess of the hunt)
by hunting down her sacred stag, and who then propitiated her by sacrificing
his daughter, is caught in a hunting net and murdered by his wife and lover
when he returns home (Aeschylus, Agamemnon). Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae
wants to hunt down the uncontrollable maenads, but he himself becomes
their quarry; his mother, still in a trance, boasts that she has brought back
the trophy of her chase -- her son’s head. When Actaeon the hunter comes
upon Artemis bathing, he is transformed into a stag and killed by his own
dogs (Ovid, Met. 3.131--255). Tristan becomes the master of the hunt for King
Mark, but is caught in nets of love for Isolde; they both become ‘‘love’s
huntsmen,’’ laying nets and snares for each other (Gottfried von Strassburg,
Tristan and Isolde 11930--32).
Hunting metaphors since ancient times have been deployed for many states
and actions. Plato has Socrates propose that not only generals but geometers,
astronomers, and calculators are hunters of a kind, for they try to find things
out (Euthydemus 290b--c). Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus is filled with hunting
metaphors, as Oedipus leads the investigation into the unknown murderer:
another case of the hunter hunted. Ovid, who seems to have inadvertently
come across something he should not have seen, and was sent in exile for it,
likens his indiscretion to Actaeon (Tristia 3.103--07). In Christian allegories
sometimes the hunter is the devil, or sin, and the quarry is everyman. In
Chaucer’s translation from a French poem, ‘‘An ABC,’’ the speaker appeals to
the Virgin to save him, though he has been a ‘‘beste in wil and deede,’’ and to
‘‘make oure foo to failen of his praye [prey].’’ (45, 64). Arthur and Guyon set
out ‘‘To hunt for glory and renowmed prayse’’ (Spenser, FQ 3.1.3), while King
Ferdinand begins Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost by asking, ‘‘Let fame, that
all hunt after in their lives, / Live regist’red upon our brazen tombs.’’
The most widespread metaphor, however, is the love hunt, as shown in the
image of Eros (Cupid) with his bow and arrows. In one of his earliest
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Hyacinth
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appearances, however, Eros hunts with nets; so Ibycus (6): ‘‘Eros, looking at me
languishingly under his dark eyebrows, by all manner of enchantments casts
me into the nets of Cypris [Aphrodite], from which there is no escape’’ (trans.
Kenney). Euripides’ Helen was one of the first to complain that someone
‘‘hunts her in marriage’’ (Helen 63). Lucretius warns us to shun ‘‘the hunting
nets of love’’ (4.1146). The love-struck Dido wanders through the city ‘‘like an
unsuspecting hind hit by an arrow, whom a shepherd pursuing with weapons
has shot from afar’’ (Aeneid 4.69--71). Horace pleads, ‘‘You avoid me, Chloe, like
a fawn / seeking its mother on the pathless / mountain and starting with
groundless / fears at the woods and winds (1.23.1--4, trans. Shepherd). Petrarch
echoes Ovid on Actaeon: ‘‘Not so much did Diana please her lover / When, by
a similar chance, all naked / he saw her in the midst of the cold waters, /
Than the cruel mountain shepherdess pleased me’’ (Rime 52). In a sonnet (Rime
190) Petrarch describes a white doe with a sweet and proud look but with a
sign about her saying ‘‘Let no one touch me, for Caesar set me free.’’ Wyatt’s
version is justly admired: ‘‘Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, / But
as for me, helas, I may no more . . . ’’
Hyacinth
102
Just what flower the classical ‘‘hyacinth’’ (Greek hyakinthos) referred to is
uncertain, perhaps the wild hyacinth (bluebell), wild iris, or blue larkspur, but
it was ‘‘dark’’ (Theocritus 10.28) or ‘‘purple’’ (Persius 1.32). Greeks thought they
saw the letters AI inscribed on the petals (hence the iris and larkspur are
likelier candidates); it is one of the flowers that laments for Bion in Moschus’
elegy -- ‘‘now hyacinth, let your lettering speak’’ (3.6), ‘‘AI’’ being a cry of grief.
Ovid tells the story of the boy Hyacinth, beloved of Apollo, and accidentally
killed by the god’s discus (Met. 10.167--219): from Hyacinth’s blood grows a
purple flower like a lily, with AIAI on it, which also suggests Ajax (Aias) (see
Met. 13.394--98). The ‘‘sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe’’ of Milton’s ‘‘Lycidas’’
(106) is the hyacinth. Shelley describes blown blossoms with the message
‘‘follow’’ on them ‘‘as the blue bells / Of Hyacinth tell Apollo’s written grief’’
(PU 2.1.139--40).
Apart from the myth of Hyacinth, the flower is found among those in ideal
gardens or fields. Zeus makes love with Hera on a bed of herbs and flowers,
including the hyacinth (Iliad 14.348); it is one of the flowers plucked by Persephone when she is plucked by Hades (Hymn to Demeter 7, 426). The crucial
scene of the hyacinth garden in Eliot’s The Waste Land, where the girl says ‘‘You
gave me hyacinths first a year ago; / They called me the hyacinth girl’’ and the
poet fails to speak or even look at her (35--41), may evoke both Homeric sexuality and elegists’ dead beloved.
Another passage in Homer has had a long progeny -- his description of
Odysseus’ hair as having locks that hung ‘‘like the hyacinth flower’’ (Odyssey
6.231). It has usually been taken to refer to the flower’s blue-black color,
though it could refer to its shape. Pope has it both ways in his translation:
‘‘His hyacinthine locks descend in wavy curls’’ (6.274). Milton gives Adam
‘‘hyacinthine locks’’ (PL 4.301), Byron’s Leila’s hair falls ‘‘in hyacinthine flow’’
(Giaour 496), Poe praises Helen’s ‘‘hyacinth hair’’ (‘‘To Helen’’ 7), and Hetty’s
hair in George Eliot’s Adam Bede has ‘‘dark hyacinthine curves’’
(chap. 15).
Incense
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
I
Incense
see Frankincense and myrrh
Insect
The symbolic meaning of the generic term ‘‘insect’’ is usually ephemerality or
brevity of life. Gray notes how the ‘‘insect youth’’ have peopled the air and
draws a moral: ‘‘Such is the race of man: / And they that creep, and they that
fly, / Shall end where they began. / Alike the busy and the gay / But flutter
through life’s little day’’ (‘‘Ode on the Spring’’ 25--36). See also Thomson,
Summer 342--51. Shelley thinks his song ends ‘‘as a brief insect dies with dying
day’’ (‘‘Ode to Liberty’’ 280); when the sun sets, ‘‘each ephemeral insect then /
Is gathered unto death’’ (Adonais 254--55). ‘‘What are men?’’ Tennyson asks;
‘‘Insects of an hour, that hourly work their brother insect wrong’’ (‘‘Locksley
Hall Sixty Years After’’ 202). Addressing Mt. Monadnoc Emerson says, ‘‘Hither
we bring / Our insect miseries to thy rocks; / And the whole flight, with folded
wing, / Vanish, and end their mumuring’’ (‘‘Monadnoc’’).
‘‘Fly,’’ used as the generic term for any flying insect, often has the same
sense. (See Fly.)
It is not clear what insect Kafka’s Gregor Samsa is transformed into (‘‘The
Metamorphosis’’) -- perhaps a cockroach or a dung beetle -- but it is a
metamorphosis not from a larva to a flying insect such as a butterfly but
rather the reverse, from human to bug. The story has been thus interpreted,
or overinterpreted, to be a kind of parody of a spiritual transformation or
resurrection. (See Butterfly, Caterpillar.)
Insect entries in this dictionary: Ant, Bee, Butterfly, Caterpillar, Cicada,
Fly, Locust, Scorpion, Spider, Wasp.
Iron
The last and worst of the races or ages, the one that now prevails, according
to Hesiod, Ovid, and other ancient authors, is symbolized by iron (see Metal).
Iron was chosen not only because it stood lowest on the hierarchy, after gold,
silver, and bronze, but probably also because the ancients remembered the
shift from bronze to iron as the most useful metal during the third and
second millennia bc. By the time of Hesiod, too, most weapons and armor
were made of iron, and it was associated with Ares the god of warfare (Roman
Mars); since the present is (always) a time of warfare and other violence, the
present is an iron age. About to have his eyes burnt out with hot irons,
Shakespeare’s Arthur cries, ‘‘Ah, none but in this iron age would do it!’’ (King
John 4.1.60). Ovid, however, notes that gold was a greater bane than iron, and
that men used both to slaughter each other (Met. 1.141--42).
Homer gives to iron (Greek sideros) such epithets as ‘‘gray,’’ ‘‘violet-colored,’’
‘‘dark,’’ and ‘‘gleaming’’; it is also ‘‘wrought with toil’’ because of its hardness
(Iliad 6.48). As a sign of hardness, ‘‘iron’’ sometimes modifies ‘‘spirit’’ or
‘‘heart’’: Hector tells Achilles, ‘‘Your spirit is of iron’’ (Iliad 22.357); ‘‘your heart
is of iron,’’ Hecuba and Achilles each tell Priam (24.205, 512). Such phrases
passed through Latin poetry into all the vernaculars -- Shakespeare has ‘‘Bear
witness, all that have not hearts of iron’’ (H8 3.2.424) -- into modern speech.
In Latin, iron (ferrum) by itself could mean ‘‘sword’’ or ‘‘spear’’ (as at Virgil,
Aeneid 8.648). Similarly in Shakespeare: ‘‘Come, my young soldier, put up your
103
Ivory
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
iron’’ (12N 4.1.39). As an epithet of ‘‘war’’ it is both synecdoche (the weapons of
war) and synonym for ‘‘remorseless’’ or ‘‘cruel’’: Shakespeare, again, has ‘‘iron
wars’’ at 1H4 2.3.48. See also ‘‘wrathful iron arms’’ (R2 1.3.136).
As a sign of inexorability or inflexibility ‘‘iron’’ could of course modify
many other nouns. Ovid writes that even the gods could not break the ‘‘iron
decrees’’ of the Fates (Met. 15.781). In Virgil death is an ‘‘iron sleep’’ (ferreus
somnus) because one cannot break its bands (Aeneid 10.745) (the phrase
translates Homer’s chalkeos hypnos, ‘‘bronze sleep,’’ at Iliad 11.241). Marvell
writes of ‘‘the iron gates of life’’ (‘‘To his Coy Mistress’’ 44).
See Metal.
Ivory
Ivy
104
The material of elephant tusks (‘‘ivory’’ in Greek is elephas), ivory is precious
and a sign of wealth. King Solomon made a great ivory throne overlaid
with gold (1 Kings 10.18), and Nestor’s court in the Odyssey is filled with
objects of gold, silver, amber, and ivory (4.73). But the chief literary use since
antiquity is as a metonym for whiteness or purity. A simile in the Iliad likens
the look of Menelaus’ blood on his skin to a purple dye on an ivory
cheek-piece for horses (4.141--42), while Penelope is transformed by Athena to
appear ‘‘whiter than sawn ivory’’ (18.196). The Song of Solomon compares the
neck of the beloved to ‘‘a tower of ivory’’ (7.4), almost certainly for its
whiteness. To give just a pair of modern examples, Spenser describes a maid
who, ‘‘seeing her selfe descryde, / Was all abasht, and her pure yvory / Into a
cleare Carnation suddeine dyde’’ (FQ 3.3.20); and Shakespeare’s Venus makes
her linked white arms into ‘‘an ivory pale [fence]’’ around Adonis (Venus and
Adonis 230).
For ‘‘ivory tower’’ see Tower. For the ‘‘gate of ivory’’ see Dream.
Ivy (Greek kissos) is the distinctive plant of Dionysus (Bacchus), the god of
life’s regenerative energy and of such vital fluids as wine, milk, honey, blood,
and semen. In one of the Homeric Hymns to Dionysus the god is
‘‘ivy-crowned’’; in another ivy magically twines about the mast of the ship
carrying the captive god. ‘‘Ivy-crowned’’ becomes a standard epithet of
Bacchus or Dionysus, as in Milton’s ‘‘L’Allegro’’ 16. Ivy (Latin hedera) is ‘‘most
pleasing to Bacchus,’’ Ovid writes (Fasti 3.767), because ivy hid him from the
jealous Hera. The natural basis for the symbolism may be that, as an
evergreen plant, it represents the victory of life over death (winter). Dionysus’
followers, the maenads or bacchantes, wore ivy crowns and so did the thyrsoi
(wands) they carried. In at least one local cult Dionysus was simply called Ivy
(Kissos).
The ivy was an emblem of tenacious emotional clinging, as in Hecuba’s
defiant vow to hold onto her daughter: ‘‘Ivy to oak, that’s how I’ll cling to her’’
(Euripides, Hecuba 398; see also Medea 1213). (Ivy clings to oak, in literature, as
vine clings to elm.) Often, however, ivy took on a sexual connotation quite
apart from its Dionysian associations. In his wedding song Catullus enjoins
Hymen to ‘‘bind her mind with love / as clinging ivy [tenax hedera] entwines
the tree, / wandering here and there’’ (61.33--35), while Horace reminds the
faithless Neaera of her pledge of loyalty, clinging to him more closely than an
Jackdaw
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
ilex is girdled by ivy (Epodes 15.5--6), and describes another woman, Damalis, as
like ‘‘wanton ivy’’ (lascivis hederis) (Odes 1.36.20). In the Renaissance the
‘‘lascivious’’ sense predominates. Bacon says ivy is Bacchus’ sacred tree because
passion coils itself around human actions like ivy (Wisdom of the Ancients
chap. 24). Spenser calls it ‘‘wanton’’ and gives it ‘‘lascivious armes’’ (FQ 2.5.29,
2.12.61). In Romantic poetry, however, ivy without disapproval decorates such
love bowers as Shelley’s cave of Prometheus and Keats’s cave of
Endymion.
Among Roman writers, ivy seemed the appropriate plant for the lighter
genres of literature -- such as pastoral and love lyrics -- as opposed to the oak
and laurel (bay). (Apollo, god of poetry, wore the laurel crown.) In his Eclogues
Virgil calls on the Arcadian shepherds to ‘‘crown with ivy your rising bard’’
(7.25--26), and of the military conqueror Pollio he asks, ‘‘Accept the songs
begun at your bidding, and let this ivy creep among the laurels around your
brow’’ (8.11--13). (Pope repeats this gesture in ‘‘Summer’’ 9--10.)
Horace claims that ‘‘the ivy, the reward of poets’ brows, links me with the
gods above’’ (1.1.29--30); in using the word doctorum for ‘‘poets’’ Horace began a
tradition that ivy was appropriate for the ‘‘learned’’ victors, leaving the other
plants for those who win military or athletic contests. Pope extends this idea
in his Essay on Criticism, where he contrasts ‘‘The Poet’s Bays and the Critick’s
Ivy’’ (706), while in The Dunciad he denounces all those who ‘‘Mix’d the Owl’s
ivy with the Poet’s bays’’ (3.54).
Pope may have drawn his pejorative meaning of ivy, which puzzled some of
his early readers, from another of its features, noted by the ancients, that it
may destroy the tree which holds it up; it can thus represent ingratitude.
Shakespeare’s Prospero invokes this sense in describing his usurping brother:
‘‘he was / The ivy which had hid my princely trunk, / And suck’d my verdure
out on’t’’ (Tempest 1.2.85--87). Adriana in Comedy of Errors plays the vine to her
husband’s elm, and dismisses whatever might dispossess her as ‘‘usurping ivy’’
(2.2.177). Pope’s point, then, is that critics are parasites on poets, and
ungratefully hide them under commentaries until they suffocate.
See Laurel, Oak, Myrtle, Elm.
J
Jackdaw
see Raven
K
Kestrel
Kingfisher
see Hawk
see Halcyon
105
Labyrinth
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L
Labyrinth
106
A sonnet of Petrarch’s tells how desire, love, pleasure, habit, and blind hope
have trapped him; it concludes: ‘‘One thousand three hundred twenty-seven,
exactly / at the first hour of the sixth day of April, / I entered the labyrinth,
nor do I see where to get out’’ (Rime 211). That was the moment he met Laura.
The original labyrinth of classical mythology was the vast maze under the
palace of King Minos of Crete, inside which was the Minotaur, product of the
monstrous lust of the queen for a bull. It was built by Daedalus and finally
entered and exited (after he slew the monster) by Theseus, with the help of
Ariadne and her ball of string. Aeneas learns the story as he examines the
doors of a temple that Daedalus himself built, just before Aeneas must
descend into another labyrinth, Hades (Virgil, Aeneid 6.14--41). Ovid tells the
story briefly in Metamorphoses 8.152--82, Catullus at greater length in
64.50--266; see also Plutarch, Life of Theseus 15--16. Ovid’s Heroides 10 is a letter
from the abandoned Ariadne to Theseus, a version that lies behind Chaucer’s
‘‘Legend of Ariadne’’ and Gower’s Confessio Amantis 5.5231--5495.
The name Daedalus comes from Greek daidalos, ‘‘cunningly wrought.’’ Taken
into Latin, the adjective is used by Virgil, for instance, to refer to beehives,
daedala . . . tecta, ‘‘intricate (or labyrinthine) dwellings’’ (Georgics 4.179). Lucretius’
phrase daedala tellus (1.7), meaning something like ‘‘manifold (or variegated)
earth,’’ has had many imitators: Spenser has ‘‘Then doth the daedale earth
throw forth to thee / Out of her fruitfull lap aboundant flowres’’ (FQ 4.10.45);
and Shelley, ‘‘The daedal earth, / That island in the ocean of the world, / Hung
in its cloud of all-sustaining air’’ (‘‘Ode to Liberty’’ 18--20). In French the noun
dédale means ‘‘maze’’ or ‘‘labyrinth.’’
The first metaphorical use of ‘‘labyrinth’’ is found in Plato’s Euthydemus,
where Socrates likens a fruitless philosophical inquiry to falling into a
labyrinth, where we think we are at the finish but the path turns and we are
back at the beginning (291b). Boethius uses the same trope in Consolation of
Philosophy 3p12; in Chaucer’s charming translation, thou ‘‘hast so woven me
with thi resouns the hous of Dedalus, so entrelaced that it is unable to ben
unlaced.’’
Anything impenetrable or inextricable might be called a labyrinth. For
Christians, sin is a wandering off the path of righteousness into labyrinthine
tangles. ‘‘Leaving the public road,’’ Ambrose writes, sinners ‘‘often run into
labyrinths of error and are punished for having left the road’’ (Exposition of
Psalm 118.59). Dante does not mention the labyrinth in his Inferno (though the
Minotaur is there), but the concentric circles, walls, broken bridges, and
‘‘pouches’’ make hell a great labyrinth itself. Chaucer compares the House of
Rumor, full of error and confusion, with the ‘‘Domus Dedaly, / That
Laboryntus cleped [called] ys’’ (House of Fame 1920--21). Spenser’s ‘‘shadie grove’’
of Error is a labyrinth of many paths and turnings (FQ 1.1.11). Milton’s Satan
seeks the serpent and finds him with symbolically resonant coils: ‘‘him fast
sleeping soon he found / In labyrinth of many a round self rolled’’ (PL 9.182--83).
Petrarch’s labyrinth of love becomes the theme of many Renaissance works,
such as Boccaccio’s Laberinto d’Amore, part of Il Corbaccio, a place where men
are trapped by the illusions of passion and turned into animals. Cervantes
Land
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wrote a comedy, El Laberinto de Amor. Mary Wroth begins a sonnet, ‘‘In this
strange labyrinth how shall I turn?’’ Rejecting every possible step, she is
moved ‘‘to leave all, and take the thread of love.’’ In one of the phases of
Blake’s ‘‘Mental Traveller’’ a desert is planted with ‘‘Labyrinths of wayward
Love’’ (83).
In more recent literature labyrinthine settings are common: passageways of
castles in gothic novels, forests, caves, and so on. Cities are labyrinthine in
Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of Paris and Hugo’s Notre Dame of Paris; Hugo gives an
elaborate account of the labyrinth of sewers under Paris in Les Miserables.
London is a labyrinth in Dickens’s Oliver Twist and Bleak House. Detective novels
presume the impenetrability of cities, impenetrable to all but the detective.
Chapter 10 of Joyce’s Ulysses (‘‘Wandering Rocks’’) has been described as
labyrinthine in the way it follows the movements of a dozen characters
through the streets of Dublin; the whole novel might be well described as a
labyrinth, and indeed one of its leading characters is named Stephen Dedalus.
One of Borges’s collections of stories, called Labyrinths in its English version,
presents several literal and metaphorical labyrinths, including a mysterious
and seemingly chaotic novel called The Garden of the Forking Paths, which is
about time and eternity. A literal labyrinth is central to Eco’s The Name of the
Rose, a metaphorical one to Marquez’s The General in his Labyrinth.
There is a technical distinction between a labyrinth and a maze, the
labyrinth being ‘‘unicursal’’ (with one path), the maze ‘‘multicursal’’ (with
branching paths); one can get lost only in a maze. This distinction, however, is
seldom observed in literature.
Land
see Nature
Lark
The lark, also called the laverock, is one of the most popular birds in
post-classical European poetry. The crested lark appears occasionally in Greek
literature, but not the skylark, with its distinctive literary characteristics.
Latin had a word for the skylark, alauda (perhaps borrowed from Gaulish),
giving French alouette and Italian allodetta, but the bird seldom appears in
Latin literature. In English, ‘‘lark’’ by itself (from a Germanic root) usually
refers to the skylark (Alauda arvensis). This little brown bird is known for the
loud, merry, musical song that it sings only in flight and notably early in the
morning; it soars so high it disappears in the light, though its song might
still be heard.
‘‘Alas, near all the birds / Will sing at dawn,’’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning
reminds us (Aurora Leigh 1.951--52), but in literature the lark is the dawn bird,
the one who begins the singing and rouses the others. ‘‘Hark, hark, the lark
at heaven’s gate sings, / And Phoebus gins arise,’’ according to the famous
song in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (2.3.19--20); ‘‘the lark at break of day arising /
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate’’ (Sonnets 29.11--12); twice
elsewhere Shakespeare calls it ‘‘the morning lark’’ (MND 4.1.94, TS, Ind. 2.44).
In Spenser: ‘‘The merry Larke her mattins sings aloft’’ (Epithalamium 80) and
‘‘With merry note her [Aurora] loud salutes the mounting larke’’ (FQ 1.11.51).
To get up early is to ‘‘rise with the lark’’ (R3 5.3.56; Wordsworth, Excursion
4.491). Milton’s description is definitive: ‘‘Thus wore out night, and now the
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Herald Lark / Left his ground-nest, high tow’ring to descry / The morn’s
approach, and greet her with his Song’’ (PR 2.279--81).
The sound of the song is conventionally ‘‘tirra-lirra’’ (e.g., Shakespeare, WT
4.3.9); in French it is ‘‘tire-lire.’’
The lark is often paired with the nightingale, most famously in Romeo and
Juliet 3.5. Wordsworth contrasts the ‘‘Lark of the dawn, and Philomel of night’’
(‘‘Liberty’’ 82); Tennyson contrasts ‘‘the morning song of the lark’’ and ‘‘the
nightingale’s hymn in the dark’’ (‘‘The First Quarrel’’ 33--34). (See Nightingale.)
The heights to which the lark mounts -- ‘‘mounting’’ is in fact a common
adjective since Spenser at least (FQ 1.11.51) -- gave it religious associations, as if
it were a chorister or angel. It is charmingly expressed in the medieval Welsh
poet Dafydd ap Gwilym’s phrase ‘‘a cantor from the chapel of God’’ (‘‘The
Skylark’’). Dante mentions it once, in a simile in the Paradiso (20.73--75). In
both his ‘‘Skylark’’ poems Wordsworth calls ‘‘divine’’ some feature of the bird.
In an earlier work he writes of the ‘‘gay lark of hope’’ (Descriptive Sketches 528),
while in the first ‘‘To a Skylark’’ he takes the contrast between the lark’s
joyous flight and song with his own weary plodding through life as an
occasion to express ‘‘hope for higher raptures, when life’s day is done.’’
That this bird among others triggers yearnings in human listeners is
explained by Faust to his student: ‘‘And yet inborn in all our race / Is impulse
upward, forward, and along, / When overhead and lost in azure space / The
lark pours forth its trilling song’’ (Goethe, Faust I 1092--95, trans. Passage).
Shelley in ‘‘To a Sky-Lark’’ yearns to become as capable as the bird, which he
compares to a ‘‘Poet hidden / In the light of thought’’ (36--37).
Perhaps the most astonishing and elaborately symbolic treatment of the
lark is found in Blake’s poem Milton. Just as the morn appears the lark springs
from the corn-field and ‘‘loud / He leads the Choir of Day! trill, trill, trill,
trill, / Mounting upon the wings of light into the Great Expanse: / Reecchoing
against the lovely blue & shining heavenly Shell: / His little throat labours
with inspiration; every feather / On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the
effluence Divine[.] / All Nature listens silent to him & the awful Sun / Stands
still upon the Mountain looking on this little Bird’’ (31.30--37).
Laurel
108
The laurel (or bay) was sacred to Apollo, god of prophecy, poetry, and music,
perhaps originally because chewing them or inhaling their aroma seemed to
induce a prophetic trance. The pythoness or priestess of Apollo was crowned
with laurel (Greek daphne), as were the victors in the Pythian games, celebrated
by Pindar. Hesiod reports that the muses gave him a shoot of laurel as a staff
and then breathed a divine voice in him (Theogony 30--32). Laurel grew in the
sacred grove of Delos, the island dedicated to Apollo (Euripides, Hecuba 459);
and his temples were decked with it (Ion 80, 103). Before long it became
conventional that Apollo and his nine muses wore laurel; as Spenser was to
put it, ‘‘The Muses . . . were wont greene bayes to weare’’ (SC ‘‘November’’ 146).
The myth of Apollo and Daphne is memorably told by Ovid. After Daphne is
changed into a laurel tree, Phoebus (Apollo) vows, ‘‘Since thou canst not be
my bride, thou shalt at least be my tree! My hair, my lyre, my quiver shall
always be entwined with thee, O laurel. With thee shall Roman generals
wreathe their heads . . . ’’ (Met. 1.557--60). Ovid also reminds us that laurel is
‘‘unfading’’ or evergreen (Tristia 3.1.45), as befits a symbol of fame.
Lead
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Victors in battle were indeed sometimes crowned with laurel; to quote
Spenser again, it was ‘‘the meed of mightie conquerours’’ as well as of ‘‘Poets
sage’’ (FQ 1.1.9). See Virgil, Eclogues 8.11--13, quoted under Ivy.
After the Italian poet Petrarch was made the first modern poet laureate
(crowned with the laurel) in 1341 at the Capitol in Rome, he explained that he
chose laurel for his crown not only for its associations with prophecy and
Apollo but for its fragrance (fame), its evergreen leaves (eternity), and its
supposed immunity from lightning. He seems not to have known that the
victors of the ancient Capitoline poetry contests were crowned with oak
leaves. ‘‘The crown / Which Petrarch’s laureate brow supremely wore,’’ in
Byron’s words (Childe Harold 4.57), became the prototype for the wreath of all
poets laureate, or ‘‘the lauriat fraternity of poets,’’ in Milton’s phrase (Apology
for Smectymnuus).
Milton opens his pastoral elegy Lycidas with three plants associated with
poetry: ‘‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more / Ye Myrtles brown, with
Ivy never sere, / I come to pluck your Berries . . . ’’ He is in part alluding to
Virgil’s ‘‘Second Eclogue’’ -- ‘‘You too, O laurels, I will pluck, and you, their
neighbor myrtle’’ (54--55) -- the plants of Apollo and Venus, appropriate to a
song about love. (See also Horace 3.4.18--19.) Petrarch wrote that ivy and myrtle
would also have been appropriate for his crown, and another account of his
coronation reports that all three were used.
Byron once pointedly contrasts laurel (fame or glory) with myrtle and ivy
(love): ‘‘And the myrtle and ivy of sweet two-and-twenty / Are worth all your
laurels, though ever so plenty’’ (‘‘Stanzas Written on the Road between
Florence and Pisa’’ 3--4).
See Ivy, Myrtle, Oak.
Lead
The heaviest common metal, pale and dull in appearance, lead sits on the
bottom of the traditional hierarchy of metals. In the Old Testament it is
included among the baser metals in prophetic visions of God’s testing the
‘‘mettle’’ of his people: Jeremiah says the rejected people are brass, iron, lead,
and ‘‘reprobate’’ or spurious silver (6.28--30); Ezekiel says they are dross: ‘‘all
they are brass, and tin, and iron, and lead, in the midst of the furnace; they
are even the dross of silver’’ (22.18). Its heaviness is the reason for a simile in
the Song of Moses -- Pharaoh’s host ‘‘sank as lead in the mighty waters’’ (Exod.
15.10) -- which has remained a commonplace; e.g., the albatross slips off
Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner ‘‘and sank / Like lead into the sea’’ and later ‘‘The
ship went down like lead’’ (‘‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’’ 290--91, 549).
Alchemists strove to transform the base or vile metal lead into gold. As it is
the heaviest it was considered the ‘‘slowest’’ metal, and was thus connected
with slowest planet Saturn. Spenser calls it ‘‘sad lead’’ (FQ 3.11.48) and twice
uses the phrase ‘‘sad as lump of lead,’’ once of a melancholy person, once of a
literal weight (2.1.45, 2.8.30); ‘‘sad’’ meant ‘‘heavy,’’ as ‘‘saturnine’’ meant
‘‘slow’’ or ‘‘gloomy.’’ Shelley once calls it ‘‘sullen lead’’ (PU 4.541). It was not
among the traditional four races or ages, which were gold, silver, bronze, and
iron, but it was available to characterize a really dull and heavy time. In The
Dunciad Pope sees ‘‘Dulness’’ ‘‘hatch a new Saturnian age of lead’’ (b 1.28),
cleverly reversing the usual association of Saturn with the golden age. Byron
writes of ‘‘Generals, some all in armor, of the old / And iron time, ere lead
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had ta’en the lead’’ (Don Juan 13.553--54) -- not only implying that the present
time is worse than ‘‘iron’’ but that lead bullets and shot, which penetrate
iron, have made it so.
The paradox that the heaviest metal flies swiftest on the battlefield was
irresistible. So Shakespeare’s Moth and Armado have this exchange: ‘‘As swift
as lead, sir.’’ ‘‘Is not lead a metal heavy, dull, and slow? . . . I say, lead is slow.’’
‘‘You are too swift, sir, to say so. Is that lead slow which is fired from a gun?’’
(LLL 3.1.57--63).
‘‘Leaden’’ in Latin (plumbeus) occasionally meant ‘‘oppressive’’ or ‘‘dull.’’ In
English it often meant ‘‘slow,’’ as in Shakespeare’s ‘‘leaden age, / Quickened
with youthful spleen’’ (1H6 4.6.12--13) or Sidney’s ‘‘leaden eyes’’ that miss
‘‘sweet beautie’s show’’ (Astrophil Song 7). Milton’s ‘‘lazy leaden-stepping
hours, / Whose speed is but the heavy Plummet’s pace’’ (‘‘On Time’’ 2--3),
wittily reminds us that the plummet of a clock is made of lead (from Latin
plumbum). It often went with sleep, as in Shakespeare’s ‘‘leaden slumber’’ (R3
5.3.105); Pope’s ‘‘leaden slumbers press his drooping eyes’’ (Odyssey 4.610); or
this from Young: ‘‘Night . . . / . . . stretches forth / Her leaden Scepter o’er a
slumbering world’’ (Night Thoughts 1.18--20). Melancholy walks ‘‘with leaden
eye’’ in Gray’s ‘‘Ode to Adversity’’ (28).
It had a particular association with death because of the common use of
lead-lined coffins. Spenser uses the formulaic phrase ‘‘wrapt in lead’’ three
times in The Shepheardes Calender to mean ‘‘dead,’’ twice rhyming with it. Byron
has ‘‘laid in lead’’ (Vision of Judgment 550), Keats has ‘‘hears’d up in stifling
lead’’ (Otho 4.1.58).
The association with death, added to its low rank among metals, makes
lead suitable for the third casket in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice: the superficial suitors choose the gold or silver caskets, but deeper Bassanio rejects
‘‘gaudy gold’’ and silver for ‘‘meagre lead,’’ whose ‘‘paleness moves me more
than eloquence,’’ and wins Portia (3.2.101--07). It was with similar symbolism
that Dante imagined the hypocrites in hell wearing cloaks gilded on the
outside but inside all of lead (Inferno 23.64--67).
See Metal.
Leaf
110
Three of the most striking facts about leaves are that there are vast numbers
of them, even on a single tree, that they are born in the spring and die in the
fall, and that they rustle or fly off in the wind. These features, mainly, make
them favorite images in poetry.
The familiar contrast between the annual coming and going of leaves on
deciduous trees and the near-permanence of the trees themselves prompts
Homer’s famous simile in the speech of Glaucus to Diomedes: ‘‘High-hearted
son of Tydeus, why ask of my generation? / As is the generation of leaves, so is
that of humanity. / The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live
timber / burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. / So one
generation of men will grow while another / dies’’ (Iliad 6.145--50; trans.
Lattimore). Glaucus goes on to tell his genealogy, what we would now call his
‘‘family tree,’’ as befits a poem in which patronymics are as prominent as given
names (here, for example, each hero is named only as the son of someone).
That this perspective may seem too godlike for a young warrior, himself a leaf
likely to fall, is confirmed by the reappearance of the simile on the lips of
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Apollo, who tells Poseidon there is no point in contending over ‘‘insignificant /
mortals, who are as leaves are, and now flourish and grow warm / with life,
and feed on what the ground gives, but then again / fade away and are dead’’
(21.463--66). It is part of the poignancy of the Iliad that its heroes occasionally
achieve the detachment to see their own life as the brief thing it is.
Homer’s comparison is repeated by Mimnermus: ‘‘we, like the leaves that
grow in the flowery springtime . . . like them we enjoy the flower of youth for
a brief span’’ (2.1--4); by Sophocles: man is as ‘‘shortlived as the leaves of a
slender poplar’’ (frag. 593); and by Aristophanes in Birds 686: humans are
‘‘feeble-lived, much like the race of leaves’’ -- an appropriate simile to be drawn
by a bird.
Shelley elaborates the simile in Queen Mab 5.1--15 and takes an even longer
view, imagining the trees falling as well as the leaves, while from the rotting
trunks a new forest springs ‘‘Like that which gave it life, to spring and die’’
(his note cites Iliad 6.146ff.).
Homer also mentions leaves (and flowers) as types of multitudinousness in
his flurry of similes for the mustering armies outside Troy (Iliad 2.468), a
comparison used by many poets ever since, such as this by Apollonius of
Rhodes: the Colchians thronged to the assembly, and ‘‘like the waves of the
stormy sea / or as the leaves that fall to the ground from the wood with its
myriad branches / in the month when the leaves fall’’ (Argonautica 4.215--17).
Marlowe uses the image with a Homeric allusion to Mt. Ida: ‘‘Here at
Aleppo, with an host of men, / Lies Tamburlaine, this king of Persia, / In
number more than are the quivering leaves / Of Ida’s forests’’ (2 Tamburlaine
3.5.3--6).
The numerousness of leaves, their mortality, and their susceptibility to
wind made them perfect emblems for the dead in the underworld. According
to Bacchylides, when Heracles descended to Hades he saw the souls of mortals
‘‘like leaves the wind shakes’’ (Epinician 5.63). Virgil’s Aeneas in the realm of
Dis meets ‘‘as many souls / As leaves that yield their hold on boughs and
fall / Through forests in the early frost of autumn’’ (Aeneid 6.309--10; trans.
Fitzgerald). Seneca uses the leaf simile among several others (flowers, waves,
migrating birds) to bring out the vast number of shades summoned by
Tiresias (Oedipus 600). Dante sees the dead on the shore of Acheron: ‘‘As, in
the autumn, leaves detach themselves, / first one and then the other, till the
bough / sees all its fallen garments on the ground, / similarly the evil seed
of Adam / descended from the shoreline one by one’’ (Inferno 3.112--16; trans.
Mandelbaum). With this tradition before him, and a passage from Isaiah
about the day of vengeance -- ‘‘all their host [of heaven] shall fall down, as the
leaf falleth off from the vine’’ (34.4) -- it was almost inevitable that Milton
would use it for the recently fallen legions of Lucifer, ‘‘angel forms, who lay
entranced / Thick as autumnal leaves that strew the brooks / Of Vallombrosa’’
(PL 1.301--03).
Isaiah also likens an individual life to a leaf: ‘‘we all do fade as a leaf; and
our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away’’ (64.6). This too became a
commonplace. To take some modern examples: Lamartine likens himself to
‘‘une feuille morte’’ (‘‘a dead leaf’’), and prays the wind to carry him like the
leaf (‘‘L’Isolement’’); Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, home from her honeymoon, gazes at
the withered golden leaves and feels she is ‘‘already into September’’ (Act 1);
111
Left and right
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Hopkins’s Margaret is grieving over the ‘‘unleaving’’ of the grove, while the
leaves, ‘‘like the things of man,’’ express ‘‘the blight man was born for’’
(‘‘Spring and Fall’’).
A tree may be personified and given feelings, leaves then becoming hair, as
in Ovid: ‘‘The woods grieved for Phyllis, shedding their leaves’’ (Ars Amatoria
3.38); the cutting of hair was the common rite of mourning.
Sometimes a person is compared to a tree that may or may not lose its
leaves. In the Bible: ‘‘he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that
bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither’’ (Ps. 1.3);
‘‘ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden that hath no water’’
(Isa. 1.30). Ovid and other ancient poets compared the life of a man to the
passing seasons (as in Metamorphoses 15.199--216). Drawing on these comparisons, Shakespeare begins one of his best known sonnets (73), ‘‘That time of
year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang /
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, / Bare ruined choirs where
late the sweet birds sang.’’ In the garden scene of Richard II, which is one
elaborate simile for the condition of England, a servant, thinking of Richard,
says, ‘‘He that hath suffered this disordered spring / Hath now himself met
with the fall of leaf’’ (3.4.48--49). As he faces his doom, Macbeth says, ‘‘I have
liv’d long enough: my way of life / Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf’’
(5.3.22--23). Byron felt ‘‘My days are in the yellow leaf’’ in ‘‘On This Day I
Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’’ (5). In his ‘‘Ode to the West Wind,’’ Shelley
(like Lamartine above) imagines that he is a dead leaf the wind might bear,
but (like Shakespeare) also imagines that he has leaves: ‘‘make me thy lyre,
even as the forest is: / What if my leaves are falling like its own!’’ (57--58).
In several languages ‘‘leaf’’ also serves for the page, or double-page, of a
book (e.g., French feuille, feuillet, German Blatt), as we say when we ‘‘turn over a
new leaf’’ -- an irresistible meaning for writers to exploit. Du Bellay imagines
his verses as dead leaves (feuillards) scattered by the wind (‘‘Non autrement que
la prêtresse folle’’). In Sonnet 17 Shakespeare considers ‘‘my papers, yellowed
with their age’’ like old men. Shelley asks the West Wind to ‘‘Drive my dead
thoughts over the universe / Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!’’
(63--64). Perhaps a distant source of this metaphor is Horace’s simile likening
the changing words (vocabulary) of a language to the shedding and regrowing
of leaves (Ars Poetica 60--62).
Pindar uses the evocative phrase ‘‘leaves of song’’ (Isth. 4.27). Among the
Romantics it became a commonplace that poetry should come spontaneously,
as if it grew organically from the poet. Keats wrote, ‘‘if Poetry comes not as
naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all’’ (letter to Taylor,
27 February 1818). Hugo dismisses as of no importance the fact that ‘‘some
autumnal blast of bitter air / With its unsettled wings may sweep along / Both
the tree’s foliage and the poet’s song’’ (‘‘Friends, a last word!’’ 6--8). This
metaphor, combined with the near-punning sense of ‘‘page,’’ lies behind such
titles as Leigh Hunt’s Foliage, Hugo’s Feuilles d’automne, Whitman’s Leaves of
Grass, and Rosalia de Castro’s Follas Novas.
Left and right
112
As about seven-eighths of the population of all cultures are right-handed, it is
not surprising that in most of them ‘‘right’’ has positive meanings and ‘‘left’’
negative. In the European languages terms for ‘‘right’’ have consistently
Leopard
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favorable senses: Greek dexios also meant ‘‘lucky,’’ particularly in augury,
where the augur stood facing north and a flight of birds to his east was
propitious (see Iliad 12.239--40), and it meant ‘‘clever’’ or ‘‘dextrous’’; Latin
dexter had the same meanings; French droit (from Latin directum) has many of
the same senses as English ‘‘right,’’ and yields English ‘‘adroit,’’ synonymous
with ‘‘dextrous.’’ One of the Greek words for ‘‘left’’ (skaios) could mean ‘‘illomened’’ or ‘‘clumsy’’; Sophocles writes of Agamemnon’s ‘‘skaion mouth’’ (Ajax
1225) and how willfulness leads to skaiotes or folly (Antigone 1028). Latin sinister
meant ‘‘wrong’’ or ‘‘perverse’’ (whence English ‘‘sinister’’); laevus meant
‘‘foolish’’; both could mean ‘‘unfavorable’’; in Roman augury, however, the left
was often propitious, as if the augur faced south. French gauche, which may
come from a Frankish word meaning ‘‘turn aside’’ (from the ‘‘right’’ way), also
means ‘‘clumsy,’’ as it does in English. English ‘‘left’’ may come from word
meaning ‘‘useless.’’ Two Greek words for ‘‘left’’ (aristeros, ‘‘best,’’ and euonumos,
‘‘good-named’’) are obvious euphemisms, perhaps evidence of a taboo on
saying ‘‘left.’’
There are a few mysterious passages in the Old Testament that suggest a
disparagement of ‘‘left.’’ ‘‘A wise man’s heart is at his right hand,’’ says Ecclesiastes, ‘‘but a fool’s heart at his left’’ (10.2); ‘‘heart’’ here seems an unwise
translation in the light of human anatomy (the NEB has ‘‘mind’’). Ezekiel lies
on his left side to make a point to the city of Jerusalem (4.4), but it is not
clear what the point is. The right hand, on the other hand, symbolizes
power: ‘‘Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power’’ (Exod. 15.6); the
Lord will use ‘‘the saving strength of his right hand’’ (Ps. 20.6). To be at one’s
right hand is to protect or support: ‘‘because he is at my right hand, I shall
not be moved’’ (Ps. 16.8); ‘‘he shall stand at the right hand of the poor’’
(109.31).
In Plato’s myth of Er we hear that the souls of the just journey to the right
and upward to heaven while those of the unjust go to the left and downward
(Republic 614c--d). At the final judgment, according to Jesus, the Son of man
shall separate the sheep from the goats, ‘‘And he shall set the sheep on his
right hand, but the goats on the left’’; those on the right are the ‘‘righteous’’
(a revealing pun in the AV) and shall inherit the kingdom, while those on the
left shall go into everlasting fire (Matt. 25.31--46). In one description of the
cosmos Milton has ‘‘on the left hand hell’’ (PL 10.322). The Nicene Creed claims
that Christ ‘‘ascended into the heavens, and sitteth on the right hand of the
Father.’’ Milton makes much of this fact, reporting it at least five times in
Paradise Lost (e.g., 3.279, 5.606); the Messiah leaves ‘‘the right hand of glory
where he sat’’ (6.747) to lead the battle against the rebel angels, Victory sits at
his right hand in the chariot (762), the rebels are defeated, and he returns to
sit ‘‘at the right hand of bliss’’ (892).
Leopard
The leopard, the pard, the pardal, the panther, and the lynx are not consistently distinguished from each other in literature, and indeed they are sometimes indiscriminately grouped with other cats as emblems of cruelty or
ferocity. As its name suggests, the leopard was thought to be a hybrid of the
lion (Latin leo) and the ‘‘pard’’ (Latin pardus, from Greek pardos, from pardalis),
which was thought to be a kind of panther; ‘‘pard’’ then came to be a poetic
equivalent of ‘‘leopard.’’
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Leviathan
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A passage in Jeremiah gives one symbolic or proverbial meaning of the
leopard as symbol of unchangeableness or the indelibility of sin: ‘‘Can the
Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good,
that are accustomed to do evil’’ (13.23). When Shakespeare’s Richard II tries to
halt the quarrel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray, he invokes his authority
as the king of beasts -- ‘‘lions make leopards tame’’ -- to which Mowbray responds, ‘‘Yea, but not change his spots’’ (R2 1.1.174--75). Kipling’s story ‘‘How the
Leopard Got his Spots’’ (which includes the Ethiopian), is a jocular response to
Jeremiah.
The leopard is one of the four beasts of Daniel’s dream, where it has four
heads (7.6); it reappears in the description of the seven-headed beast of
Revelation: ‘‘And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet
were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion’’ (13.2). These
visions are the basis of the later Christian iconographic meaning of the
leopard as sin, Satan, or the Antichrist.
Another passage in Jeremiah, where he prophesies that a lion, a wolf, and a
leopard will tear in pieces those who break the yoke of the Lord (5.6), stands
behind the most thoroughly discussed leopard in literature, if it is a leopard,
the lonza, ‘‘covered with a spotted hide,’’ that confronts Dante as he struggles
vainly up the hill in canto 1 of the Inferno. It is finally neither the lonza nor
the leone (lion) but the lupa (she-wolf) that defeats Dante. Countless allegorical
meanings have been proposed for these three alliterating beasts, but the
likeliest theory has it that the leopard represents the sins of fraud, deeper and
crueler sins than those of violence (lion) and incontinence (she-wolf). Richard
of St. Victor had commented on Daniel 7.6: ‘‘Rightly is the fraudulence of
dissemblers symbolized by the pard which is speckled with spots over its
whole body. For dissemblers indeed make a show of holiness.’’ Dante may be
confessing that his own sins, which block his climb to salvation, are not of
the cold-blooded leopard-like sort but more impulsive and thoughtless.
From late classical sources the leopard or panther emerged as the distinctive beast of Dionysus or Bacchus. Captured by pirates, Dionysus transforms
their ship by magic, grape vines grow around the oars and sails, and ‘‘tigers,
lynxes, and fierce spotted panthers’’ appear on board (Ovid, Met. 3.669); in his
triumphal procession, a pair of lynxes draw his chariot (4.24--25), or it is
panthers and lions (Nonnus, Dionysiaca 14.261). By the time of Schiller, his
chariot is drawn by ‘‘majestic panthers in a team’’ (‘‘Gods of Greece’’ 58), while
Keats imagines himself ‘‘charioted by Bacchus and his pards’’ (‘‘Ode to a
Nightingale’’ 32).
In English poetry the pard/panther was seen as the characteristic enemy of
the hind (doe). Shakespeare’s Cressida lists the proverbial predators and prey:
‘‘as false / . . . / As fox to lamb, as wolf to heifer’s calf, / Pard to the hind, or
stepdame to her son’’ (TC 3.2.191--94). Dryden’s poem The Hind and the Panther
deploys these beasts and many others in a complex religious allegory.
See Lion, Wolf.
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Leviathan
see Whale
Light and
darkness
Light and darkness are probably the most fundamental and inescapable
terms, used literally or metaphorically, in the description of anything in life
Light and darkness
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
or literature. It seems almost superfluous to include them in a dictionary, and
almost circular to try to shed light on them. What follows will be highly
selective.
Light is traditionally linked with goodness, life, knowledge, truth, fame, and
hope, darkness with evil, death, ignorance, falsehood, oblivion, and despair.
When all was darkness, the first thing God created was light (Gen. 1.3), as if
light is a precondition of creating anything, of bringing a hidden thing ‘‘to
light’’ (as in Job 28.11). To ‘‘see light’’ is to be born (Job 3.16); in fact light is life
itself (3.20): ‘‘the light of the wicked shall be put out’’ (18.5). The Lord is our
light and salvation (Ps. 27.1); he shall be ‘‘an everlasting light’’ (Isa. 60.19). ‘‘The
people that walked in darkness have seen a great light,’’ says Isaiah (9.2), and
Matthew quotes him as a prophet of Christ (4.16). John, for whom light is a
dominant image, makes Christ ‘‘the light of men’’ (1.4), ‘‘the true Light, which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world’’ (1.9); ‘‘men loved darkness
rather than light’’ (3.19), but Jesus says, ‘‘I am the light of the world: he that
followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life’’ (8.12).
Jesus tells his followers, ‘‘Ye are the light of the world’’ (Matt. 5.14), ‘‘the
children of light’’ (Luke 16.8); Paul repeats it: ‘‘Ye are all the children of light,
and the children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness’’ (1 Thess.
5.5). When Christ was crucified, there was darkness at noon (Matt. 27.45).
Hell is dark, as far as possible from the light of God. Dante calls it ‘‘the
eternal dark’’ and ‘‘the blind world’’ (Inferno 3.87, 4.13). Milton, drawing on St.
Basil, describes hell as full of flames, ‘‘yet from those flames / No light, but
rather darkness visible / Served only to discover sights of woe’’ (PL 1.62--64). In
absolute contrast, Dante concludes The Divine Comedy with a vision of ‘‘the
Highest Light,’’ whom he addresses twice as God and praises as the ultimate
and ineffable truth (Paradiso 33.50ff.). Heaven in Milton is ‘‘the happy realms
of light’’ (1.85), and Milton opens book 3 by invoking Light itself: ‘‘Hail, holy
Light, offspring of heaven first-born, / Or of the eternal co-eternal beam / May I
express thee unblamed? since God is light, / And never but in unapproached
light / Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee, / Bright effluence of bright
essence increate’’ (3.1--6).
The image of light emerging from darkness becomes an important symbol
in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, from the relay beacon-fires that the guard sees in the
opening of the Agamemnon -- ‘‘Oh hail, blaze of the darkness, harbinger of
day’s / shining’’ (22--23 trans. Lattimore) -- to the torchlight processional that
concludes The Eumenides; the herald of Agamemnon, for instance, greets both
the land and the light of the sun (508) and with dramatic irony announces
that his lord will bring light into the gloom (522).
Light and dark imagery pervades Beowulf. The monster Grendel is dark, a
‘‘shadow-walker’’ (703), from whose eyes comes a ‘‘horrible light’’ (727); the
dragon is also dark, though it belches fire; Herot the hall of Hrothgar shines
brightly, as do Beowulf and his men.
We could easily multiply examples from works of all periods, but we shall
end with the notion of ‘‘enlightenment.’’ In the Gospel of John, Jesus is not
only the light but the ‘‘truth’’ (14.6). Truth gives us light to see or understand,
and it seems to shine with its own light. Spenser speaks of ‘‘the light of
simple veritie’’ (Ruins of Time 171); his character Error hates the light and
prefers to dwell in darkness, ‘‘Where plain none might see her, nor she see
115
Lightning
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any plaine’’ (FQ 1.1.16). Pope’s epigram ‘‘Intended for Sir Isaac Newton’’ is justly
famous for its succinct celebration of that hero of the Enlightenment (who
wrote a book on optics): ‘‘Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in Night: / God
said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.’’ The Enlightenment put an end to the
‘‘Dark Ages.’’ Thomas Paine writes, ‘‘But such is the irresistible nature of
truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing. The sun
needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness’’ (Rights of Man, Part 2,
Intro.). Blake, a foe of the Enlightenment, nonetheless deploys the
indispensable terms: ‘‘God Appears & God is Light / To those poor Souls who
dwell in Night / But does a Human Form Display / To those who Dwell in
Realms of day’’ (‘‘Auguries of Innocence’’ 129--32).
See Black, Night, Sun, White.
Lightning
116
The sky gods of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans manifested themselves in
lightning and thunder. When the Lord descends on Mt. Sinai, ‘‘there were
thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount’’ (Exod. 19.16).
David’s song of thanksgiving tells that ‘‘he sent out arrows, and scattered
them [the enemies]; lightning, and discomfited them’’ (2 Sam. 22.15); Psalm
144.6 also sets arrows and lightning in parallel (see 77.17), for lightning is the
Lord’s arsenal. At the Day of Judgment there shall be plenty of thunder,
lightning, and earthquake (Rev. 4.5, 8.5, etc), and the Son of Man shall come
‘‘as the lightning cometh out of the east’’ (Matt. 24.27).
The lightningbolt is Zeus’s characteristic weapon (Homer, Iliad 11.66) and
one of his Homeric epithets is ‘‘lightning-gatherer’’ (16.298). In Hesiod he has
three weapons, if that is possible: thunder, lightning, and ‘‘bright
thunderbolt’’ (Theogony 854). Pindar calls Zeus ‘‘driver of thunder’’ and ‘‘lord of
lightning and thunder’’ (Olymp. 4.1, Pyth. 6.24). Roman Jupiter also terrifies
with lightning (Virgil, Aeneid 1.230); his eagle is the ‘‘winged plyer of the
thunderbolt’’ (Horace 4.4.1). In both Greek and Latin the verbs ‘‘thunders’’ and
‘‘lightens’’ can take either an impersonal form (‘‘it thunders’’) or Zeus/Jupiter
as the personal subject. (See Rain.) When Semele begged Zeus to manifest
himself without disguise, he came as a lightningbolt and destroyed her
(Euripides, Bacchae 3).
This theophanic or god-revealing character of lightning seems natural
enough to believers in gods, but it is interesting that we retain the word
‘‘thunderstruck’’ in English even when nothing divine is in question. Our
words ‘‘astonish’’ and ‘‘stun’’ derive from Latin tonere, ‘‘to thunder.’’ Lightning
now can represent any revelation, though something of its numinous
character remains. Liberty gleams like lightning in Shelley’s ‘‘Ode to Liberty’’
and scatters ‘‘contagious fire’’ (4). Byron imagines that if he could ‘‘unbosom
now / That which is most within me’’ and express it in one word, ‘‘And that
one word were Lightning, I would speak’’ (Childe Harold 3.905--11). A flash of
lightning reveals something in the face of the lover that breaks the spell in
Lawrence’s ‘‘Lightning’’: ‘‘the lightning has made it too plain!’’
As lightning is often forked -- Cowper, for instance, writes, ‘‘forky fires / Dart
oblique to the Earth’’ (‘‘A Thunder Storm’’ 28--29) -- Dickinson can both wittily
domesticate it by saying, ‘‘The Lightning is a yellow Fork / From Tables in the
sky / By inadvertent fingers dropt,’’ and restore its awesome aura by calling it
‘‘The Apparatus of the Dark / To ignorance revealed’’ (no. 1173).
Lilac
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As organs of revelation, eyes ‘‘glance’’ or ‘‘flash’’ or ‘‘dart lightning’’ in love
or anger at least as far back as Sophocles, who writes, ‘‘Such is the magic
charm of love, a kind of lightning of the eyes’’ (frag. 474). In Aristophanes a
warrior has ‘‘glances of lightning’’ (Acharnians 566). Shakespeare’s Imogen ‘‘like
harmless lightning throws her eye / On him, her brother, me, her master,
hitting / Each object with a joy’’ (Cym 5.5.394--96). Reversing vehicle and tenor,
Byron sees a night storm as lovely ‘‘as is the light / Of a dark eye in woman!’’
(Childe Harold 3.862--63). (See Eye.)
Lilac
Lily
see Purple flower
After the rose, the lily is the most prominent of literary flowers. Indeed it is
often paired with the rose, not least as a pleasing contrast of colors, for the
lily has long been a synonym for ‘‘white.’’ The Greek leirion was almost
certainly the Lilium candidum, the white lily or Madonna lily; adjectives
derived from it often meant ‘‘white.’’ ‘‘White as a lily’’ and ‘‘lily-white’’ are
ancient commonplaces. Propertius begins a list of deliberate love-clichés with
‘‘Lilies are not whiter than my mistress’’ (2.3.10).
The epic form of the adjective (leirioeis) seems to have meant ‘‘soft’’ or
‘‘delicate.’’ Perhaps in mockery, Hector threatens to rend Ajax’s ‘‘lily-like flesh’’
(Iliad 13.830). The voices of cicadas are ‘‘lily-like’’ (Iliad 3.152), as are those of
the Muses (Hesiod, Theogony 41--42) and the Sirens (Apollonius 4.903); perhaps
it also means ‘‘clear’’ or ‘‘bright.’’ The Hesperides are ‘‘lily-like’’ in Quintus
Smyrnaeus (2.419--20), perhaps the source of ‘‘the lily maid of Astolat,’’ Elaine,
in the Arthurian cycle (see Tennyson’s ‘‘Lancelot and Elaine’’).
In Latin literature lilies stood for the brevity of life or beauty. Horace with
characteristic brevity calls the lily ‘‘brief’’ (breve lilium) (Odes 1.36.16), but
Valerius Flaccus spells it out at length: ‘‘as white lilies gleam brightly through
the colors of spring, / whose life is short and their honor / flourishes for a
moment and already the dark wings of the south wind approach’’ (Argonautica
6.492--94).
Lilies are prominent in the Song of Songs, of which the most famous and
influential verses are these: ‘‘I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the
valleys. / As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters’’ (2.1--2).
Both ‘‘rose’’ and ‘‘lily’’ are unlikely translations of the Hebrew terms (‘‘lotus’’
would be better for the latter, shoshannah), but they have entered the European
languages and shaped Christian allegorizings of the Song. The lily’s whiteness
suggests purity, its beauty suggests perfection, but since it is unclear who
speaks these verses the lily has been assigned to Christ, to the Church, and
above all to the Virgin Mary. Paintings of the Annunciation, where the
archangel Gabriel brings the news to the Virgin that she shall bear a son
(Luke 1.26--38), almost always include a lily, either in a vase or in Gabriel’s
hand. This association presumably lies behind Howe’s evocative but mysterious
line, in ‘‘The Battle-Hymn of the Republic’’: ‘‘In the beauty of the lilies Christ
was born across the sea.’’
The lily can then represent virginity in any woman. Chaucer’s nun makes
St. Cecilia another lily, ‘‘‘hevenes lilie,’ / For pure chaastnesse of virginitee’’
(Second Nun’s Tale 87--88). Shakespeare’s Cranmer prophesies that the young
Elizabeth will live and die ‘‘a virgin, / A most unspotted lily’’ (H8 5.5.60--61). As
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Linden
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for the flower itself, there is ‘‘the virgin Lillie’’ of Spenser (‘‘Prothalamion’’ 32),
Pope has a garden where ‘‘lilies smile in virgin robes of white’’ (‘‘Imitation of
Cowley’’ 5), and Blake’s Thel addresses a lily as ‘‘thou little virgin of the
peaceful valley’’ (Book of Thel 2.3). Rimbaud imagines that the drowning
Ophelia ‘‘floats like a great lily’’ (‘‘Ophélie’’ 28--29).
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Linden
The linden, like the oak and beech, is appreciated for its shade; in Europe it is
often planted near homes and in village greens, while in England it often
lines avenues on estates. It is also called the lime tree: ‘‘lime’’ is probably a
variant of ‘‘line,’’ itself a variant of ‘‘lind,’’ and has nothing to do with the
citrus fruit. The tree in Coleridge’s ‘‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’’ is the
linden. Its name in older English literature is ‘‘lind’’; the more common
modern form ‘‘linden’’ may come from German. The tree is also known for its
yellow flowers and attractive fragrance, ‘‘the lime at dewy eve / Diffusing
odours’’ (Cowper, Task 1.316--17).
In Ovid’s tale of the hospitable old couple Philemon and Baucis, Philemon
(the husband) is turned into an oak, while Baucis (the wife) is turned into a
linden (Met. 8.620). In Baltic pagan lore, men are to sacrifice to the oak,
women to the linden.
In Middle English poetry ‘‘lind’’ or ‘‘line’’ might refer to any tree, especially
in the phrase ‘‘under lind’’ or ‘‘under the lind.’’ A proverbial saying about the
tree (or generic tree) is found in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: ‘‘Be ay of chiere as light
as leef on lynde’’ (1211).
The linden was distinctive of German village centers and so it appears often
in German poetry, notably in the famous love poem by Walther von der Vogelweide that begins ‘‘Under der linden / An der heide / da unser beider bette
was . . . ’’ (‘‘Under the linden by the heath where we two had our bed . . . ’’). It
becomes a conventional resort of lovers, and often a symbol of faithful love.
Eichendorff remembers mournfully the many times he sat with his beloved
under a linden (‘‘The Vespers’’). The best-known linden poem is ‘‘Der Lindenbaum’’ from Müller’s cycle Die schone Mullerin, set by Schubert. Heine writes,
‘‘We sat under the linden tree / And swore eternal faithfulness’’ (‘‘I dreamt the
old dream again,’’ from Lyrical Intermezzo). Heine notes elsewhere that ‘‘the
linden plays a leading role in [The Boy’s Magic Horn, by Brentano and von
Arnim]; in its shade lovers talk in the evenings; it is their favorite tree, perhaps
because the linden leaf has the shape of a human heart’’ (The Romantic School
3.1). Since many trysts under the linden take place at night, nightingales are
often heard singing in its boughs.
Lion
Lions are rampant in both biblical and Greek literature from the beginning.
They are the strongest and most dangerous of predatory beasts, whose roaring
alone is terrifying, and they loom large in the minds of ancient authors.
‘‘Thou huntest me as a fierce lion,’’ says Job (10.16). ‘‘Their roaring shall be like
a lion, they shall roar like the young lions: yea, they shall roar’’ (Isa. 5.29). In
the Iliad lions appear about thirty times, nearly always in similes. ‘‘As among
cattle a lion leaps on the neck of an ox or / heifer, that grazes among the
wooded places, and breaks it, / so the son of Tydeus hurled both from their
horses / hatefully’’; ‘‘And as herdsmen who dwell in the fields are not able to
frighten / a tawny lion in his great hunger away from a carcass, / so the two
Lion
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Aiantes, marshals of men, were not able / to scare Hektor, Priam’s son, away
from the body’’ (5.161--64, 18.161--64, trans. Lattimore). Nearly every warrior is
likened to a lion during his display of prowess. Tyrtaeus enjoins the Spartan
soldiers to place ‘‘a tawny lion’s spirit in your breast’’ (frag. 13).
The lion thus became a byword for ferocity, strength, and terror. In
Chaucer, for instance, lions are called ‘‘crewel,’’ ‘‘fel,’’ ‘‘fiers,’’ ‘‘grym,’’ ‘‘wild,’’
and ‘‘wood’’ (mad or furious). In Spenser they are also ‘‘dredd,’’ ‘‘ramping,’’ and
‘‘ravenous.’’ Shakespeare’s Bottom and his friends rightly worry that whoever
plays the lion must not frighten the ladies, because ‘‘a lion among ladies is a
most dreadful thing; for there is not a more fearful wild fowl than your lion
living, and we ought to look to’t’’ (MND 3.1.30--33).
As fighter and roarer the lion is an emblem of anger. ‘‘The king’s wrath is as
the roaring of a lion’’ (Prov. 19.12). When the system of the seven deadly sins
was established during the Middle Ages, the lion often stood for ira, ‘‘anger’’;
so in Spenser’s procession of the sins ‘‘fierce revenging Wrath’’ rides on one
(FQ 1.4.33). Less explicit is the lion Dante meets at the opening of the Inferno,
the second of three beasts (1.45--48). If the leopard stands for fraud, the worst
category of sin, and the she-wolf stands for incontinence, the least bad
category, then the lion may represent the sins of violence, which Dante places
midway in his hell. (See Wolf, Leopard.) The lion is also sometimes linked to
pride (superbia), the first of the seven sins, since pride often goes with irascibility. Since the fifteenth century ‘‘pride’’ has been the term for a company or
family of lions.
In the Middle Ages also the lion was crowned king of beasts, though it was
long considered a regal emblem. Spenser calls him ‘‘mighty Lyon, Lord of all
the wood’’ (‘‘Vanitie’’ 10.1) and ‘‘Lyon Lord of everie beast in field’’ (FQ 1.3.7) and
speaks of its ‘‘imperiall powre’’ (2.5.10). Marlowe also has ‘‘imperial lion’’
(Edward II 5.1.11), while Shakespeare calls it ‘‘imperious’’ (Othello 2.3.275).
Richard II, demanding obedience, proclaims ‘‘lions make leopards tame’’ (R2
1.1.174); deposed, he is reminded by his queen that he is ‘‘a lion and the king
of beasts’’ (5.1.34).
When Jacob gives his blessings on his sons, he pronounces that ‘‘Judah is a
lion’s whelp: . . . he couched as a lion, and as an old lion,’’ and prophesies that
he shall hold the scepter (Gen. 49.9--10). John of Patmos makes ‘‘the Lion of
the tribe of Juda’’ a title of Christ (Rev. 5.5). Ezekiel has an allegory where the
captured princes of Israel are lions and the sons of a lioness (19.1--9). Despite
these connotations lions also came to represent enemies of the faithful:
Daniel in the lions’ den was the prototype for the fate of many Christians in
the Roman empire. The four faces of the living creatures of Ezekiel’s vision
(1.10) include a lion’s; Christians assigned the lion to St. Mark, and as he is the
patron saint of Venice the lion became a symbol of that city.
The best-known biblical lion is the one that supposedly lies down with the
lamb in the peaceable kingdom. Misled by the alliteration of ‘‘lion’’ and
‘‘lamb,’’ however, most people muddle the famous passage from Isaiah, which
reads: ‘‘The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie
down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; the
young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox’’
(11.6--7; see 65.25). Virgil’s ‘‘Fourth Eclogue,’’ adopted by Christianity, makes a
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Liver
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similar prophecy of a time when ‘‘cattle will not fear the great lions’’ (22). If
such harmony will reign in the messianic kingdom, Milton imagines that it
reigned before the fall as well: ‘‘Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw /
Dandled the kid’’ (PL 4.343--44); but when Satan enters the garden Milton
likens him to a (fallen) lion and tiger, seeking prey (401--08), an allusion to 1
Pet. 5.8, comparing Satan to a roaring lion. In heaven, according to Blake, the
lion will weep tears of pity and say, ‘‘And now beside thee bleating lamb, / I
can lie down and sleep; / Or think on him who bore thy name, / Grase after
thee and weep’’ (‘‘Night’’ 41--44). Shelley foresees a transformation in this
world, where ‘‘The lion now forgets to thirst for blood: / There might you see
him sporting in the sun / Beside the dreadless kid’’ (Queen Mab 8.124--26).
Wordsworth imagines a place in the past where meekness tempered pride,
where ‘‘The lamb is couching by the lion’s side, / And near the flame-eyed
eagle sits the dove’’ (Ecclesiastical Sonnets 2.7).
The Asiatic goddess Cybele was depicted in Latin literature as riding a
chariot pulled by lions (Virgil, Aeneid 3.113, 10.253), as if to say she tames wild
nature; Lucretius has the same image for mother Earth (2.601ff.); both may be
traceable to the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who is shown seated on a lion
throne. Kings, if they are not called lions themselves, or ‘‘lion-hearted’’ like
Richard I, have often been symbolized as hunters or tamers of lions; and the
lion is a frequent heraldic animal and national symbol, as it is of Britain.
Another old tradition is that a lion will not harm a true prince or princess -an excuse Falstaff makes to account for his cowardice before the disguised
Prince Hal (1H4 2.4.267--71). A lion rushes suddenly upon Spenser’s Una, but
then ‘‘he kist her wearie feet, / And lickt her lilly hands with fawning tong’’
(FQ 1.3.6).
In Latin literature lions are associated with Africa (i.e., North Africa),
particularly Libya (Seneca, Oedipus 919), Gaetulia (Horace 1.23.10), or the land
of the Carthaginians (‘‘Punic lions’’ in Virgil, Eclogues 5.27). These places
became ‘‘decorative adjectives’’ for lions, and lasted into modern poetry.
Liver
120
The most celebrated literary liver belongs to the Titan Prometheus, whose
punishment for stealing fire from the gods was to have his liver (Greek epar)
devoured each day by a vulture or eagle (it was restored each night) (Hesiod,
Theogony 523--25). The Greeks traced certain emotions and faculties to various
bodily organs, but it is not clear what function the liver serves in the
Prometheus myth; perhaps his torture is meant simply to be excruciating and
intimate. In Homer’s Iliad, Hecuba, the mother of Hector, wishes she could
attach herself to his killer Achilles and eat at his liver (24. 212f.), perhaps
because Achilles is known for his ferocious anger (cholos, ‘‘bile’’), which was
sometimes thought to be a liver product (see Bile). It was not until Aeschylus
that the liver was generally taken to be the seat of the passions. The chorus of
the Agamemnon sings that ‘‘many things touch the liver’’ (432); in Sophocles’
Ajax the chorus says, ‘‘True grief, I know, goes to the liver’’ (938); in both cases,
modern translators make the liver into the ‘‘heart,’’ a more familiar seat of
feeling and courage (‘‘courage’’ comes from the French word for ‘‘heart’’).
By the Renaissance the liver was usually taken as the seat of sexual desire.
It is frequently so used by Shakespeare. Tarquin seeks Lucrece ‘‘To quench the
Livid
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
coal which in his liver glows’’ (Rape of Lucrece 47). Ferdinand assures Prospero,
‘‘The white cold virgin snow upon my heart / Abates the ardour of my liver’’
(Tempest 4.1.55--56). As the seat of courage or martial valor the liver is the
occasion of insults, as when Macbeth dismisses a servant as a ‘‘lily-liver’d boy’’
(5.3.15) or Goneril taunts Albany as a ‘‘Milk-liver’d man’’ (Lear 4.2.50), the
proper color of the liver being dark red with blood. Hamlet blames himself
for being ‘‘pigeon-liver’d’’ and lacking gall (2.2.573), for the notoriously timid
pigeons were thought to lack that source of bitter anger. (See Dove.)
Livid
Locust
Lode star
see Blue
In parts of North Africa and the Middle East locusts come in vast swarms and
devour all vegetation. They are one of the plagues sent upon Egypt (Exod.
10.12--19), and if Israel disobeys the laws of God they will come again (Deut.
28.38, 42). Locusts are included with famine, pestilence, caterpillars, etc., as
typical disasters (1 Kgs 8.37, Pss. 78.46, 105.34). John of Patmos prophesies they
shall come in the last days from the bottomless pit: they shall sting like
scorpions and look like horses with human faces (Rev. 9.3, 7).
Fortunately it is permitted to eat them (Lev. 11.22), and John the Baptist
famously does so, along with honey, in the wilderness (Matt. 3.4) (see Dante,
Purgatorio 22.151--52).
Locusts make good similes and metaphors. Milton likens Satan’s legions to
the locusts of Egypt (PL 1.338--46); Wordsworth saw that France ‘‘all swarmed
with passion, like a plain / Devoured by locusts’’ (1805 Prelude 9.178--79); Byron
laments that Spain has been overrun by ‘‘Gaul’s locust host’’ (Childe Harold
1.215). Nathanael West invokes the biblical apocalypse in the final scene of
violent riot in his novel The Day of the Locust.
see Star
Lute
see Harp
Lynx
The lynx is proverbially sharp-eyed. It is invoked twice in the Romance of the
Rose as the keenest-sighted animal (8023, 8901). A troop of monsters in Spenser
is the more dangerous because ‘‘every one of them had Lynces eyes’’ (FQ 2.11.8).
As ‘‘modes of sight betwixt each wide extreme,’’ Pope would have us admire
‘‘The mole’s dim curtain, and the lynx’s beam’’ (Essay on Man 1.211--12). ‘‘I did
look,’’ says a character of Browning’s, ‘‘sharp as a lynx’’ (‘‘Youth and Art’’ 41).
Ezra Pound dwells on lynxes in an insistent but mysterious way in one of
his ‘‘Pisan Cantos,’’ written while in detention by the US army; perhaps tranfiguring his guards into the watchful lynxes, he prays to one as to a god, ‘‘O
Lynx keep watch on my fire,’’ ‘‘O Lynx, guard my vineyard’’ (Cantos 79).
One of the Argonauts is named Lynceus, after the cat: ‘‘beyond all mortals
else his eye was sharpest,’’ according to Pindar (Nem. 10.61--62); he ‘‘had the
sharpest eyes of any mortal, if the report is true that without trouble he could
see even down beneath the earth’’ (Apollonius 1.153--54, trans. Hunter; cf.
4.1477--79). Lynceus became proverbial too. Horace advises us not to examine
bodily perfections with the eyes of Lynceus (Satires 1.2.90--91). Goethe
121
Lyre
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
mentions him in Faust (7377) and then names two watchmen after him
(9218ff., 11143ff.); the first says, ‘‘Eye-beam [Augenstrahl] is given me / like the
lynx at the top of the tree’’ (9230--31). Galen describes an eye-salve called
‘‘lynceus’’ (12.778).
Ovid describes Bacchus as driving a pair of lynxes (Met. 4.25); Propertius
imagines Ariadne borne to the sky by them (3.17.8); Virgil speaks of ‘‘Bacchus’s
colorful lynxes’’ (Georgics 3.263). Elsewhere Bacchus drives tigers or leopards.
Lyre
see Harp
M
Maggot
Mandrake
122
see Worm
The mandrake is a plant native to the Mediterranean, a member of the potato
family, with thick roots, often forked, and thought to resemble male or
female genitals, or the legs of a human being. The name comes from Latin
mandragora, from Greek mandragoras, of unknown origin; the English word
was misinterpeted to be a compound of ‘‘man’’ and ‘‘drake’’ (from Latin draco,
‘‘dragon’’).
Mandrakes (Hebrew duda’im) are mentioned twice in the Old Testament.
Rachel asks Leah for the mandrakes her son Reuben has gathered, presumably
as a fertility drug (Gen. 30.14--16). By extension it may have been used as an
aphrodisiac, and thus it appears in the Song of Solomon (7.13). The Greeks
also knew of it as a love philtre; mandragoritis was an epithet of Aphrodite.
The seducer Callimaco in Machiavelli’s play La Mandragola tells the gullible
husband of the woman he wants: ‘‘there is no more certain way to get a
woman pregnant than to give her an infusion of mandragora to drink’’ (Act 2).
When Donne demands the impossible, ‘‘Get with child a mandrake root,’’ he
is wittily reversing one of its functions (‘‘Go, and catch a falling star’’ 2). Some
ancient readers thought the ‘‘miserable drugs’’ by which Circe transformed
Odysseus’ men into swine were mandrakes (Odyssey 10.236).
The main effect of eating mandrakes is narcotic or soporific. Apuleius says
it produces a sleep very like death (Met. 10.11). It is sometimes mentioned with
the poppy, as in Shakespeare’s Othello: ‘‘not poppy, nor mandragora, / Nor all
the drowsy syrups of the world, / Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep /
Which thou owedst yesterday’’ (3.3.330--33) (see also AC 1.5.4). Marino calls it
the ‘‘stupid and heavy mandragora’’ (10.95).
Aelianus and other Latin writers report that the plant was extremely
dangerous to uproot: the approved ritual was to tie it, at night, to a black dog,
who would die in the process of pulling it up. It was also believed that the
mandrake shrieks terribly as it comes out. So Juliet imagines that in the
Capulet tomb she will hear ‘‘shrieks like mandrakes torn out of the earth, /
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad’’ (4.3.47--48).
See Poppy.
Manna
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Manna
see Bread
Marble
see Bronze
Marigold
Mask
Though the name of this hardy yellow or orange flower seems to mean
‘‘Mary’s gold,’’ its usual symbolic meaning has to do with its heliotropic or
sun-following character. It ‘‘opens and shuts with the sun,’’ according to Nashe
(Unfortunate Traveller 9). One name for it in modern Latin was solsequium,
‘‘sun-follower,’’ whence French souci. Shakespeare invokes it in a simile for the
transitory glory of courtiers dependent on the favor of the monarch: ‘‘Great
princes’ favourites their fair leaves spread / But as the marigold at the sun’s
eye’’ (Sonnets 25). Ronsard compares himself to a ‘‘Soucy’’ ‘‘who dies and hangs
her languishing head / when she is no longer enjoying the sun’’ but is reborn
at dawn, when the sun -- his beloved’s eye -- shines on him (‘‘Fantaisie à sa
Dame’’ 39--50 in Premières Poésies).
The marigold’s heliotropism was inevitably figured as the love between the
female flower and the male sun. As Shakespeare’s Perdita passes out flowers
she includes ‘‘The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ th’ sun / And with him rises,
weeping’’ (WT 4.4.105--06), while Drayton names ‘‘marigold, Phoebus’ beloved
friend’’ (Endimion and Phoebe 63). Carew elaborates the conceit: ‘‘Mark how the
bashful morn, in vain / Courts the amorous Marigold, / With sighing blasts,
and weeping rain; / Yet she refuses to unfold. / But when the Planet of the
day, / Approacheth with his powerful ray, / Then she spreads, then she
receives / His warmer beams into her virgin leaves’’ (‘‘Boldness in Love’’). Keats
addresses ‘‘Ye ardent marigolds!’’ in ‘‘I stood tiptoe’’ (48). Though she is not a
marigold, Ovid’s description of Clytie after she becomes a plant lies behind
these modern passages (Met. 4.259--270).
Erasmus Darwin writes in canto 3 of The Loves of the Plants that marigolds
sometimes emit flashes of light at evening, as if returning the rays they have
received all day. Coleridge concludes his ‘‘Lines written at Shurton Bars’’ by
alluding to this phenomenon: ‘‘’Tis said, in Summer’s evening hour / Flashes
the golden-color’d flower / A fair electric flame: / And so shall flash my lovecharg’d eye / When all the heart’s big ecstasy / Shoots rapid through the
frame!’’ (91--96). Gosse may be referring to the flash in his ‘‘Flower of the
Marigold’’: ‘‘And I have found the flower she loves, / Whose burning leaves
shut in the sun; / All day to watch his path it moves, / And dreams of him
when day is done’’ (13--16).
The Romance of the Rose describes Jealousy as wearing a chapel de soussie, a
‘‘garland of marigolds’’ (21741--42); Chaucer imitates this in Knight’s Tale
(1928--29). Yellow is a traditional color of jealousy, and this sense is seconded
by the pun on souci, ‘‘care’’ or ‘‘worry.’’ (See Yellow.)
Blake makes use of the well-known hardiness and regenerative powers of
the garden marigold when his amorous heroine Oothoon encounters one who
tells her, ‘‘pluck thou my flower Oothoon the mild / Another flower shall
spring’’ (Visions of the Daughters of Albion 8--9); she does so, and is thus fortified
against the rape she shortly suffers. She then becomes the emblem of
unjealous love.
see Theatre
123
Matzah
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Matzah
Maze
Melancholy
124
see Bread
see Labyrinth
Melancholy, from Greek melancholia, ‘‘black bile,’’ was once thought to be
caused by an excess of that fluid, produced by the liver. It was not at first
clearly distinguished from yellow bile (Greek chole), but in Hippocrates and
other ancient physiologists melancholy is taken as one of four ‘‘humors’’ or
fluids, alongside yellow bile, blood, and phlegm.
Its dominant constituent element is the earth, its qualities are cold and
dry, it is sympathetic to nighttime, to the color black, and to the slowest of
the planets, Saturn. Its Latin term, atra bilis, entered English as ‘‘atrabile’’ and
the adjective ‘‘atrabilious’’; it was also called ‘‘choler adust’’ (from Latin
adustus, ‘‘burnt, scorched,’’ hence ‘‘blackened’’). In German it has been called
Schwarzgalligkeit, ‘‘black-gallishness.’’
Its link with choler (bile) is shown in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale, where
Pertelote, who knows a lot about humors, advises Chauntecleer to purge
himself ‘‘bothe of colere and of malencolye’’ (2946). A letter from
Shakespeare’s verbose Armado supplies the appropriate epithets: ‘‘So it is,
besieged with sable-colored melancholy, I did commend the black-oppressing
humor to the most wholesome physic of thy health-giving air’’ (LLL 1.1.231--34).
It became associated with meditation, introspection, study, and the idle
imagination. Sidney connects the ‘‘fumes of melancholy’’ with ‘‘dull pensiveness’’ (Astrophel 23); Dürer’s famous engraving, though mysterious in certain
details, connects it with intellectual contemplation. Spenser’s character
Phantastes is ‘‘full of melancholy,’’ with a dark complexion and mad or foolish
eyes, as if he were born under Saturn; in his chamber are flying swarms of
‘‘idle thoughtes and fantasies’’ (FQ 2.9.50--52). Hamlet, a student, seems to be in
its grip as well. Robert Burton, who suffered from the scholar’s version of it,
wrote an immense treatise on it, The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Love-melancholy is common: Romeo has it, and so does Duke Orsino in
Twelfth Night, whom the Clown commends to the protection of ‘‘the
melancholy god’’ (Saturn) (2.4.73); in that play Viola speaks of a girl whose love
is not requited and who pines ‘‘with a green and yellow melancholy’’ (2.4.113).
Melancholy gains prominence in eighteenth-century ‘‘sensibility’’ literature,
and then in Romanticism, where a poet typically visits a graveyard or a ruined
abbey and has ‘‘night thoughts.’’ Milton’s Il Penseroso is a prime source for this
mode. Coleridge started a poem called ‘‘Melancholy’’ and completed one called
‘‘Dejection,’’ Mary Robinson wrote ‘‘The Progress of Melancholy,’’ Keats wrote
an ‘‘Ode on Melancholy’’; Schiller wrote ‘‘Melancholie,’’ Tieck ‘‘Melankolie’’;
Darı́o wrote ‘‘Melancolia,’’ in which he blames poetry itself for his suffering.
Much of Byron’s Childe Harold is composed of gloomy meditations among ruins
and the ‘‘blight and blackening’’ of the mind (4.211). Peacock was prompted by
it to write his novel Nightmare Abbey, about which he said, ‘‘I think it
necessary to ‘make a stand’ against the ‘encroachments’ of black bile’’ (letter
to Shelley 30 May 1818); it has a character based on Byron called Mr. Cypress.
Gérard de Nerval poses as a bereaved prince in a ruined tower, whose lute
bears ‘‘the black sun of Melancholy’’ (‘‘El Desdichado’’).
See Bile, Humor.
Merlin
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Merlin
Metal
see Hawk
The traditional hierarchy of metals -- gold, silver, bronze, iron, and perhaps
lead -- is ancient. One of the earliest recorded uses of the hierarchy is to
characterize the succession of races or ages of humankind. Thus Hesiod, in
Works and Days 109--201, describes five races, four of them assigned a metal.
The golden race ‘‘lived like gods, with carefree heart, / remote from toil and
misery,’’ taking what they wished from a plenteous earth. The silver race was
‘‘much inferior’’: they were witless and given to crime and impiety; Zeus
removed them. The bronze race was ‘‘terrible and fierce, occupied with the
woeful works of Ares.’’ The fourth race were the demigods (Greek hemitheoi), a
‘‘godly race of heroes’’ who fought at Thebes and Troy and destroyed themselves. The race now on earth is the iron race, which ‘‘will never cease from
toil and misery by day or night.’’ Hesiod predicts it will behave worse and
worse until Zeus destroys it. (Translations from M. L. West.)
There are parallels in Zoroastrian myth for the correspondence of metals
to ages. In Daniel 2.31--45 there is Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of a huge statue
with golden head, silver breast and arms, bronze belly and thighs, iron legs,
and feet part clay and part iron. Daniel interprets it to refer to the succession
of kingdoms to follow Nebuchadnezzar’s (gold); it will culminate in a new
everlasting kingdom, which among later Christians was called the Fifth
Monarchy.
Ovid recasts the Hesiodic story in Metamorphoses 1.89--150. In the golden age
(not race) everyone did what was right, without laws; earth was bounteous
and spring was perpetual. This was the age of Saturn (corresponding to Greek
Kronos), who was banished by his son Jove (or Jupiter). The silver race came in
along with seasons and agriculture. Then followed the bronze or brazen race,
which was savage but not yet impious. Then the age of ‘‘hard iron’’ arrived
and all evil burst forth, including private property, war, plunder, murder,
and marital hatred; ‘‘Baneful iron came, and gold more baneful than iron’’
(141).
In his famous ‘‘Fourth Eclogue’’ Virgil names three ages, gold, heroic, and
iron, and announces they will repeat, an idea not found in Hesiod or Ovid.
The metallic hierarchy was applied to individuals as well as races or ages.
Plato in his Republic divides citizens into three classes or castes according to
what innate metal they possess. God, he wrote, mingled gold in the composition of the rulers, silver in that of the auxiliaries or helpers, and iron and
bronze in that of the farmers and the other craftsmen (3.415a). This use is
the origin of the English word ‘‘mettle,’’ meaning temperament or innate
character; it is simply a respelling of ‘‘metal.’’ ‘‘To try one’s mettle’’ is to test
one’s character or spirit; ‘‘mettlesome’’ means ‘‘spirited’’ or ‘‘brave.’’ The full
original sense is alive in Shakespeare’s line, ‘‘They have all been touched, and
found base metal’’ (Timon 3.3.6), the word ‘‘touched’’ meaning ‘‘tested by the
touchstone,’’ which reveals the nature of the metal. (If mineralogical terms are
used of social distinctions, the reverse is also true, for we still speak of ‘‘base’’
metals and ‘‘noble’’ gases.)
The process of refining or purifying precious metals has long lent itself to
metaphoric uses, as we find in the Hebrew prophets. Isaiah quotes the Lord as
saying, ‘‘I will turn my hand upon thee, and purely purge away thy dross,
125
Milk
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
and take away all thy tin’’ (1.25). The New English Bible version reads: ‘‘Once
again I will act against you to refine away your base metal as with potash and
purge all your impurities.’’ Ezekiel has God say, ‘‘As they gather silver, and
brass, and iron, and lead, and tin, into the midst of the furnace, to blow the
fire upon it, to melt it; so I will gather you in mine anger and in my fury, and
I will leave you there, and melt you’’ (22.20). See also Jeremiah 6.27--30 and
Malachi 3.3.
Metal entries in this dictionary: Bronze, Gold, Iron, Lead, Silver.
126
Milk
Milk, like snow, is a standard of whiteness: ‘‘white as milk’’ is a commonplace,
and ‘‘milkwhite’’ lambs and doves abound in older poetry. ‘‘Milkwhite’’ is
doubly appropriate for lambs and doves because milk, the drink of infants, is
also an emblem of innocence. In Pope’s translation of the Iliad there is a tribe
that ‘‘from Milk, innoxious, seek their simple Food’’ (13.12). A mother’s breasts
are filled with ‘‘innocent milk’’ (Wordsworth, 1805 Prelude 5.272). It is thus
often associated with female tenderness and mercy. Lady Macbeth coins a
famous phrase to describe her husband’s mild nature, ‘‘the milk of human
kindness’’ (1.5.17; the Folio has ‘‘humane kindness’’); she herself calls on spirits
to ‘‘Come to my woman’s breasts / And take my milk for gall’’ (1.5.47--48). If
Byron’s Lambro were to lose his daughter it would ‘‘wean / His feelings from
all milk of human kindness’’ (Don Juan 3.454--55). Sin ‘‘turns Heaven’s milk of
mercy to revenge,’’ according to a character in Shelley’s Charles I (1.65). One
in Tennyson’s Princess speaks of ‘‘The soft and milky rabble of womankind’’
(6.290).
‘‘Milk,’’ of course, might be metaphorical for any beneficent drink. ‘‘Wine,’’
says Jonson, ‘‘it is the milk of Venus’’ (‘‘Over the Door’’ 12). The poet in
Coleridge’s ‘‘Kubla Khan’’ has drunk ‘‘the milk of Paradise’’ (54).
The Promised Land is ‘‘a land flowing with milk and honey’’ (Exod. 3.8) -- a
formula that recurs many times in the Old Testament. In the final days ‘‘the
mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk’’ (Joel
3.18). When Dionysus appears, according to Euripides, the earth flows with
milk, wine, and honey (Bacchae 142--43). During the golden age, Ovid tells us,
‘‘streams of milk and springs of nectar flowed / And yellow honey dripped
from boughs of green’’ (Met. 1.111--12, trans. Melville).
Milk’s whiteness, innocence, and maternal and paradisal associations make
it all the more terrible that what the Jews in the death camp drink, in Celan’s
words, is ‘‘black milk’’: ‘‘black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall / we
drink it at noon and the morning we drink it at night / we drink it and drink
it’’ (‘‘Death-Fugue’’).
Mirror
The symbolism of mirrors depends not only on what things cause the
reflection -- nature, God, a book, drama -- but also on what one sees in them -oneself, the truth, the ideal, illusion.
As early as Roman times real mirrors were instruments of vanity or
‘‘narcissism’’ and soon came to stand for it. The myth of Narcissus, indeed, is
the first great mirror tale, told in full by Ovid (Met. 3.339--510). In the Amores
Ovid reminds a vain girl that she has ruined her hair by constantly curling it
with irons; now ‘‘you lay aside the mirror with sorrowful hand’’ (1.14.36).
Petrarch calls Laura’s mirror ‘‘my adversary’’ because it has driven him away,
Mirror
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
and he warns her to remember Narcissus and his fate (Rime 45); in the next
sonnet he blames his miserable state on ‘‘those murderous mirrors / which
you have tired out by gazing fondly at yourself’’ (46). Spenser’s proud Lucifera
‘‘held a mirrhour bright, / Wherein her face she often vewed fayne, / And in
her selfe-lov’d semblance took delight’’ (FQ 1.4.10).
But we might profit from watching others as potential mirrors. A character
in Terence tells a friend ‘‘to look at other men’s lives as in a mirror’’ (Adelphoe
415--16). Certain people are models or ideals and serve as mirrors for everyone.
‘‘Mirror of X’’ had become a common phrase by Chaucer’s time. In Chaucer
one’s lover is the ‘‘mirour of goodlihed’’ (Troilus 2.842); Shakespeare has
‘‘mirror of all Christian kings’’ (H5 2 Prologue 6), ‘‘mirror of all martial men’’
(1H6 1.4.74), ‘‘mirror of all courtesy’’ (H8 2.1.53), while Ophelia calls Hamlet
‘‘The glass of fashion and the mould of form’’ (3.1.153); Waller calls Ben Jonson
the ‘‘Mirrour of Poets’’ (‘‘Upon Ben Jonson’’).
By extension a book can be a mirror. Jean de Meun says his Romance of the
Rose might be called a Mirror of Lovers, ‘‘since they will see great benefits in it
for them’’ (10620--22). Hundreds of books, in fact, were titled Mirror of X or
Mirror for Y, beginning with Augustine’s Speculum; there have been mirrors of
the world, of faith, of astronomy, of alchemy, of sin, of fools, of drunkenness,
and for magistrates, all calculated to instruct and admonish.
The ancient idea that the arts imitate nature or the world led sometimes to
an analogy with a mirror, as in Plato, Republic 596d--e. Donatus attributed to
Cicero the opinion that comedy is a ‘‘mirror of custom’’ (Commentum Terenti
1.22). Skelton refers to his own play Magnyfycence: ‘‘A myrrour incleryd [made
clear] is this interlude, / This lyfe inconstant for to beholde and se’’ (2524--25).
Marlowe invites his audience to ‘‘View but his picture in this tragic glass’’ (1
Tamburlaine Prologue 7). Hamlet’s speech on acting is justly famous: the end of
playing is ‘‘to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her
feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form
and pressure’’ (3.2.21--24). Shortly after Don Quixote likens a play to a mirror
(2.12), he encounters the Knight of the Mirrors, sent by his friends to defeat
him and bring him home (2.15). The mirror became a common analogue in
neoclassic aesthetic theory, according to which art imitates reality, but even
after the Romantic analogue lamp or fountain took hold, the mirror could
still be invoked (with a difference); so Shelley: ‘‘A story of particular facts is as
a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is
a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted’’ (Defence of Poetry).
With the advent of realism the mirror again assumed a central role; so
Stendhal: ‘‘a novel is a mirror being carried down a highway. Sometimes it
reflects the azure heavens to your view; sometimes, the slime in the puddles
along the road’’ (The Red and the Black 2.19, trans. Parks).
Many romances and fairy tales have magic mirrors. Spenser’s Merlin has a
‘‘looking glasse, right wondrously aguiz’d [fashioned],’’ which could show
everything in the world (FQ 3.2.18); Britomart’s adventure begins when she
sees Artegall in ‘‘Venus looking glas’’ (3.1.8). The mirror of Snow White’s
stepmother is both a means of magic and a mundane tool of vanity. Lewis
Carroll’s Alice begins a tale by stepping Through the Looking-Glass. Wilde’s Picture
of Dorian Gray is about a portrait as ‘‘the most magical of mirrors’’ (chap. 8): it
reveals the inner degradation of its subject.
127
Mist
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Mist
Mistletoe
128
see Cloud
The Icelandic Poetic Edda alludes to the death of Balder the son of Odin by
mistletoe (‘‘Voluspa’’ st. 31). Snorri Sturluson tells how the mistletoe, which
had been overlooked when all things on earth took an oath not to harm him,
was thrown at Balder by an enemy. (See also Matthew Arnold’s ‘‘Balder Dead’’
6.) Pliny records that the Druids of Gaul venerated the mistletoe, which grew
on sacred oaks from which they cut it down with a golden sickle and used as
a potion for fertility (Natural History 16.95).
The Greeks and Romans noted the affinity of the mistletoe for the oak -- a
fragment of Sophocles has the phrase ‘‘mistletoe-bearing oaks’’ (frag. 403) -- but
seem not to have regarded it with much awe. Propagated through birddroppings, especially by the missel-thrush, mistletoe grows green in winter
while the host tree itself (not necessarily an oak) seems dead or dormant.
These facts underlie the famous simile in Virgil’s Aeneid (6.205--09) for the
‘‘golden bough,’’ which Aeneas is led to by birds; the bough looks like
mistletoe, but it is a dead thing growing on a live tree, whereas mistletoe is
apparently the opposite; the bough lets the living Aeneas enter the realm of
the dead, where no birds may fly.
Mistletoe was also used to make birdlime to capture birds. Marcus
Argentarius warns a blackbird away from an oak, for ‘‘the oak bears mistletoe,
the foe of birds’’ (Greek Anthology 9.87). Since it is spread by birds in the first
place, it seems poetically just that it should catch them.
Sidney wishes that a wedded couple may live ‘‘Like Oke and Mistletoe. / Her
strength from him, his praise from her do growe’’ (Third Eclogues 63.51--52). It
was widely thought to be poisonous, as Shakespeare seems to note when he
calls it ‘‘baleful mistletoe’’ (Titus 2.3.95), unless he is alluding to old Germanic
legends. Keats imagines it as an ingredient of a deadly potion (Endymion 3.514).
Since at least the seventeenth century mistletoe has been a feature of
Christmas customs, perhaps because, as an evergreen, it represents life in the
season of death.
Mold
see Clay
Mole
The mole is an emblem of blindness. Virgil says moles are ‘‘robbed of sight’’
(Georgics 1.183). Sidney, withdrawn from his beloved’s light, likens himself ‘‘to
the Mowle with want of guiding sight, / Deepe plunged in earth, deprived of
the skie’’ (Certain Sonnets 21). It is contrasted with the lynx: Coleridge addresses
a penetrating man as ‘‘Lynx amid moles!’’ (‘‘No more twixt conscience’’ 5) (see
more under Lynx); and to the eagle: ‘‘Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?’’
Blake asks, ‘‘O wilt thou go ask the Mole’’ (‘‘Thel’s Motto’’), while Yeats wonders
about ‘‘toils of measurement / Beyond eagle or mole / Beyond hearing or
seeing’’ (‘‘A woman’s beauty’’ 9--11). He may have good ears, however, as Yeats’s
line may imply; Shakespeare’s Caliban thinks so: ‘‘Pray you, tread softly, that
the blind mole may not hear a foot fall’’ (Tempest 4.1.194--95).
The mole is a miner or burrower in the ground. When the ghost keeps
moving underground, Hamlet cries, ‘‘Well said, old mole. Canst work i’ th’
earth so fast? / A worthy pioner! [miner]’’ (1.5.162--63). Nature tells man,
according to Pope, ‘‘Learn of the mole to plow’’ (Essay on Man 3.176). Cowper,
Monkey
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
however, takes the mole as a symbol of destructive greed: noting the hillocks
‘‘Raised by the mole, the miner of the soil,’’ he comments, ‘‘He, not unlike the
great ones of mankind, / Disfigures earth; and, plotting in the dark, / Toils
much to earn a monumental pile, / That may record the mischiefs he has
done’’ (Task 1.273--77).
As for the hillocks, a character in Sidney is so depressed ‘‘that molehilles
seem high mountaines’’ (Fourth Eclogues 71.23), and Shakespeare’s Coriolanus
compares ‘‘Olympus to a molehill’’ (5.3.30).
A toast by a Scotsman in Scott’s Waverley ‘‘to the little gentleman in black
velvet who did such a service in 1702’’ almost leads to bloodshed, for the little
gentleman was the mole whose hill caused the horse of William III to stumble
and kill him (chap. 11).
Monkey
see Ape
Monster
see Beast
Moon
The moon is one of the ‘‘two great lights’’ that God made on the fourth day,
according to Genesis 1.16, ‘‘the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser
light to rule the night’’ (AV). Now known to be the only natural satellite of
planet Earth, under the Ptolemaic cosmology it was thought to be the nearest
or lowest of the seven planets that revolve around the earth on their
transparent spheres: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. In
Latin and the Romance languages the seven days of the week are named after
these planets, but in English and the other Germanic languages only the two
great lights (and Saturn in English) have given their names to days. Monday,
or Moon-day, corresponds to Latin dies lunae, ‘‘day of the moon,’’ whence
French lundi, Italian lunedi, and so on.
Because it reflects the sun’s light from constantly varying angles to the
earth, the moon passes through phases, one complete cycle taking one
‘‘moon’’ or ‘‘month’’ of about 291 21 days. Five distinct phases have names: new
(when the moon is invisible or just the first sliver is visible), crescent, half,
gibbous (from Latin gibbus, ‘‘hump’’), and full. When the first thin crescent is
visible, some call the dark remainder the old moon, which may appear ‘‘with
swimming phantom light o’erspread’’ (Coleridge, ‘‘Dejection’’). The crescent
and gibbous phases are said to be waxing before the full moon and waning
after it. The crescent phase is often called ‘‘horned’’: its ‘‘temples were marked
with a small horn’’ (Claudian, Rape of Proserpine 2.54); it is likened sometimes
to a boat, sometimes to an archer’s bow. The nearer the apparent positions of
sun and moon in the sky the less the moon is lit. Thus the full moon is
always opposite the sun in the sky, rising when the sun sets and vice versa;
only a full moon can be eclipsed by the shadow of the earth, and only a new
moon can eclipse the sun. If the moon is at its meridian or high point at
midnight, it must be full.
In Latin usage, the day when the moon is near the sun and thus invisible is
the day of the ‘‘silent moon’’ (silentis lunae) or the ‘‘interlunar’’ day (interlunii)
(Pliny, Natural History 16.190). When the Greeks return by stealth to Troy,
according to Virgil, they come tacitae per amica silentia lunae, ‘‘by the friendly
silence of the quiet moon’’ (Aeneid 2.255); that might mean they come in utter
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Moon
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darkness. (Yeats borrows ‘‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’’ as the title of an
important essay.) Milton’s phrase, ‘‘silent as the moon, / When she deserts the
night / Hid in her vacant interlunar cave’’ (Samson Agonistes 87--89), is echoed
by Wordsworth: ‘‘All light is mute amid the gloom, / The interlunar cavern of
the tomb’’ (Evening Walk 267--68); and by Shelley: ‘‘the silent Moon / In her
interlunar swoon’’ (‘‘With a Guitar. To Jane’’ 23--24). Shelley also combines this
terminology with the boat and with Coleridge’s phantom light when he
describes the earliest new phase: ‘‘I see a chariot like that thinnest boat / In
which the Mother of the Months is borne / By ebbing light into her western
cave / When she upsprings from interlunar dreams, / O’er which is curved an
orblike canopy / Of gentle darkness’’ (PU 4.206--11). The synaesthesia lying
behind this Latin usage is found also in Dante’s description of hell as a place
where ‘‘all light is mute’’ (Inferno 5.28).
Its regular phases make the moon a measurer of time. The word ‘‘moon’’
derives from an Indo-European root ∗ me-, meaning ‘‘measure,’’ which also
appears in Latin mensis, ‘‘month,’’ and menstruus, ‘‘monthly’’ (whence English
‘‘menstruate’’), as well as in mensura, ‘‘measuring’’ (whence English ‘‘immense,’’
‘‘dimension,’’ and ‘‘measure’’ itself).
In both Greek and Latin new terms for ‘‘moon’’ replaced forms based on the
me- root: Greek selene (‘‘blaze’’ or ‘‘flame’’) and Latin luna (‘‘light’’), both with
feminine endings, as opposed to the masculine gender of the original words.
(Homer twice uses a feminine form, mene, for ‘‘moon,’’ which is based on
masculine men, the usual word for ‘‘month.’’ Old English mona was masculine,
as is modern German Mond.) In the classical tradition, then, the moon is
invariably feminine, and since Homer and Hesiod it has been associated with
Greek and then Roman goddesses. Greek Artemis, protectress of virgins as
well as mothers in childbirth, guardian of young animals and of the hunt
(with bow and arrow), became a moon goddess; Roman Diana was identified
with Artemis; both acquired the epithet ‘‘Cynthian’’ from Mt. Cynthus on
Delos, where Artemis (and her brother Apollo) were born, and Cynthia became
a name in its own right. Another epithet, ‘‘Phoebe,’’ meaning ‘‘bright’’ in
Greek, also became a name, like its masculine form ‘‘Phoebus’’ (Apollo).
Horace calls Diana the diva triformis: her three forms are Luna in heaven,
Diana on earth, and Hecate in the lower world (Shakespeare calls her ‘‘triple
Hecate’’ at MND 5.1.370). All the Latin names enter English poetry singly or in
combination as names of the moon or moon-goddess. She drives a chariot as
the sun does, as we see as early as the Homeric Hymn to Selene and Pindar’s
third Olympian ode; for an English example see Spenser’s Cynthia in
Mutabilitie Canto 6.
Virginity or chastity is frequently attributed to the moon, partly through its
connection with virgin goddesses and partly because its light is cold.
Shakespeare calls it the ‘‘cold fruitless moon’’ (MND 1.1.73).
The moon’s continually changing phases led to its association with
mutability, metamorphosis, inconstancy, or fickleness. The ‘‘sublunary’’ realm,
everything beneath the sphere of the moon, is governed mainly by change,
chance, or fortune, as opposed to the divinely ordered spheres above it.
It has long been known to cause the tides; hence it is called ‘‘watery’’ or
‘‘liquid’’ and associated with water or the sea. Shelley called the sea ‘‘Slave to
the mother of the months’’ (Revolt of Islam 1420). Dew was thought to come
130
Morning star
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
from the moon; in one version of her story, Herse (Dew) is the daughter of
Zeus and Selene.
From its silvery light, alchemists associated the moon with silver, whereas
gold belonged to the sun. In Spenser, Cynthia steeps things in silver dew (FQ
1.1.39); ‘‘silver moon’’ has been a formula in English poetry for centuries.
Moonlight was thought to cause madness or ‘‘lunacy’’; lunatics have
‘‘moon-struck madness’’ (Milton, PL 11.486). A ‘‘lune’’ is a fit of lunacy: we
must beware ‘‘These dangerous, unsafe lunes i’ th’ king’’ (Shakespeare, WT
2.2.28).
As the sun is the eye of day, the moon is the eye of night (e.g., Aeschylus,
Seven 390; Euripides, Phoenician Women 543; Ronsard, Odes 3.25.51), or it has an
eye (Pindar, Olymp. 3.19--20; Shakespeare, AYLI 3.2.3). Like the sun as well, the
moon drives a chariot and team (Ovid, Fasti 5.16; Statius, Thebaid 8.160).
In Christian iconography, the Virgin Mary is sometimes shown with the
moon under her feet (from Rev. 12.1). The church has been represented by the
moon, shining benignly with the reflected light of Christ the sun. The date of
Easter is set as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal
equinox.
Morning star
Moth
Mould
Mountain
see Star
see Butterfly
see Clay
Most cultures have considered mountains awesome, sacred, or dreadful. In the
western tradition they are often the homes of gods, being near to heaven and
dangerous to mortals. Jehovah dwells on Sinai or Horeb, the Greek gods hold
Olympus, Apollo and the Muses live on Parnassus or Helicon, Dionysus and
Artemis occupy Cithaeron, and so on. In the Tannhäuser legend Venus has a
mountain, and there are demonic mountains, such as the Brocken, the resort
of witches, where Goethe sets his ‘‘Walpurgis Night’’ scene in Faust I.
In the Bible mountains are the sites of revelation both natural and
supernatural. Christ gives a ‘‘Sermon on the Mount,’’ which is the counterpart
or ‘‘antitype’’ of Moses bringing down the tablets from Mt. Sinai; revelation
comes from on high. Christ’s temptation in the wilderness takes place on ‘‘an
exceeding high mountain’’ (Matt. 4.8).
From the top of Mt. Pisgah the Lord shows Moses the Promised Land; ‘‘I
have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither’’
(Deut. 34.4). ‘‘Pisgah’’ as a site for revelation is found in radical Protestant
rhetoric from at least the seventeenth century. Browning appropriates it in a
pair of poems called ‘‘Pisgah-Sights’’ -- ‘‘and I see all of it, / Only, I’m dying!’’
Stephen Dedalus playfully titles one of his parables A Pisgah Sight of Palestine
(Joyce, Ulysses, ‘‘Aeolus’’). It reached its greatest expression in the sermons and
speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.: ‘‘I’ve been to the mountain top . . . I’ve seen
the promised land. I may not get there with you’’ (sermon of 3 April 1968).
God brings Ezekiel to the top of ‘‘a very high mountain’’ and shows him a
vision of the Temple (40.2). Milton alludes to this verse when he has Michael
lead Adam up the highest hill of Paradise from which the hemisphere of
131
Mountain
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
earth lay ‘‘to the amplest reach of prospect’’ (PL 11.380). Coleridge echoes the
double sense of ‘‘prospect’’ when, after prophesying disaster if Britain
continues in her ways, he climbs a hill and has ‘‘a burst of prospect’’ into the
natural world, which softens his heart (‘‘Fears in Solitude’’ 215).
Indeed a characteristic motif of Romantic literature, at least since Schiller’s
‘‘Der Spaziergang,’’ is the philosophical wanderer who feels moments of
exaltation and profound insight on mountains. Byron’s Manfred may be the
archetype in English literature, perhaps Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in German;
Chateaubriand’s René climbs mountains, as does Lamartine in ‘‘L’Isolement.’’
The two most sublime ‘‘spots of time’’ or epiphanies in Wordsworth’s Prelude
come as he crosses the Alps (6.494--572) and as he climbs Mt. Snowdon
(13.10--119, 1805 version). Thomas Mann fully exploits the philosophical
mountain-view tradition in The Magic Mountain.
Before the eighteenth century few people seem to have found mountains
attractive or sublime. Petrarch’s climb to the top of Mt. Ventoux (in about
1336) just to see what he could see was probably unusual; to write about it
was unprecedented (‘‘The Ascent of Mt. Ventoux’’). Mountains were thought of
as dangerous obstacles and excrescences on the fair face of the earth, and
early comments on the Alps were anything but favorable. Thomas Gray was
one of the first poets to appreciate them: in a Latin ode he addresses the
‘‘Holy Spirit of this stern place,’’ and claims ‘‘we behold God nearer to us, a
living presence, amid pathless steeps, wild mountainous ridges and
precipitous cliffs, and among roaring torrents’’ (‘‘Grande Chartreuse among
the Mountains of Dauphiné,’’ trans. Starr and Hendrickson). Soon the Alps
attracted tourists, and Mont Blanc in particular, the highest peak of Europe,
‘‘the monarch of mountains,’’ inspired pious emotions in many of them. A
short poem in German by Friederika Brun, called ‘‘Chamouny at Sunrise,’’ asks
the mountain several questions, such as ‘‘Who piled high into the ether’s
vault / Mighty and bold thy radiant face?’’ and answers, ‘‘Jehovah! Jehovah!’’
Coleridge more or less plagiarized this poem with his ‘‘Hymn before Sunrise,
in the Vale of Chamouni’’: ‘‘Who bade the sun / Clothe you with rainbows?
Who, with living flowers / Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet? -- /
god! let the torrents, like a shout of nations / Answer! and let the ice-plains
echo, god!’’ Tom Moore visited Mont Blanc (unlike Coleridge) and wrote several
poems about the experience: ‘‘Alps on Alps in clusters swelling, / Mighty, and
pure, and fit to make / The ramparts of a Godhead’s dwelling!’’ (Rhymes on the
Road I). With such poems as these in mind William Hazlitt wrote, ‘‘The
Crossing of the Alps has, I believe, given some of our fashionables a
shivering-fit of morality; as the sight of Mont Blanc convinced [Moore] of the
Being of God’’ (‘‘On Jealousy and Spleen of Party’’). Hölderlin calls the Alps
‘‘the fortress of the heavenly ones / . . . from where / in secret much is firmly /
Handed down to men’’ (‘‘The Rhine’’ 6--9). Victor Hugo exclaimed, ‘‘How trifling
the monuments of man seem beside these marvelous edifices which a mighty
hand raised on the surface of the earth, and in which there is for the soul
almost a new revelation of God!’’ ( ‘‘Fragment of a Journey to the Alps’’). The
atheist Shelley, however, probably goaded by Coleridge’s poem, wrote the
greatest of Mont Blanc poems, in which the mountain is the home of ‘‘Power’’
rather than the product of the Creator, and has a voice ‘‘to repeal / large codes
of fraud and woe’’ rather than to hand them down (‘‘Mont Blanc’’ 80--81).
132
Music of the spheres
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Emerson’s Monadnoc has a similar silent power: ‘‘We fool and prate; Thou art
silent and sedate’’; ‘‘Mute orator! well skilled to plead, / And send conviction
without phrase, / Thou dost succor and remede / The shortness of our days’’
(‘‘Monadnoc’’).
Because of their impassable homeland, mountain people have preserved
their independence more effectively than people of the valleys or plains, or so
it has seemed; the example of the redoubtable Swiss stood as a beacon and a
reproach to those who yearned for liberty in the kingdoms of Europe. Milton’s
phrase, ‘‘The Mountain Nymph, sweet Liberty’’ (‘‘L’Allegro’’ 36), has had many
successors. Writing of Corsica, Barbauld claims ‘‘Liberty, / The mountain
Goddess, loves to range at large / Amid such scenes’’ (‘‘Corsica’’ 67--69). Of his
Welsh hero, Southey tells that ‘‘Among the hills of Gwyneth and its wilds /
And mountain glens, perforce he cherished still / The hope of mountain
liberty’’ (‘‘Madoc in Wales’’ 12.51--53). Growing up in the Lake District,
Wordsworth acquired a ‘‘mountain liberty’’ (1805 Prelude 9.242); during the
revolt of the Tyrol against Napoleon, Wordsworth begins a sonnet, ‘‘Advance -come forth from thy Tyrolean ground, / Dear Liberty! stern Nymph of soul
untamed; / Sweet Nymph, O rightly of the mountains named!’’ Byron’s
Manfred, on the Jungfrau, feels ‘‘the liberal air’’ (Manfred 1.2.50). Musset has a
character cry, ‘‘Elle est la sur les monts, la liberté sacrée!’’ (La Coupe et les lèvres,
‘‘Invocation’’ 48).
Yet nineteenth-century tourists to the Alps were often struck by the
imbecility of those who lived there, and when Emerson went to Mt.
Monadnoc, expecting ‘‘to find the patriots / In whom the stock of freedom
roots; / To myself I oft recount / Tales of many a famous mount, -- / Wales,
Scotland, Uri, Hungary’s dells: / Bards, Roys, Scanderbegs and Tells,’’ he found
a dull, hard-working stock instead (‘‘Monadnoc’’). More caustically he asks
‘‘Who dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer? / I found by thee, O
rushing Contoocook! / And in thy valleys, Agiochook! / The jackals of the
negro-holder’’ (‘‘Ode to Channing’’). As if to endorse this deflation of the myth,
T. S. Eliot has a rootless and timid countess claim, ‘‘In the mountains, there
you feel free,’’ but ‘‘I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter’’ (The
Waste Land 17--18).
Music of the
spheres
The Pythagoreans believed (according to Aristotle, De Caelo 290b12) that the
stars make sounds as they move, and since their speeds are in the same ratios
as musical concordances, the entire sound they produce is a harmony. We
cannot hear it, for it is a constant background sound in our ears from birth.
Plato presented a vision of eight cosmic ‘‘whorls’’ (Greek sphondulos), hollow
and nested one inside the other; on each stood a Siren singing one note, and
from all eight there came a single harmony (Republic 616d--17b). Plotinus
(Enneads 2.3.9) and Cicero (Dream of Scipio 18), among others, elaborated this
vision; in Cicero the spheres are those of the seven planets and the fixed stars,
and we learn that the uppermost stars give out the highest pitch, the moon
the lowest; on earth we are deaf to the music, but when raised into the
heavens we will hear it. (There are some discrepancies in the texts as to the
number of different notes.)
Another source of this idea is a passage from Job: ‘‘the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy’’ (38.7).
133
Myrrh
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Chaucer’s Troilus, transported to heaven after his betrayal in love, saw ‘‘The
erratik sterres [planets], herkenyng armonye / With sownes ful of hevenyssh
melodie’’ (TC 5.1812--13) (see also PF 59--63). Shakespeare’s Lorenzo tells Jessica,
‘‘There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st / But in his motion like an
angel sings, / Still quiring to the young-ey’d cherubins; / Such harmony is in
immortal souls, / But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close
it in, we cannot hear it’’ (MV 5.1.60--65). Sir John Davies’s poem about the
cosmic dance, Orchestra, tells how ‘‘The turning vault of heaven formèd was, /
Whose starry wheels he [Love] hath so made to pass, / As that their movings
do a music frame, / And they themselves still dance unto the same’’ (130--33).
Milton calls on ‘‘ye Crystal spheres’’ to ring out ‘‘with your ninefold
harmony’’ and accompany the angels singing in honor of Christ (‘‘Nativity’’
125--32) (see also ‘‘At a Solemn Music’’). The opening lines of the ‘‘Prologue in
Heaven’’ of Goethe’s Faust allude to this music -- ‘‘The sun intones as it has of
old / in rival song with brother spheres’’ (243--44).
In the traditional scheme the earth, being motionless, made no sound, but
Shelley transforms the tradition to suit the Copernican model. Panthea and
Ione hear ‘‘the deep music of the rolling world,’’ which is made of ‘‘Ten
thousand orbs involving and involved’’ that ‘‘whirl / Over each other with a
thousand motions,’’ solemnly ‘‘Kindling with mingled sounds, and many
tones, / Intelligible words and music wild’’ (PU 4.186, 241--51).
134
Myrrh
see Frankincense and myrrh
Myrtle
The myrtle plant was sacred to Aphrodite and to her Roman counterpart
Venus, as it was to the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar; hence it became the
plant of love. There is little in Greek literature before Plutarch (Marcellus 22.4)
connecting myrtle with Aphrodite, but apparently there were temples to
Aphrodite where a sacred myrtle was cultivated. Aristophanes uses ‘‘myrtle’’ as
a euphemism for the female genitalia (Lysistrata 1004).
According to Ovid, Venus crouched behind a myrtle bush to hide from the
satyrs (Fasti 4.141--3, 869); another story has her emerge from the sea at birth
covered with myrtle, which often grows by the shore. Venus’ son Aeneas
shades his temples with ‘‘maternal myrtle’’ (materna myrto) before the games
(Aeneid 5.72), and later in the Underworld he sees a myrtle grove where those
who died of love wander disconsolate (6.443). It soon became a common icon
of Venus; e.g., Du Bellay’s poem ‘‘To Venus’’ dedicates flowers to her and
promises her myrtle if he is successful in love. Marlowe’s description of
Leander’s ‘‘amorous habit [dress]’’ includes ‘‘Cupid’s myrtle’’ (Hero and Leander
588--89).
Myrtle is an evergreen and thus suggestive of life’s power against death; in
Drayton’s words, ‘‘bay and myrtle, which is ever new, / In spight of winter
flourishing and green’’ (Pastoral Eclogues 6). Perhaps for this reason it was
frequently used in garlands and crowns at festivals and to deck tombs. Early
Greek lyric poets spoke of twining roses with myrtle. Horace praises the
‘‘simple myrtle’’ without embellishments: ‘‘myrtle suits you pouring, and me
drinking’’ (1.38.5--7). Pliny reports that a Roman commander was crowned with
the myrtle of Venus Victrix for a victory in which none was slain (Natural
History 15.38).
Nature
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Both its connection with festivals and its association with love, a common
subject of song, may account for its use as a crown for poets, along with
laurel, ivy, or oak, though each has distinctive connotations. Dante introduces
the poet Statius as crowned with myrtle (Purgatorio 21.90). Garnier asks that
the laurel grow green at Ronsard’s tomb ‘‘with the ivy / and the amorous
myrtle’’ (‘‘Elegy on the Death of Ronsard’’). Thomson imagines Sidney ‘‘with
early Laurels crown’d, / The Lover’s Myrtle, and the Poet’s Bay’’ (‘‘Summer’’
1512--13).
A famous drinking song collected by Athenaeus tells of the two liberators of
Athens: ‘‘In a myrtle bough will I carry the sword / Like Harmodius and
Aristogiton / When they killed the tyrant / and brought equality to Athens’’
(Deipnosophistae 15.695). It is hard to see how myrtle branches could have
concealed swords, but myrtle doubtless adorned the festival where the tyrant
was killed (they actually killed Hipparchus, brother of the tyrant Hippias, in
514 bc), and the poetic point may lie in the contrast between the festive and
friendly connotations of myrtle and the contrary sense of sword. Shelley, in
any case, brilliantly recreates the image as he imagines earth and heaven
united by beams ‘‘Like swords of azure fire, or golden spears / With
tyrant-quelling myrtle overtwined,’’ as if it is the myrtle of love that defeats
tyranny and not the sword (PU 4.271--72).
See Ivy, Laurel, Oak.
N
Nature
‘‘Nature’’ in Greek (physis) and Latin (natura) at first meant the nature of
something, as in Lucretius’ title ‘‘On the Nature of Things,’’ but it came to
stand alone, perhaps by means of phrases such as ‘‘the nature of everything,’’
to mean the universe or the natural world. In this sense Ovid mentions
‘‘nature’’ as featureless before the creation (Met. 1.6). According to late ancient
sources, the Orphics praised Physis as the mother of all, all-wise, all-ruling, and
immortal; if so, that was the first instance of ‘‘Mother Nature,’’ but the
personification was not sustained. The more ancient myths about Gaia (Earth)
must also have encouraged this personification; the Homeric ‘‘Hymn to the
Mother of All’’ begins ‘‘I shall sing of well-founded Earth, mother of all, /
Eldest of all, who nourishes all things living on land.’’ In both Greek and Latin
the words for ‘‘nature’’ and for ‘‘earth’’ (Greek gaia, ge, Latin tellus, terra) are all
feminine in grammatical gender.
A later forerunner of Mother Nature is Lucretius’ alma Venus (‘‘nourishing
Venus’’), whom he invokes as the goddess of the generation of life and the
muse of his poem (1.2); Spenser imitates his invocation in FQ 4.10.44--47. Statius
makes Nature a ‘‘captain’’ (dux) (Thebaid 12.642); in Claudian, Nature is the
‘‘marriage-maker’’ (pronuba) (Magnes 38). She is a fully fledged allegorical figure
in Bernard Sylvestris and Alanus de Insulis; the latter’s ‘‘Complaint of Nature’’
influenced The Romance of the Rose, where Nature is the mistress of Venus’
forge, making new generations of living things (15975ff.). She first appears in
135
Nature
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
English poetry as ‘‘this noble goddesse Nature’’ in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls
303; Chaucer cites Alanus’ ‘‘Pleynt of Kynde’’ as his authority. Gower has
‘‘Nature the goddesse’’ (Confessio 5.5961). Spenser also refers to ‘‘mother
Nature’’ (FQ 2.6.16) and ‘‘great Dame Nature’’ with ‘‘fruitfull pap’’ that feeds
the flowers (2.2.6). Amidst the manifold meanings of ‘‘nature’’ in Shakespeare,
the ‘‘good goddess nature’’ persists (WT 2.3.104); ‘‘Nature hath fram’d strange
fellows in her time’’ (MV 1.1.51). But when Edmund in his first speech
announces ‘‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound’’
(Lear 1.2.1--2), we are alerted that he will not be bound by traditional duty.
Shakespeare himself, according to Gray, was ‘‘Nature’s darling,’’ for ‘‘To him
the mighty Mother did unveil / Her awful face’’ (‘‘Progress of Poetry’’ 84--87).
With the new feeling for nature in the literature of sensibility and
romanticism, of course, richer and less allegorical accounts of nature prevail,
but it often remains maternal, or at least feminine. Goethe’s Faust asks,
‘‘Where do I seize you, unending Nature -- / you breasts, where?’’ (455--56).
Wordsworth constantly refers to nature as ‘‘she,’’ and sometimes she is active
in ministering to the growth of the poet’s soul, the subject of The Prelude.
Earth, too, has ‘‘something of a Mother’s mind’’ in the ‘‘Intimations Ode’’ (79).
Shelley invokes the ‘‘Mother of this unfathomable world’’ near the opening of
‘‘Alastor’’ (18). In his fallen state, according to Blake, Man perceives Nature as
something apart from him, often as a domineering and faithless female
whom he names Vala (punning on ‘‘veil’’): ‘‘Vala, the Goddess Virgin-Mother.
She is our Mother! Nature!’’ (Jerusalem 18.29--30). But the usual romantic view is
that nature governs our most human feelings, our imaginations, our hearts.
Dickens with typical sarcasm describes the utilitarian philosophers of
self-interest as having deduced a ‘‘little code of laws’’ as ‘‘the main-springs of
all Nature’s deeds and actions: the said philosophers very wisely reducing the
good lady’s proceedings to matters of maxim and theory and, by a very neat
and pretty compliment to her exalted wisdom and understanding, putting
entirely out of sight and considerations of heart, or generous impulse and
feeling’’ (Oliver Twist chap. 12).
Parallel to maternal nature is the widespread idea of the ‘‘virgin land,’’
uncultivated territory that must be conquered and ploughed by men to make
her a ‘‘motherland.’’ One root of this notion is the biblical image of Israel or
Jerusalem as the ‘‘married’’ land (Hebrew beulah): ‘‘Thou shalt no more be
termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate; but
thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighteth
in thee, and thy land shall be married’’ (Isa. 62.4). Too often, however,
Jerusalem plays the harlot and commits fornications with other countries
(Ezek. 16 passim). Another source may be the plot of Virgil’s Aeneid, where the
hero leaves a wife behind in the flames of Troy and a mistress on a pyre in
Carthage in order to conquer a destined land in Italy and confirm it by
marrying Latinus’ daughter Lavinia, ‘‘Miss Italy.’’ The symbolism of ploughing
enters into it, too; the word ‘‘colony’’ comes from the root in ‘‘cultivate’’ and
‘‘agriculture’’ (Latin colere, ‘‘to till’’ or ‘‘plough’’), and early American colonies
were often called ‘‘plantations’’. (See Plow.) Most national names in the
European languages are feminine in gender and have feminine allegorical
emblems: la France is symbolized by Marianne or by Joan of Arc, Britain by
Britannia (derived from Minerva), America by Lady Liberty, and so on.
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The very name ‘‘America’’ is the feminine form of ‘‘Americus,’’ the Latin
form of Amerigo (Vespucci); the noun terra may have been understood but it
vanished quite early from the maps. ‘‘Virginia’’ is the perfect expression of
this symbolism, though it was named for Queen Elizabeth; John Smith calls
that colony the ‘‘blessed Virgin’’ and refers to ‘‘This Virgins sister (called New
England)’’ (New-England Trials 1.243). According to Thomas Morton in 1632, New
England herself was ‘‘Like a faire virgin, longing to be sped [made to prosper,
or made pregnant], / And meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed’’ (New English
Canaan Prologue 9--10). Blake’s character Orc, who stands for the revolutionary
American colonists who claim the land, seizes the womb of the nameless
virgin who attends him and makes her pregnant (America, ‘‘Preludium’’).
Night
Milton describes Night as ‘‘eldest of things’’ (PL 2.962), though in Genesis it is
coeval with day (1.5); it is ‘‘darkness’’ that precedes everything but the void or
chaos itself. Spenser calls Night the ‘‘most auncient Grandmother of all’’ (FQ
1.5.22). Both authors hearken not only to Genesis but Hesiod’s Theogony, where
Night is the offspring of Chaos, though she seems to follow Earth, Tartarus,
and Eros (116--23); she is the mother of Sky (Aither), Day, Heaven, the Hills, and
Sea (124--32).
Like the sun, moon, and dawn, night is portrayed in classical literature
(though not in Hesiod) as driving a chariot and team of horses. ‘‘The
darkening chariot of Night / leans to its course,’’ as Aeschylus has it in
Choephoroe 660--61 (trans. Lattimore); Euripides writes, ‘‘black-robed Night, /
Drawn by a pair, urged on her chariot’’ (Ion 1150--51, trans. Willets). Virgil has
‘‘And black Night borne upward in her chariot held the sky’’ (Aeneid 5.721).
Ovid imagines a lover appealing for more time: ‘‘O slowly, slowly run, ye
horses of night’’ (Amores 1.13.40), the Latin original of which Marlowe uses
with great poignancy in Dr. Faustus’s final terrified speech: ‘‘O lente, lente
currite noctis equi’’ (5.2.152). Spenser’s Night has an ‘‘yron wagon’’ with double
team, two horses ‘‘blacke as pitch’’ and two brown (FQ 1.5.28); later she rides
on a black palfrey (7.7.44). Milton has ‘‘Night-steeds’’ in his ‘‘Nativity’’ ode (236).
Shakespeare several times has the night drawn by dragons (e.g., MND 3.2.379),
perhaps a confusion with those of Ceres.
In the Greek and Roman poets there are standard features of night or
nightfall: silence, loneliness, sleep, dreams; the star-filled sky, the bright
moon; and occasionally festivities. A poem by Sappho or Alcaeus expresses the
loneliness by understatement: ‘‘The moon has gone down / and the Pleiades;
the middle / of the night, time goes by, / and I lie alone’’ (Sappho Campbell
168B). A brief description of night in Virgil’s Aeneid makes a similar contrast to
the sleepless Dido (4.80--81). Milton has a full description of night in Eden,
with the silence (except for the nightingale), Hesperus, and the moon (PL
4.598--609). Goethe’s ‘‘Wanderer’s Night-Song’’ beautifully evokes the peace of
night and the deeper peace to come.
Night is of course the time of unseen dangers, ‘‘night’s black agents’’
(Macbeth 3.2.54), ghosts, magic, and moonstruck madness, as well as the
pursuit of love or anything else restrained by daylight. We hardly need to give
examples. Since the sun or light may stand for knowledge or insight, and ‘‘a
great cause of the night is lack of the sun’’ (AYLI 3.2.26), night is also symbolic
of spiritual error: Paul exhorts, ‘‘The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let
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us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of
light’’ (Rom. 13.12); Dante is lost in the wood at night (Inferno 1); Spenser’s
Night is the mother of falsehood (FQ 1.5.27) and ignorance (Teares of the Muses
263). Night also stands for death: ‘‘I must work the works of him that sent
me,’’ Jesus says, ‘‘while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work’’
(John 9.4). Racine’s Olympe would be happy if her grief plunged her into ‘‘the
night of the tomb’’ (Thébaïde 5.5.1478), while Phèdre wants to flee ‘‘into the
infernal night’’ (Phèdre 4.6.1277). Shelley has ‘‘the night of death’’ (Julian 127),
though he also has ‘‘the night of life’’ (PU 3.3.172), that is, ‘‘our night’’ (Adonais
352) in this life of misery and ignorance. Poe’s raven seems to come from ‘‘the
night’s Plutonian shore’’ (47, 98).
Night is the traditional time for meditation and study, for ‘‘burning the
midnight oil,’’ and hence for melancholy. Milton’s ‘‘Il Penseroso’’ (the pensive
man) prefers the night: ‘‘let my Lamp at midnight hour, / Be seen in some
high lonely Tow’r’’ (85--86). Night poetry was much in vogue in the eighteenth
century as part of the literature of ‘‘sensibility,’’ and particularly ‘‘graveyard’’
poetry; e.g., Young’s Night Thoughts, Blair’s The Grave, and Gray’s ‘‘Elegy,’’ which
begins where the plowman ‘‘leaves the world to darkness and to me’’ (4).
Goethe’s Faust meditates at night (and practices magic), and so do Coleridge
in ‘‘Frost at Midnight’’ and ‘‘Dejection,’’ and Lamartine in his Méditations. Some
Romantics revalued night as a place of imaginative revelation: Novalis’s Hymns
to the Night, and perhaps Keats’s ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale.’’
See Moon.
Nightingale
138
The nightingale has had the most spectacular career of all literary birds. It has
appeared in many thousands of poems from Homer to the twentieth century,
and even in ancient times it acquired an almost formulaic meaning as the
bird of spring, of night, and of mourning. Later, through its link to spring and
night, it also became a bird of love.
The Greeks considered the nightingale, like the swallow and cuckoo, to be a
notable harbinger of spring. A four-word fragment of Sappho sums it up:
‘‘spring’s herald, lovely-voiced nightingale.’’ Homer has it singing in the woods
‘‘when springtime has just begun’’ (Odyssey 19.519). In the late Latin Vigil of
Venus the goddess of spring makes the bird sing a song of love (86--88). This
tradition is repeated in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls, where the nightingale is
defined as the bird ‘‘That clepeth [calls] forth the grene leves newe’’ (351--52),
and in Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe: ‘‘The Nightingale, woods Herauld of the
Spring’’ (55).
Its melodious, liquid, and variable voice made the nightingale a popular
housebird in ancient times. One of the two Greek names for it refers to its
song: aedon, ‘‘singer’’; the other, philomela, has been taken to mean ‘‘lover of
music,’’ but what mela means is uncertain (probably not ‘‘music’’).
The Greeks also heard in the nightingale’s song something mournful,
and imagined one of its ‘‘words’’ to be the name of a lost child; they also
imagined, wrongly, that the female of the species does the singing. Its
earliest literary appearance is in Penelope’s simile for herself as Pandareos’
daughter Aedon, wife of Zethos; Aedon in a mad fit killed her son Itylos
and now, changed into a nightingale, pours out a mournful song (Odyssey
19.518--23).
Nightingale
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It may be that the Greeks, listening to two prominent birds of early spring,
were struck by the contrast between the tuneless chattering call of the
swallow and the beautiful song of the nightingale, and so a different story
arose about Procne, daughter of Pandion of Athens and wife of Tereus of
Daulis (Thrace), and her younger sister Philomela. As Ovid tells it centuries
later (Met. 6), Tereus rapes Philomela, tears out her tongue so she cannot
speak, and confines her in a hidden cottage; she contrives to weave a message
on her loom and send it to her sister, who rescues her. Together they take a
horrible revenge on Tereus by killing his son by Procne, Itys, and serving him
to his father for dinner. As the furious Tereus pursues the sisters, they both
turn into birds, which Ovid does not name: one flies into the woods
(presumably a nightingale), the other flies to the roof (presumably a swallow);
Tereus becomes a hoopoe.
Ovid does not say which sister flew where, but presumably the tongueless
one becomes the swallow. His vagueness may reflect a long-standing conflict
in the myth, since philomela, if it is taken to mean ‘‘lover of music,’’ is a poor
name for the songless swallow, but if the nightingale’s song sounds mournful
then it should be she who has lost a son. There are variants where Tereus cuts
out Procne’s tongue, but it is always Procne’s son who is killed, so Philomela
would be singing a mournful song for her nephew. In any case, sometimes (as
in Aristophanes) Procne is the nightingale.
This tale, in its Ovidian form, became very popular. In Medieval lyrics in
several languages Philomela or Philomena replaces native words for nightingale. Chaucer tells part of the story in The Legend of Good Women and it recurs
throughout Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. T. S. Eliot makes use of it in The
Waste Land. When Keats compares the silent Madeline to a ‘‘tongueless
nightingale,’’ however (Eve of St. Agnes 206), it is doubtful if we are to think of
Philomela and her tragedy.
In Greek drama a simpler version prevailed. The chorus of Aeschylus’
Agamemnon compares Cassandra’s wild lament on the brink of her murder to
the nightingale’s clamor for Itys; Cassandra responds by saying she longs for
the nightingale’s fate, happier than her own (1140--49). The chorus of
Sophocles’ Ajax imagines the mother of Ajax grieving over her son more
violently than the nightingale (621--31). The chorus of Euripides’ Helen invokes
the nightingale to sing mournfully with them over Helen’s fate. (See also
Sophocles, Electra 107--09, 147--49, 1077ff.) Seneca imitates Greek tragedy when
his Octavia asks what nightingale could sing her song of sorrow (Octavia 914).
Perhaps because of the Athenian provenance of the Philomela myth, the
nightingale came to be called the ‘‘Attic bird’’ (Propertius 2.20.5--6; Milton,
PR 4.245--46; Gray, ‘‘Ode on the Spring’’ 5).
After three millennia of poetic nightingales Darı́o could claim ‘‘The same
nightingales sing the same trills, / and in different tongues it is the same
song’’ (‘‘The Swans’’ 7--8), but a survey of human tongues gives a different
impression. Aristophanes’ comedy The Birds (737--52) gives the song as ‘‘tio tio
tio tiotinx’’ and ‘‘totototototototototinx,’’ which do not sound very mournful,
but in a ‘‘tio’’ or ‘‘ito’’ Greeks heard the name Itys. Whether mournful or not,
‘‘tiotinx’’ is much more accurate than the conventional sound in English
poetry since the Renaissance, ‘‘jug jug,’’ which resembles the call of the
nightjar. The medieval German poet Walther von der Vogelweide has the bird
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cheerfully sing ‘‘tandaradei!’’ (in ‘‘Under der linden’’), but later German poets
heard sadness in the sound, which they made into ‘‘zurück’’ (‘‘back’’) or ‘‘zu
spät’’ (‘‘too late’’). Provençal poets do not record its voice, but in Old French it
is ‘‘oci’’ or ‘‘ochi,’’ which sounds like the verb for ‘‘kill,’’ whence its connection,
in a few poems, with vengeance. According to Fitzgerald, Omar Khayyam
imagines it saying ‘‘Wine! Wine! Wine! / Red Wine!’’ (22--23).
Nearly all brief allusions to the nightingale in Greek and Latin poetry
mention its beautiful voice, its mournfulness, its presence in early spring,
and/or its invisibility, hiding among thickets or leafy trees. Moschus in his
‘‘Lament for Bion’’ mentions ‘‘nightingales complaining in the thick foliage’’
(9); Catullus vows ‘‘I will always sing strains of mourning, as under the thick
shadows of the branches sings the Daulian bird bewailing the fate of Itylus’’
(65.12--14). By describing a nightingale weeping all night long (Georgics
4.511--16), Virgil gave an impetus to the association of the nightingale, as its
English name also implies, with night. (The ‘‘-gale’’ is from Old English galan,
‘‘sing.’’ Its Latin name, luscinia, may mean ‘‘singer at twilight,’’ though more
likely ‘‘singer of grief,’’ as Varro argued in Latin 5.76.)
The nightingale’s nighttime provenance is well established in English
poetry -- it is stated, or overstated, by Christina Rossetti: ‘‘A hundred thousand
birds salute the day: -- / One solitary bird salutes the night’’ (‘‘Later Life’’ 20). It
is often paired with the lark as its opposite; the most famous of such pairings
comes in Romeo and Juliet 3.5, which begins with a debate between the young
lovers, the morning after their first night together, over whether it is the
nightingale they have just heard or the lark.
Milton calls it the ‘‘wakeful Bird,’’ which ‘‘Sings darkling, and in shadiest
Covert hid / Tunes her nocturnal Note’’ (3.38--40), and ‘‘all night tun’d her soft
lays’’ (7.436), among eight appearances in Paradise Lost. Perhaps because night
is the time of lovers, Milton also stresses the amorous quality of the song:
‘‘She all night long her amorous descant sung’’ in Eden, while Adam and Eve
‘‘lull’d by Nightingales imbracing slept’’ (4.603, 771). His first sonnet, ‘‘O
Nightingale,’’ claims that its songs ‘‘Portend success in love,’’ as opposed to the
cuckoo, ‘‘the rude Bird of Hate.’’ Combining love with the traditional mournfulness, Milton calls the bird ‘‘love-lorn’’ in Comus (234), as if it is her mate she
has lost, not her child.
Any bird that sings might well become a metaphor for a poet (as the swan
did), but the nightingale came to do so as early as Hesiod. In Works and Days
(202--12) Hesiod tells a fable about a hawk who has a nightingale in his grasp;
the hawk calls his prey an aoidos, the usual term for bard or minstrel in
Hesiod and Homer; the implication is that Hesiod is himself a nightingale in
a world of dangerous hawks (predatory lords). (See also Theognis 939.) Plato
imagines the soul of the poet Thamyras choosing the life of a nightingale
(Republic 620a). Theocritus calls Homer the ‘‘Chian nightingale’’ (7.47). It is a
frequent conceit in Troubadour and Trouvère (Provençal and Old French)
poetry that the poet is like a nightingale, which incites him to sing and
reminds him of his unhappiness in love; the same is true among the German
Minnesänger. One medieval tradition adds that they stop singing when love is
fulfilled. The Troubadour tradition, incidentally, does not seem to draw much
from the classical tradition: often the birds are male, and often they are
happy.
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In devotional literature the bird sometimes represents the soul, as it does
in John Peacham’s Philomena: ‘‘You should know that this bird is the figure / Of
the soul who puts all its effort into loving God’’ (45--46, trans. Baird and Kane).
Milton, in the first passage quoted above (PL 3.38--40), compares himself to
the nightingale, who like him sings in the dark. Keats alludes to this passage
in his famous ‘‘Ode to a Nightingale,’’ where he compares, or rather contrasts,
himself with the invisible bird whose singing overwhelms him. In his Defence
of Poetry, Shelley writes, ‘‘A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and
sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men
entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved
and softened, yet know not whence or why.’’ ‘‘Of Philomela and the poet,’’
Lamartine claims, ‘‘the sweetest songs are sighs’’ (‘‘Adieux à la Poésie’’ 34--35).
Mandelstam laments his incurable disease of poetry-writing: ‘‘there is no
hope / For heart still flushed / with Nightingale Fever’’ (‘‘Clock-Grasshopper’s
Song,’’ trans. Hingley).
A secondary tradition has it that nightingales press a thorn against their
breast to keep awake so they might lament all night. Shakespeare’s Lucrece
speaks to the bird: ‘‘against a thorn thy bear’st thy part / To keep thy sharp
woes waking’’ (Lucrece 1135--36); according to Sidney she ‘‘Sings out her woes, a
thorn her song-book making’’ (‘‘The Nightingale’’ 4). Marvell seems to be
alluding to this tradition in ‘‘Upon Appleton House’’ 513--20, and Oscar Wilde
builds on it in his story ‘‘The Nightingale and the Rose.’’
The thorn motif goes back to sixteenth-century French poetry, which seems
to have taken it from Arabic or Persian poetry, where the (male) nightingale
or bulbul sings to the (female) rose until it blooms in the spring; he sometimes
presses his breast against a rose thorn to ease his pain while singing.
Fitzgerald in his version of Omar Khayyam indicates the Persian origin of the
motif, the ‘‘divine / High piping Pehlevi [Persian]’’ in which ‘‘the Nightingale
cries to the Rose’’ (21--23). In the early eighteenth century Mary Wortley
Montagu introduced the ‘‘bulbul’’ to English readers with a translation of a
Turkish love poem by Ibrahim Pasha, while Thomas Moore and Byron were
among the first to put one in their poems: in Lalla Rookh (1.280) and in The
Bride of Abydos (1.288 and 2.694; see also Byron’s The Giaour 21--31). In the
opening of Epipsychidion Shelley calls his beloved a nightingale and likens his
poem to a rose: ‘‘soft and fragrant is the faded blossom, / And it has no thorn
left to wound thy bosom’’ (11--12).
Ignoring the tradition that the bird sings a lament, some poets since the
Middle Ages have made the nightingale an emblem of love. Ronsard has a
nightingale court his beloved (Odes 4.22). Thomas Randolph imagines a
nightingale singing in Elysium, where ‘‘The soules of happy Lovers crown’d
with blisses, / Shall flock about thee, and keep time with kisses’’ (‘‘On the
Death of a Nightingale’’). On a pair of young lovers, Byron comments, ‘‘there
was no reason for their loves / More than for those of nightingales or doves’’
(Don Juan 4.151--52). ‘‘The nightingale,’’ Hugo recalls, ‘‘sang like a poet and like
a lover’’ (‘‘La Fête chez Thérèse’’ 79--80). For the most part, however, melancholy
remains the bird’s dominant note, though the melancholy might be due, of
course, to lost love.
Coleridge wrote a pair of nightingale poems that ought to have put an end
to nightingale poems. In ‘‘To the Nightingale’’ he begins: ‘‘Sister of love-lorn
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Poets, Philomel! / How many Bards . . . / . . . How many wretched Bards address
thy name.’’ He then quotes Milton’s line about ‘‘Philomel’’ in Il Penseroso, ‘‘Most
musical, most melancholy,’’ as if to debunk it, but follows tradition himself in
saying ‘‘Thou warblest sad thy pity-pleading strains.’’ Three years later in ‘‘The
Nightingale’’ he again quotes the Milton line and even quotes his own phrase
‘‘pity-pleading strains,’’ but this time he refutes the idea that nightingales are
melancholy. ‘‘In Nature there is nothing melancholy,’’ and we owe to an
anonymous unhappy ‘‘night-wandering man’’ the idle thought that nightingales are sad; ‘‘And many a poet echoes the conceit.’’ This argument was not
original with Coleridge. Socrates said that ‘‘no bird sings when it is hungry or
cold or distressed in any other way -- not even the nightingale or swallow or
hoopoe, whose song is supposed to be a lament’’ (Plato, Phaedo 85a). Keats
seems to be responding to Coleridge when he makes his nightingale happy,
singing with no thought of death or other human woes, but he seems nonetheless to project such woes when near the end he imagines the bird singing
a ‘‘requiem’’ or ‘‘plaintive anthem.’’
Despite Coleridge, more nightingale poems continued to get written, such
as Matthew Arnold’s ‘‘Philomela,’’ Wilde’s ‘‘The Burden of Itys,’’ and Robert
Bridges’s ‘‘Nightingales.’’ In France a notable example is Verlaine’s ‘‘Le
Rossignol,’’ where the weeping nightingale’s languishing voice evokes
memories of his absent beloved.
See Cuckoo, Lark.
Noon
Number
142
see East and west
To the ancients, as well to many moderns of a mystical bent, numbers had
meanings beyond their mathematical characteristics. The Pythagoreans
developed a whole cosmology based on the interrelations of small numbers,
in particular the ratios of string lengths underlying the musical intervals.
Both the Hebrews and the Greeks used their alphabet as their written number
system, with the result that words acquired numerical values. In Greek, for
example, the letters in iesous (Jesus) sum to 888, a number notable not only
for its repetition but because eight seemed significant in the life of Jesus (he
was in Jerusalem eight days from Palm Sunday to Easter, for example), it can
stand for the Eternal Sabbath after a seven-day week, and is the first perfect
cube (23 ). Similarly 666, the famous ‘‘number of the beast’’ of Revelation 13.18,
can be derived from the Hebrew spelling of nero caesar, though it is only fair
to point out that different manuscripts of the text give 616 and 665. (666 is
also the Pythagorean ‘‘triangle of the great tetractys,’’ that is, the sum of all
the numbers from 1 to 36 (or 62 .) If 888 is a perfect number, then 666,
appropriately enough, is an imperfect number, for it falls below the Hebrew
measure of time just as 888 surpasses and ‘‘completes’’ it.
Seven, of course, is crucial in western number sense. As it is the number of
days in the Hebrew week, it memorably structures the first chapter of Genesis
as well as the whole of the Book of Revelation, the beginning and the end of
the Christian Bible. There are seven visible ‘‘planets’’ in the original sense: the
Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. They give their
names to the days of the week in the Romance languages and, converting five
corresponding gods or goddesses, in the Germanic languages (e.g., Wodan was
Oak
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identified with Mercury, so Wodan’s Day (Wednesday) is French mercredi). As for
time, seventy is the traditional biblical lifespan, though it is sometimes stated
in a way that disguises its ‘‘sevenness’’: ‘‘the days of our years are threescore
and ten’’ (Ps. 90.10). The Greeks also found seven significant, and one of them,
Hippocrates (or Pseudo-Hippocrates), wrote a treatise called ‘‘On the Sevens,’’
in which he declared sevens to be everywhere: seven seasons, seven strata of
the cosmos, and the like. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is filled with
sevens: seven chapters, seven main characters (one named Settembrini), seven
years spent in the sanatorium from 1907 to 1914, and so on. So is Malcolm
Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which begins and ends at seven o’clock and rings
changes on threes and fours, triangles and quadrangles, as well as on fateful
sevens.
There is no space in this volume to discuss all the interesting symbolic
numbers that appear in literature, such as the ‘‘pentangle’’ on the shield of
Sir Gawain in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (619ff.). Instead we shall mention
a few cases of what has been called ‘‘numerical composition’’ or
‘‘numerological composition,’’ the division of literary works into parts whose
lengths correspond to significant numbers and ratios. The oldest and simplest
case is the division of both the Iliad and the Odyssey into twenty-four books,
corresponding to the number of letters in the Attic Greek alphabet after the
fourth century bc; Virgil reduced the books to twelve in his Aeneid, and twelve
books became standard for epics thereafter (e.g., Paradise Lost). Dante’s Divine
Comedy is structured almost obsessively on the number three: the three major
divisions or cantiche each have thirty-three canti or cantos except the first, the
Inferno, which has an additional introductory one, giving one hundred in all;
each canto is made of a varying number of tercets or terzine of three lines;
each line has eleven syllables, so each terzina has thirty-three; stitching the
tercets together is a rhyme scheme called terza rima, where each rhyme except
the first and last in the canto occurs three times. The entire work, then,
foreshadows its culminating vision of the Trinity. A more ingenious example,
not explicated until recently, is Spenser’s Epithalamion, a poem about the day
of his wedding; its twenty-four stanzas correspond to the hours, sixteen of
them in daylight, eight in darkness (hence it is set at the summer solstice); its
365 long lines match the days of the year; and its sixty-eight short lines seem
to be the sum of the four seasons, the twelve months, and the fifty-two weeks.
Many other candidates for numerological structures have been offered by
scholars, some of them plausible, others obscure or far-fetched.
O
Oak
As the largest and strongest of common European trees, the oak (in several
varieties) was originally ‘‘the tree’’ to the Greeks: their word for the oak, drus,
originally meant ‘‘tree’’ before it was restricted to the oak (also called phegos).
In fact drus is cognate with English ‘‘tree’’ and related to Greek dendron, ‘‘tree,’’
and to dryas, ‘‘Dryad’’ -- Dryads are wood nymphs, not just oak nymphs. There
is evidence from Sanskrit, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic cultures as well as
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Greek and Latin that the Indo-Europeans worshiped the oak and connected it
with a thunder or lightning god; ‘‘tree’’ and drus may also be cognate with
‘‘Druid,’’ the Celtic priest to whom the oak was sacred. There has even been a
study that shows that oaks are more likely to be struck by lightning than
other trees of the same height.
Homer’s epithets for the oak are ‘‘high-headed,’’ ‘‘lofty-leaved,’’ and the like.
It was sacred to Zeus and to Roman Jupiter. The Odyssey tells of Zeus’s holy
grove of Dodona, where an oak (or several oaks) was consulted, perhaps by a
priest or priestess who listened to the rustling of the leaves (14.327--28).
Aeschylus refers to ‘‘talking oaks’’ (Prometheus 832), Sophocles to an ‘‘oak of
many tongues’’ (Trachiniae 1168), at Dodona; the phrase from Aeschylus seems
to have inspired Tennyson’s ‘‘The Talking Oak.’’ It is ‘‘Jove’s spreading tree’’ in
Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.106.
James Frazer’s Golden Bough, an important source for twentieth-century
poetry, turns on the idea that a sacred oak grove at Nemi near Rome was the
scene of an annual sacrifice of a king or priest. His title refers to the branch
Aeneas must carry to the Underworld (Aeneid 6.204--11), which is compared in
a simile to mistletoe. Mistletoe is often associated with oaks (Sophocles calls
the oak ixophoros, ‘‘mistletoe-bearing,’’ in fragment 403), but Virgil does not
name the tree.
As ‘‘Lord of the woods, the long-surviving oak’’ (Cowper, Task 1.313) has
become a symbol of English rootedness and steadfastness; England’s sons have
‘‘hearts of oak’’ in battle, though that phrase misquotes the song (‘‘Heart of
oak are our men’’). (Similar traditions are found in Germany and throughout
Europe.) Oaks were also the preferred timber for building beams. Chaucer
calls it ‘‘byldere oak’’ (Parliament of Fowls 176) and Spenser echoes him: ‘‘The
builder Oak, sole king of forrests all’’ (FQ 1.1.8). Older trees, however, had
‘‘knotty entrails’’ (Tempest 1.2.295) and were difficult to work with.
It is proverbial that ‘‘oaks may fall when reeds stand the storm,’’ but oaks
are also known to stand the storm, as a great simile at Virgil’s Aeneid 4.441--49
suggests. Prehistoric associations between oaks and lightning (the weapon of
Zeus/Jupiter) survive on such passages as this from Shakespeare: ‘‘Merciful
heaven, / Thou rather with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt / Splits the
unwedgeable and gnarled oak / Than the soft myrtle’’ (MM 2.2.114--17).
Occasionally the oak plays the part usually given to the elm as the support
of the vine. Irving has an elaborate simile: ‘‘As the vine, which has long
twined its graceful foliage about the oak and been lifted by it into sunshine,
will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling around it with
caressing tendrils and bind up its shattered boughs, so is it beautifully
ordered by Providence, that woman, who is the mere dependent and
ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when
smitten with sudden calamity, winding herself into the rugged recesses of his
nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken
heart’’ (‘‘The Wife,’’ in The Sketch Book).
In Republican Rome a crown of oak leaves was given to those who had saved
the life of a citizen in battle; it was called the ‘‘civic oak’’ (quercus civilis). When
Coriolanus ‘‘prov’d best man i’th’field, and for his meed / Was brow-bound
with the oak’’ (Cor. 2.2.97--98), Shakespeare may have misunderstood his source
in Plutarch, who goes on to speculate on the origin of the Roman custom.
144
Oat
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
After ad 86 the victor of the Capitoline poetry contest was also given an oak
crown. Ovid says that the victor of the Pythian games was crowned with oak
leaves before the laurel was introduced (Met. 1.448--50). Having crowned the
poet Tasso with laurel, Alfonso promises to crown his ambassador Antonio
with the civic crown of oak (Goethe, Torquato Tasso 1.4.681--85).
According to Lucretius (5.939, 1414), acorns were the original food of the
human race (in Arcadia or elsewhere); Juvenal (10.80--81) says bread replaced
acorns. Homer, however, considers acorns or mast to be the normal fodder of
pigs (Odyssey 10.242).
See Elm, Laurel, Mistletoe.
Oat
Ocean
Oil
see Pipe
see Sea
In the ancient world most oil was pressed from olives, as even the English
words suggest -- going back through Latin oleum (‘‘oil’’) and oliva (‘‘olive’’) either
to Greek elaia (‘‘olive’’) or to a Mediterranean source for both the Greek and
the Latin. Oil was used for food, cooking, medicine, sacrifice, lighting, and
anointing the body after a bath or before gymnastics.
Among the Hebrews oil was used for anointing a king or priest. ‘‘Then
Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him [David] in the midst of his
brethren: and the spirit of the Lord came upon David from that day forward’’
(1 Sam. 16.13). ‘‘And Zadok the priest took an horn of oil out of the
tabernacle, and anointed Solomon. And they blew the trumpet; and all the
people said, God save king Solomon’’ (1 Kgs 1.39). Poured over the head, the oil
symbolizes God’s blessing, vitality, and power. The Hebrew word for
‘‘anointed,’’ mashiah, becomes our ‘‘Messiah.’’ When Simon Peter answers Jesus’
question ‘‘But whom say ye that I am?’’ by saying, ‘‘Thou art the Christ, the
Son of the living God’’ (Matt. 16.16, Mark 8.29), he calls him the Messiah, for
Greek christos means ‘‘anointed.’’ He is ‘‘thy [God’s] holy child Jesus, whom
thou hast anointed’’ (Acts 4.27). Milton calls him ‘‘Messiah king anointed’’ (PL
5.664) and ‘‘Anointed king Messiah’’ (12.359).
Since Charlemagne kings in Europe have usually been anointed. That
Richard II is the anointed king is made a prominent theme in Shakespeare’s
play; twice Gaunt calls him ‘‘anointed’’ (1.2.38, 2.1.98), York once (2.3.96),
Carlisle once (4.1.127), and once most poignantly Richard himself: ‘‘Not all the
water in the rough rude sea / Can wash the balm [holy oil] off from an
anointed king’’ (3.2.54--55).
When the oil spills or is used up, the lamp goes out. That fact became a
metaphor for human life and death at least as early as Ecclesiastes, whose
cryptic verse ‘‘Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken’’
(12.6) seems to describe an oil lamp; it is in a series of images of death. Gaunt,
again, near death, predicts ‘‘My oil-dried lamp and time-bewasted light / Shall
be extinct with age and endless night’’ (1.3.221--22). In All’s Well we hear of a
man who said, ‘‘Let me not live . . . / After my flame lacks oil’’ (1.2.58--59).
Cleopatra announces, ‘‘Our lamp is spent, it’s out!’’ (AC 4.15.85).
‘‘To burn the midnight oil’’ means to study late at night. The seed of this
saying, which goes back to the seventeenth century in English, is in Juvenal:
145
Olive
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
‘‘And is your labour more fruitful, writers / Of history? More time is wasted
here, and more oil’’ (7.98--99).
See Olive.
Olive
146
Olive trees grow very slowly. Virgil speaks of the ‘‘fruit of the slowly growing
olive’’ (Georgics 2.3); Lope de Vega praises the ‘‘fruit so slow in maturing’’ (‘‘O
Fortune, pick me that olive’’); Landor tersely follows with ‘‘slow olive’’ (Gebir
3.306). Olive trees were therefore planted only in times of peace or stability: a
man planted a grove for his son. The chorus of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus
sings of the sacred olive grove at Colonus; it uses the striking epithet
‘‘child-nurturing’’ (701) of the tree. Hence since classical times the olive has
symbolized peace, though that meaning is clearer in Roman than in Greek
literature. As Gibbon writes, ‘‘The olive, in the western world, followed the
progress of peace, of which it was considered as the symbol’’ (Decline and Fall
chap. 2). Greek suppliants carried olive branches (Orestes carries one in
Aeschylus, Eumenides 43) and so did heralds. According to Virgil, the olive is
placitam Pacis, ‘‘agreeable to Peace’’ (Georgics 2.425); when Aeneas encounters
the Arcadians he extends ‘‘a branch of peaceful olive’’ (Aeneid 8.116). As
Spenser later sums it up, ‘‘olives bene for peace’’ (SC ‘‘April’’ 124).
Where Peace is personified she is usually associated with the olive. As
Shakespeare states it, when the rebellion in 2 Henry 4 comes to an end, ‘‘Peace
puts forth her olive everywhere’’ (4.4.87). Milton imagines ‘‘meek-ey’d Peace’’ to
be ‘‘crown’d with Olive green’’ and equipped with ‘‘Turtle wing’’ and ‘‘myrtle
wand,’’ attributes of Venus (‘‘Nativity’’ 46--51); for Pope, ‘‘Peace descending bids
her Olives spring, / And scatters Blessings from her Dove-like Wing’’
(‘‘Windsor-Forest’’ 429--30).
The dove is borrowed not only from Aphrodite-Venus (see Dove) but from
the story of Noah and the Flood. When the dove returns with an olive leaf in
her mouth, Noah knows the waters have receded (Gen. 8.11). It is not clear if
the olive connoted peace to the Hebrews, but dove and leaf together have
come to do so, as in Milton: ‘‘in his Bill / An Olive leaf he brings, pacific sign’’
(PL 11.859--60).
Psalm 52.8 has ‘‘I am like a green olive tree in the house of God: I trust in
the mercy of God for ever and ever,’’ a passage that may have influenced later
literary uses of the olive as a symbol of love and trust as well as of peace.
The olive was sacred to Athena (Roman Minerva), and a sacred olive tree
grew on the acropolis of Athens. Herodotus tells of its miraculous
rejuvenation after it was burned by the Persians (8.55); see Euripides Ion
1433ff. and Trojan Women 801ff. Virgil calls Minerva the ‘‘discoverer of the
olive’’ (oleae inventrix) (Georgics 1.18--19); he is imitated by Petrarch in Rime 24.
The association of the olive with Athens was already a well-worn theme when
Horace invoked it in Ode 1.7.7.
Three times in Homer’s Odyssey the olive seems to symbolize home, safety,
or rest: when Odysseus is cast ashore on Scheria he makes a bed under two
kinds of olive trees, ashore on Ithaca he sleeps while his belongings are placed
under a sacred olive, and his bed in his palace is carved out of an olive.
Athena, of course, is his protectress. She appears in his palace carrying a
lamp, which burns oil (19.33); as she symbolizes wisdom or mental illumination we may have another reason for her connection with the olive.
Ouroboros
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Pindar in Olympian 3 tells the origin of the olive spray as the ‘‘crown of
prowess’’ for victors at the games at Olympia, famous for its wild olives. See
also Virgil, Aeneid 5.309.
The two kinds of olive are the wild olive (Greek phylia, Latin oleaster) and the
cultivated olive (Greek elaia, Latin oliva or olea). The latter produces not only
edible fruit but oil. The word ‘‘oil’’ is derived from the same source as
‘‘olive.’’
See Oil.
Ouroboros
Owl
see Serpent
The tradition that the owl is the bird of wisdom may owe something to the
sharp glaring eyes and the nocturnal habits of most species (as if they were
scholars studying late), but it may have more to do with the fact that the owl
was the bird of Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom (Roman Minerva). That in
turn was probably due to the large number of owls in Athens, Athena’s
citadel. ‘‘To bring owls to Athens’’ was to bring coals to Newcastle, that is, to
bring something to a place already abundantly supplied with it; the phrase
was already a commonplace in Aristophanes (Birds 301). Zeus wore an eagle on
his head, Athena an owl on hers (Birds 514--16). Thus the owl became an official
emblem of the city. The ‘‘Lauriotic’’ owls (Birds 1106) were the silver coins,
made from silver from the mines of Laurion, which were stamped with an owl.
In Pope’s Dunciad, to ‘‘hunt th’Athenian fowl’’ means to seek money (b 4.361).
An owl (skops) is mentioned only once in Homer (Odyssey 5.66); none is
mentioned in Hesiod. But an epithet from glaux, the generic term for ‘‘owl,’’ is
applied to Athena over ninety times in Homer and a dozen times in Hesiod:
glaukopis. It may have meant ‘‘owl-eyed,’’ but glaux itself comes from a root
meaning ‘‘glare’’ or ‘‘gleam’’; in Homer the adjective glaukos modifies ‘‘sea’’ and
the verb glaukiao refers to the eyes of a lion. In Pindar glaukopis modifies
‘‘Athena’’ a few times but twice it modifies ‘‘serpent.’’ So it may have meant
‘‘sharp-eyed’’ or ‘‘with gleaming eyes.’’
Since it is nocturnal and hard to see, the owl’s most salient feature is its
‘‘shriek’’ or ‘‘screech’’ or ‘‘hoot.’’ The word ‘‘owl’’ (like German Eule) comes from
the same root as ‘‘howl’’; one of the Latin names for ‘‘owl’’ is ulula, from the
same root. Latin ululare (whence English ‘‘ululate’’) means ‘‘lament’’ or ‘‘howl
in mourning’’; the cry of the owl sounds mournful to most ears. The prophet
Micah says, ‘‘I will make a . . . mourning as the owls’’ (1.8). To the Greeks the
cry sounded like kikkabau (Aristophanes, Birds 261), similar to the Latin verb
cucubio; we also find tutu in Latin (Plautus, Menaechmi 654). In English poetry
the conventional cry is ‘‘Tu-who’’ or ‘‘Tu-whit, tu-who’’ (as in Shakespeare LLL
5.2.917--18; Coleridge, Christabel 3; R. Browning, Flute-Music 119). Another owl
with onomatopoeic name is Greek strinx and Latin strix, the screech-owl.
To ancient and modern authors alike the owl’s cry has sounded ‘‘ominous’’
or omen-filled, and especially prophetic of death. As Dido prepares to die, she
seems to hear her dead husband’s voice summoning her, and the owl (bubo)
sings its ‘‘funereal song’’ (Virgil, Aeneid 4.462--63); in Dryden’s translation,
‘‘Hourly ’tis heard, when with a boding note / The solitary screech-owl strains
her throat, / And, on a chimney’s top, or turret’s height, / With songs obscene
disturbs the silence of the night’’ (‘‘obscene’’ here in the sense of Latin
147
Palm
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
obscenus, ‘‘ill-omened’’). Ovid tells how the boy Ascalaphus saw Proserpina eat
the pomegranate and betrayed her so she must remain in the Underworld; for
that he was transformed into ‘‘the slothful screech-owl [ignavus bubo] of evil
omen to mortals’’ (Met. 5.550). Chaucer names the owl ‘‘that of deth the bode
bryngeth’’ (PF 343). Spenser lists a group of ‘‘fatall birds’’ that includes the
‘‘ill-faste [ill-faced] Owle, deaths dreadfull messengere’’ (FQ 2.12.36; cf. 1.5.30);
four times Spenser calls the owl ‘‘ghastly.’’ The soldier Talbot is called an
‘‘ominous and fearful owl of death’’ by his enemy (Shakespeare, 1H6 4.2.15),
and King Henry tells Richard, ‘‘The owl shrieked at thy birth, an evil sign’’
(3H6 5.6.44). Gray uses an interesting adjective: ‘‘The moping owl does to the
moon complain’’ (‘‘Elegy’’ 10), perhaps echoing Ovid’s ignavus.
The owl is the ‘‘bird of night,’’ Ovid’s noctis avis (Met. 2.564); indeed the Latin
name for the most common of owls is noctua. (It is almost redundant to name
one species the ‘‘night-owl.’’) Thus it is common in poetry to set the owl
parallel to the raven (or night-raven) as birds of death. Chaucer has ‘‘revenes
qualm [croak], or shrichyng of thise owles,’’ as fearful auguries (Troilus 5.382);
Spenser writes, ‘‘Owles and Night-ravens flew, / The hatefull messengers of
heavy things, / Of death and dolor telling sad tidings’’ (FQ 2.7.23). It is also
fairly common to set the owl in contrast to the lark, though more frequently
the lark’s counterpart is the nightingale. As Richard II yields to Bolingbroke,
he laments, ‘‘For night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing’’ (R2
3.3.183; cf. Cym 3.6.93). Sometimes, as in the final song of Shakespeare’s Love’s
Labour’s Lost, the owl is set against the cuckoo as symbols of winter and spring.
Latin strix could also mean ‘‘witch,’’ and witches often transformed
themselves into owls (Ovid, Amores 1.8.13--14; Apuleius, Met. 3.21).
Despite its glaring eyes, the owl proverbially has poor eyesight, at least by
day. ‘‘Blind as an owl’’ was a commonplace by the seventeenth century. One of
Herbert’s proverbs is ‘‘The ignorant hath an Eagles wings, and an Owles eyes’’
(902). Tennyson writes, ‘‘thrice as blind as any noonday owl’’ (Holy Grail 866).
As the bird of wisdom that can only see at night, the owl can be invoked in
a disparaging or humorous manner to refer to scholars or critics. Pope mocks
those who, ‘‘in mild benighted days, / Mixed the Owl’s ivy with the Poet’s
bays’’ (see Ivy) and the scholarly ‘‘Wits, who, like owls, see only in the dark’’
(1743 Dunciad, 53--54, 192).
P
Palm
148
Palm trees are common in biblical lands, and the date palm in particular is
highly prized for its many useful products, but they were not frequently
found in ancient Greece or Rome. The Greek word for the palm, phoinix,
points to a Phoenician homeland, while Virgil refers to Idumaeas . . . palmas
(Georgics 3.12), as if they come from Edom.
Homer nonetheless has Odysseus refer to one in his courtly remarks to
young Nausicaa: ‘‘Wonder takes me as I look on you. / Yet in Delos once I saw
such a thing, by Apollo’s altar. / I saw the stalk of a young palm shooting up’’
(Odyssey 6.161--63, trans. Lattimore). This might be the sacred palm of the
Palm
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Delian Apollo, the one Euripides calls protogonos or ‘‘first-born’’ (Hecuba 458),
except that Homer makes it ‘‘young’’ to suit Nausicaa. (The Homeric Hymn to
Apollo 115--19 tells how Leto gave birth to Apollo while holding on to the tree.)
Odysseus’ comparison is a more discreet version of the simile in the Song of
Solomon: ‘‘This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of
grapes’’ (7.7). (The grapes are not in the Hebrew text; the clusters are surely of
dates.) The Hebrew word for palm, tamar, was and remains a common girl’s
name.
The word ‘‘palm’’ (Latin palma) is the same as that for the palm of the hand:
to the ancients the tree resembled the hand, the branches or fronds looking
like fingers.
In Psalm 92.12 we are told that the righteous ‘‘shall flourish like the palm
tree.’’ Hamlet alludes to this verse as he rewrites the Danish message to
England, hoping ‘‘love between them like the palm might flourish’’ (5.2.40),
and a character in Timon of Athens invokes it when he says, ‘‘You shall see him
a palm in Athens again, and flourish with the highest’’ (5.1.10--11).
Around 400 bc the palm leaf was introduced into Greece as a symbol of
victory in athletic contests. An early reference is Aristotle’s to ‘‘he who takes
the palm’’ in a game (Magna Moralia 1196a36), but it is not much mentioned in
Greek literature. According to Livy (10.47.3), it was introduced into Roman
culture in 293 bc, and in Latin literature it soon became a commonplace.
Horace begins his first ode by mentioning chariot races and their victors’ palm
(1.1.5), though he prefers the ivy of lyric poets. In their prologues both Terence
and Plautus refer to the palm as a prize for winners of drama contests
(Phormio 17, Amphitryon 69). Plutarch observes that the palm is an appropriate
prize for athletes because, among other things, both tree and victorious
athlete are resistant and resilient (Moralia 724e). It was soon a commonplace
symbol. Apuleius tells of a man who fought many battles and won ‘‘many
palms of victory’’ (Met. 10.25). In his list of trees Chaucer has ‘‘the victor palm’’
(PF 182). ‘‘To bear the palm’’ becomes synonymous for ‘‘be the victor,’’ as it is
twice in Shakespeare’s Roman plays (JC 1.2.131, Cor 5.3.117), though it is for
military conquest rather than a game. Horatio seems to coin a new word
when he speaks of ‘‘the most high and palmy state of Rome’’ (Hamlet 1.1.113),
suggesting both ‘‘triumphant’’ and ‘‘flourishing.’’ Wilde refers to ‘‘the palmy
days of the British Drama’’ (Dorian Gray chap. 4).
The New Testament reflects the classical symbolism of the palm. When
Christ enters Jerusalem many people take palm branches and shout ‘‘Hosanna:
Blessed is the King of Israel’’ (John 12.13), a ceremony reenacted in churches
on Palm Sunday. According to John of Patmos, those who are ‘‘sealed’’ or saved
will stand before the Lamb, ‘‘clothed with white robes, and palms in their
hands’’ (Rev. 7.9). These are ‘‘those just Spirits that wear victorious Palms’’ in
Milton’s ‘‘At a Solemn Music’’ (14). The palm thus became ‘‘the palm of
martirdom’’ (Chaucer, Second Nun’s Tale 240), the symbol of the victory of the
Christian believer over torture and death.
A pilgrim who went to Jerusalem was called a ‘‘palmer’’ for he brought back
a palm from the Holy Land; then any pilgrim might be called a palmer:
Chaucer so names those who go to Canterbury (CT Gen. Pro. 13). The Palmer,
‘‘a sage and sober sire,’’ is a major character in Book Two of Spenser’s Faerie
Queene (introduced 2.1.7). At the Capulets’ ball Romeo and Juliet make elegant
149
Pansy
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
puns on ‘‘palmer’’ as they dance: ‘‘saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do
touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss’’ (1.5.99--100).
Pansy
150
‘‘Pansy’’ is a common name for a kind of violet (viola tricolor), especially for the
hybridized varieties in gardens. The name is from the French pensée,
‘‘thought’’; in Spanish it is called pensamiento, in Italian viola del pensiero.
Ophelia reflects its etymology when she says, ‘‘And there is pansies -- that’s for
thoughts’’ (Hamlet 4.5.176). Pensiveness often entails remembering, of course,
so Wordsworth chooses an appropriate flower, ‘‘The Pansy at my feet,’’ to ask
whither the visionary gleam is fled that attended him as a boy (‘‘Ode:
Intimations of Immortality’’ 54ff.). When Shelley advises the revolutionary
Spanish to conquer not only their foes but their own desire for revenge, he
tells them to bind their brows with violet, ivy, and pine but not with pansy:
‘‘Ye were injured, and that means memory’’ (‘‘Ode: Arise’’ 35).
Lawrence offers ‘‘a bunch of pansies’’ in his book of poems called Pansies:
‘‘These poems are called Pansies because they are rather Pensées than anything
else’’ (‘‘Foreword’’).
The viola tricolor is often called, with rather different connotations,
‘‘heartsease’’ (heart’s ease).
Panther
see Leopard
Pard
see Leopard
Path
For as long as humans have walked they have made paths or followed natural
ones. So fundamental is the experience of traveling on a path that many
other basic human activities, even the whole of a human life, are described in
cultures everywhere in such terms as ‘‘path,’’ ‘‘way,’’ or ‘‘course.’’ In English
‘‘way’’ is used so often and in so many contexts that its metaphorical origin
has long vanished: we speak of a ‘‘way’’ to do something or a ‘‘way of life’’
without thinking of a road or path. The same is true of words borrowed from
other languages. Etymologically, if something is ‘‘viable’’ it has a ‘‘way’’ before
it (from Latin via, ‘‘way’’); if something is ‘‘obvious’’ it stands in our path; if
something ‘‘deviates’’ it leaves the main road. ‘‘Routine’’ comes from ‘‘route’’
(French, from Latin rupta [via], ‘‘broken or beaten [way]’’); ‘‘method’’ comes
from Greek hodos, ‘‘path.’’
A similar metaphor is the frequent biblical use of ‘‘walk’’ (verb) as ‘‘behave’’
or ‘‘live.’’ ‘‘Enoch walked with God’’ (Gen. 5.22); the Lord tests the people
‘‘whether they will walk in my law, or no’’ (Exod. 16.4); some ‘‘kept not the
covenant of God, and refused to walk in his law’’ (Ps. 78.10); after the
resurrection of Christ ‘‘we also should walk in newness of life’’ (Rom. 6.4)
(Hebrew halak, Greek peripateo). From the verb comes the noun for ‘‘conduct
of life’’: Scott names a righteous woman who has ‘‘an upright walk’’ (Heart of
Midlothian 10); in a more general sense we use the phrase ‘‘in every walk of
life.’’ The Bible generally uses ‘‘path’’ for the noun corresponding to ‘‘walk’’:
‘‘Make me to go in the path of thy commandments,’’ ‘‘Thy word is a lamp
unto my feet, and a light unto my path’’ (Ps. 119.35, 105).
Life is a path or a journey on a path. Dante’s Divine Comedy begins ‘‘Nel mezzo
del cammin di nostra vita,’’ ‘‘In the middle of the path of our life’’; Bunyan’s
Path
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Pilgrim’s Progress begins, ‘‘As I walked through the wilderness of this world.’’
We are all pilgrims, making our way on foot. Christ said, ‘‘I am the way’’
(John 14.6), he made the lame walk, and he washed the feet of his disciples.
Bunyan explains in a note that when Christian the pilgrim is wounded by
Apollyon in the foot, it is his ‘‘conversation’’ that is hurt -- his conduct or
capacity to ‘‘walk’’ properly. Tennyson writes, ‘‘I know that this was Life, -- the
track / Whereon with equal feet we fared’’ (In Memoriam 25.1--2). In ‘‘America
the Beautiful’’ Katharine Lee Bates finds beautiful the ‘‘pilgrim feet, / Whose
stern, impassioned stress / A thoroughfare for freedom beat / Across the
wilderness!’’
The path to salvation, or to any worthy destination, is steep, thorny, rugged,
narrow. Matthew tells us, ‘‘strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which
leadeth unto life’’ (7.14). Dante tells us he lost the right path (Inferno 1.3, 11.9).
Ophelia contrasts ‘‘the steep and thorny way to heaven’’ with ‘‘the primrose
path of dalliance’’ (Hamlet 1.3.48--50; see Macbeth 2.3.18--19). Spenser’s Knight
and Una pass ‘‘forward by that painfull way . . . / Forth to an hill that was both
steepe and hy, / On top whereof a sacred chappell was’’ (FQ 1.10.46). ‘‘Once
meek,’’ Blake writes, ‘‘and in a perilous path, / The just man kept his course
along / The vale of death’’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 2.3--5).
The oldest classical statement of this metaphor is Hesiod’s: the road to
wickedness is short and smooth, but ‘‘the gods have put hard sweat between
us and virtue. The road to it is long and uphill, and rough at first, though
easier going at the summit, if you get there’’ (Works and Days 287--91). Theognis
imagines himself at a crossroads, wondering whether to take a frugal or
spendthrift path (911--12). Justice tells Parmenides he has chosen the right
path, though ‘‘far indeed does it lie from the beaten track of man’’ (frag. 1.27).
Persius refers to ‘‘the letter which separates the Samian branches’’ (Satires
3.56), i.e., ‘‘the upsilon of Pythagoras of Samos,’’ which resembled a curved ‘‘y’’:
the straight branch was the path of virtue, the crooked, of vice. ‘‘The Choice
of Heracles’’ between Virtue and Pleasure, told by Xenophon (Memorabilia
2.1.22--34), is sometimes presented as a choice at a crossroads (Hercules in bivio).
Another famous and fateful crossroads is the ‘‘triple road’’ where Oedipus kills
his father Laius (Sophocles, Oedipus 716).
Paths and roads have had many other meanings in literature, of course, for
they may be broad or narrow, crooked or straight, circular or irreversible; they
may represent space or time, real things or ideal; they may unite some places
but not others; and they may be literal or metaphorical or both. In America,
to give one example, there has been almost a cult of the road, a belief in
movement itself, notably in Whitman’s ‘‘Song of the Open Road’’ and Jack
Kerouac’s On the Road.
There is a metaphor in Greek poetry, finally, that presents poetry itself as a
path. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes speaks of the ‘‘bright path of song’’ (451),
and Hesiod reports that the Muses ‘‘set his foot upon song’’ (Works and Days
659). Pindar was fond of the conceit: he has, for instance, ‘‘found the
praiseworthy path of words’’ (hodon logon) in one ode (Olymp. 1.110); at the
outset of another, ‘‘I have countless paths opening on every side’’ (Isthm. 4.1).
Apollo bids Callimachus drive over ‘‘untrodden paths’’ (Aetia frag. 1.27--28).
Lucretius explores ‘‘the trackless haunts of the Muses where no man’s foot has
trod’’ (1.926--27).
151
Peacock
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152
Peacock
The peacock (Greek taos, Latin pavo) is striking for its large colorful tail that
opens erect like a fan; as it struts about in full display the bird seems
inordinately proud. It is not mentioned often in Greek literature (they were
imported into the Mediterranean region from India), but in Latin literature
the bird is sacred to Juno and a byword for beauty and pride: ‘‘the bird of
Juno unfolds (explicat) its feathers’’ (Ovid, Amores 2.6.55). A list of superlatives
in Metamorphoses includes ‘‘prouder than peacocks’’ (13.801). Chaucer presents
a character: ‘‘as any pecok he was proud and gay’’ (Reeve’s Tale 3926); Spenser
describes an image with ‘‘More sondry colours than the proud Pavone / Beares
in his boasted fan’’ (FQ 3.11.47). As doves or swans pull Venus’ chariot, ‘‘Great
Junoes golden chayre [is] . . . // Drawne of fayre Pecocks, that excell in pride, /
And full of Argus eyes their tayles dispredden wide’’ (FQ 1.4.17). The story of
Argus and how the peacock got its ‘‘eyes’’ is found in Metamorphoses 1.625--723.
The ‘‘paycock’’ in Sean O’Casey’s well-known play Juno and the Paycock is the
feckless, drunkard husband of ‘‘Juno’’ Boyle; he ought to be Jupiter, perhaps,
but instead he goes ‘‘gallivantin’ about all the day like a paycock’’ (Act 1) while
she tries to keep her family together.
Pearl
From their beauty, rarity, and great price pearls stand, not surprisingly, for
beauty, rarity, or great price, as when we speak of pearls of wisdom or say
that someone was a pearl, in these uses equivalent to ‘‘gem.’’ Othello feels, at
the end, that he ‘‘threw a pearl away’’ (5.2.347). Two biblical passages,
however, have given ‘‘pearl’’ additional connotations.
The more important of these is Christ’s brief parable: ‘‘the kingdom of
heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: / Who, when he
had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought
it’’ (Matt. 13.45--46). The anonymous medieval dream-poem Pearl, at one level
about a girl lost to earthly life but flourishing in heaven, seems also to be
about lost and restored faith. In ‘‘The Pearl,’’ which cites the Matthew passage
in the title, Herbert claims he ‘‘knows the ways’’ of learning, honor, and
pleasure, has them in hand, knows their value as commodities, but gives
them up and turns ‘‘to thee.’’ Steinbeck’s novella The Pearl is also based on the
parable. Cowper several times calls truth a pearl, and once seems to rewrite
the parable in asking ‘‘What pearl is it that rich men cannot buy, / That
learning is too proud to gather up; / But which the poor, and the despis’d of
all, / Seek and obtain, and often find unsought? / Tell me -- and I will tell thee
what is truth’’ (Task 3.285--89).
The second biblical passage is Christ’s injunction not to ‘‘cast ye your pearls
before swine, lest they trample them under their feet’’ (Matt. 7.6). Pearls here
are usually taken to mean preaching (the kingdom) or wisdom, thus
seconding the meaning of the parable. Shakespeare’s absurd pedant
Holofernes praises a saying by the lowly Costard as ‘‘pearl enough for a swine’’
(LLL 4.2.89). Milton felt that the barbarous noise that greeted his pamphlets
was ‘‘got by casting Pearls to Hogs’’ (Sonnet 12).
That the pearl is the ‘‘treasure of an oyster’’ (Shakespeare, AC 1.5.44) allows
the suggestion that it is hidden, or is found among base or ugly conditions.
Touchstone says, ‘‘Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house, as
your pearl in your foul oyster’’ (AYLI 5.4.59--61). Shelley cleverly evokes the
pearls-before-swine saying in describing his friend Hogg ‘‘a pearl within an
Pelican
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
oyster shell, / One of the richest of the deep’’ (‘‘Letter to Gisborne’’ 231--32).
Tennyson consoles himself over the loss of Hallam by vowing to wait until
‘‘Time hath sunder’d shell from pearl’’ (In Memoriam 52.16).
Pelican
Philomel
The pelican is mentioned only briefly in Aristophanes (Birds 884), Aristotle,
and a few other classical authors. The name (Greek pelekan, pelekinos) seems to
be related to pelekus, ‘‘ax,’’ because of the way the bird uses its bill. (The
woodpecker is pelekas.)
In the Bible it is listed twice as unclean (Lev. 11.18, Deut. 14.17), and twice as
one of the desert birds that will occupy the land after the Lord lays it waste
(Isa. 34.11, Zeph. 2.14). (The AV renders the latter two as ‘‘cormorant,’’ but
Coverdale, Geneva, and Bishops’ versions have ‘‘pelican.’’) The remaining
biblical passage, however -- ‘‘I am like a pelican of the wilderness’’ (Ps. 102.6) -had a fruitful history. Epiphanius and Augustine commented that the pelican
there stands for Christ. In medieval legend the pelican was thought to revive
its young with blood from its breast, and that act made the bird a symbol of
Christ, who redeems us by his blood. Thomas Aquinas has the phrase Pie
pelicane Jesu Domine in one of his hymns. In the Old French Quest of the Holy
Grail, Sir Bors has a vision of the pelican and adopts it as his device. Dante’s
Beatrice identifies John the Apostle as ‘‘he who lay upon the breast / of our
pelican’’ (Paradiso 25.112--13).
Without allusion to Christ, the image might stand for the self-sacrifice of a
parent, as when Shakespeare’s Laertes offers to open his arms to his friends
and, ‘‘like the kind life-rend’ring pelican, / Repast them with my blood’’
(Hamlet 4.5.145--47); or for the ingratitude of children, as when Gaunt tells
Richard that the blood of his father, ‘‘like the pelican, / Hast thou tapp’d out
and drunkenly carous’d’’ (R2 2.1.126--27), or when Lear laments for ‘‘discarded
fathers’’ with ‘‘pelican daughters’’ (3.4.72,75). The mother in Strindberg’s The
Pelican protests to her children that ‘‘I’ve nourished you with my life’s blood’’
(scene 3) but it is a lie, as she has devoured them emotionally and nearly
starved them physically.
Byron invokes the pelican ‘‘Whose beak unlocks her bosom’s stream / To
still her famish’d nestlings’ scream, / Nor mourns a life to them transferr’d”
(Giaour 952--54). It is probably this passage that inspired Musset’s elaborate
image of the pelican as a symbol of the poet, who offers his heart as nourishment for the young in a ‘‘divine sacrifice” (”The Night in May” 153--91). Musset’s
poem launched pélicanisme as the term for confessional poetry of the heart
and its sorrows, though Goethe had already described his novel The Sorrows of
Young Werther as having been nourished like the pelican with the blood of his
heart (Conversations with Eckermann 2 January 1824).
see Nightingale
Phlegm
see Humor
Phoenix
The earliest reference to a phoenix is found in a riddling fragment of Hesiod
(frag. 304), from which we learn that it was already a byword for great longevity. Herodotus reports an Egyptian belief in a sacred bird, resembling a red
and golden eagle, that comes from Arabia to Egypt once every five hundred
153
Phoenix
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years to bury the corpse of his father in the Temple of the Sun (2.73). He
says it is very rare; later authors say it is unique -- unica semper avis, according
to Ovid (Amores 2.6.54). Philostratus says it comes from India, and adds that
‘‘the phoenix, while it is consumed in its nest, sings funeral hymns to itself’’
(Life of Apollonius 3.49). Ovid thinks it comes from Assyria, and describes it as
the sole animal that regenerates itself. When it has lived five hundred years
it builds a nest high on a lofty palm, covers it with spices, and dies among
the odors (Ovid says nothing about fire). From the ‘‘father’’ phoenix a little
phoenix is born, and when he grows sufficiently strong it carries the
remains of its father to the Egyptian City of the Sun, Heliopolis (Met.
15.391--407).
Pliny, who thinks it might be fabulous, cites a report that it flew from
Arabia to Egypt in ad 36; it has a gleam of gold around its neck, a purple
body, a tail blue and rose; it lives 540 years, a period somehow correlated with
the Great Year (Natural History 10.3--5). Tacitus dates its last visit at ad 34, cites
the belief that it lives 1461 years (the Sothic or Canicular Period when the
calendar year of 365 days realigns with the solar year of 365 14 days), and adds
the detail that when it brings its father to the Altar of the Sun it consigns
him to the flames (Annals 6.28).
Despite these variants, the phoenix became an emblem of rarity or
uniqueness. Martial can make a typically extravagant claim that, compared to
a certain lovely girl, the bird is frequens, ‘‘commonplace’’ (5.37.13). Shakespeare
even speaks of ‘‘the sole Arabian tree’’ on which it nests (‘‘Phoenix and Turtle’’
2), or ‘‘that in Arabia / There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne; one phoenix / At
this hour reigning there’’ (Tempest 3.3.22--24). ‘‘There is but one Phoenix in the
world,’’ says Lyly (Euphues and his England 2.86). (See also Chaucer, Duchess
981--84; Milton, PL 5.272--74.) It is sometimes called ‘‘the Arabian bird’’ (e.g.,
Shakespeare, Cym 1.6.17).
The myth may be Egyptian in origin, as Herodotus reports, for a similar
bird connected with Heliopolis is described in Egyptian texts, but it differs in
several ways, and the name phoinix seems to means ‘‘Phoenician [bird].’’
Clement of Rome cites the phoenix as proof that the Resurrection is
possible (First Epistle). Its usual function in Christian writing, however, is
emblematic. The rebirth of the soul is like that of the phoenix (De Ave Phoenice,
ascribed to Lactantius). Samson’s sudden display of strength after his seeming
defeat Milton likens to the bird that ‘‘Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous
most / When most unactive deem’d’’ (Samson Agonistes 1704--05). It can
symbolize the death and resurrection of Christ or of a Christian soul. The Old
English poem The Phoenix tells that the bird dwells in Eden, where he rises
each dawn like a lark to sing to heaven; after a thousand years he flies west to
his tree, builds a nest, is consumed in fire, is reborn in an apple but free of
sin, and then flies back to Eden; the bird stands for the chosen servants of
Christ. The fourteenth-century author of Mandeville’s Travels, after describing
the renewal of the bird from its ashes in three days, comments, ‘‘men may
well liken that bird unto God because that there is no God but one, and also
that Our Lord arose from death to life the third day’’ (chap. 7). So Skelton, in
Phyllyp Sparowe, offers an elaborate conceit where the phoenix stands for the
priest who celebrates the mass over the tomb, promising rebirth into eternal
life (513--49).
154
Pig
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Pig
Pigeon
Pipe, Flute, Reed,
Oat
The pig, however unfairly, is a symbol of uncleanness, stupidity, sensuality,
and/or greed; its wild variety also stands for anger or rage.
Until the nineteenth century ‘‘swine’’ was the most general term in English,
and ‘‘pig’’ originally meant a young swine; ‘‘boar’’ is an adult male, ‘‘sow’’ an
adult female, ‘‘barrow’’ a castrated boar, and ‘‘hog’’ any swine or a castrated
boar; ‘‘farrow’’ once meant a young pig, then a litter of pigs.
To Jews (and Muslims) the pig is ‘‘unclean’’ and may not be eaten (Lev. 11.7,
Deut. 14.8); the Lord shall punish the rebellious ones ‘‘which eat swine’s flesh’’
(Isa. 65.4, 66.17). An old Greek taunt for stupidity is ‘‘Boeotian pig’’ (Pindar,
Olymp. 6.90), Boeotia representing ‘‘the sticks’’ or backwoods. Another old
phrase is ‘‘a pig contending with Athena’’ (as in Theocritus 5.23): a fool
arguing with the goddess of wisdom or, as we might say, ‘‘teaching your
grandmother.’’ To ‘‘cast pearls before swine’’ is to give valuable things (such
as pearls of wisdom) to those incapable of appreciating them (Matt 7.6). (See
Pearl.)
The goddess and witch Circe turns men into pigs and other beasts, as
Odysseus finds out (Odyssey 10). ‘‘Who knows not Circe / The daughter of the
Sun?’’ Milton asks. ‘‘Whose charmed Cup / Whoever tasted, lost his upright
shape, / And downward fell into a groveling Swine’’ (Comus 50--53). ‘‘Drunk as a
pig’’ is a commonplace now; Gower has ‘‘drunk swine’’ (Confessio 5.6894),
Shakespeare ‘‘swine-drunk’’ (AWEW 4.3.255). Virgil tells Dante that many
sinners who are kings above ‘‘will dwell here like pigs in slime’’ (Inferno 8.50).
It is perhaps symbolic that Odysseus, who has spent one year with Circe,
arrives in Ithaca to find his faithful swineherd in charge of 360 swine, one of
which he brings each day to the suitors, who are acting like pigs in his home
(Odyssey 14.13--20).
The wild boar is ferocious and dangerous. Venus warns Adonis not to hunt
the boars whose tusks have the force of lightning (Ovid, Met. 10.550); in
Shakespeare’s version Venus describes the horrors of ‘‘churlish swine’’ at
length (Venus and Adonis 616--30) but in vain. The Calydonian Boar Hunt was
another popular Greek tale (e.g., Ovid, Met. 8.260--444). The chorus of women
in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata warns, ‘‘I will set loose my sow’’ (683), meaning ‘‘I
will vent my rage,’’ ‘‘sow’’ being an appropriate change from the expected
‘‘boar.’’ Shakespeare makes much of the fact that the badge of Richard III was
a white boar. He is known simply as ‘‘the boar’’ (e.g., 3.2.11), and his many
enemies call him such things as ‘‘elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog’’
(1.3.227) and ‘‘The wretched, bloody, and usurping boar, / That spoiled your
summer fields and fruitful vines, / Swills your warm blood like wash, and
makes his trough / In your emboweled bosoms’’ (5.2.7--10).
In Orwell’s political allegory Animal Farm it is the pigs who commandeer
the animals’ revolution against man, and in the end ‘‘The creatures outside
looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again;
but already it was impossible to say which was which.’’
see Dove
The Greeks and Romans had many kinds of wind instruments, made of many
different materials, and played on many different occasions. The Greek aulos,
for instance, usually but wrongly translated ‘‘flute’’ (it was really an oboe),
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Planet
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could accompany marches, dances, and choral songs; Plato and Aristotle
thought it could send listeners into a religious frenzy, though others praised
its calming, meditative effect. (Pipes in the Bible are used for both mourning
and rejoicing.) In literature wind instruments appear on a similar variety of
occasions, as when the troubled Agamemnon gazes at the plain filled with
Trojan campfires and hears oboes and panpipes (syrinx) (Iliad 10.13), or when
oboes and lyres play at a wedding (18.495), or when the pipe (lotos)
accompanies the ecstatic dances of the Maenads (Euripides, Bacchae 160).
The syrinx was invented by Hermes, according to the Homeric Hymn to
Hermes 512. In Ovid, Mercury charms Argus with his pipes and tells him how
the pipes were invented: the girl Syrinx, fleeing Pan, is changed into marsh
reeds, which then make a plaintive sound when Pan sighs in dismay,
whereupon he constructs the first panpipes (Met. 1.677--712; see Lucretius
5.1382--83). The panpipes are the most distinctive rustic or pastoral
instrument, but by the time of Theocritus at least all the pipes became
assimilated into one another in the pastoral world. The reed (Greek kalamos,
Latin calamus, harundo) the oat (Latin avena), the tube (Latin fistula) and other
terms all became more or less synonymous: the pipe that shepherds play, the
rustica . . . fistula . . . avenis (‘‘rustic pipe of reeds,’’ Met. 8.191--92).
In the English pastoral tradition we find the ‘‘oaten pype’’ (Spenser SC
‘‘January’’ 72), ‘‘shepherds pipe on oaten straws’’ (Shakespeare LLL 5.2.911),
‘‘Arcadian pipe, the pastoral reed / Of Hermes’’ (Milton, PL 11.132--33), ‘‘my Oat’’
(Lycidas 88), ‘‘a pipe of straw’’ (Wordsworth, ‘‘Ruth’’ 7), and ‘‘The natural music
of the mountain reed’’ (Byron, Manfred 1.2.48), to mention a few. In an obvious
synecdoche the pipe could stand for pastoral poetry itself: Spenser announces
he must ‘‘chaunge mine Oaten reeds’’ for the trumpet of epic (FQ 1 Pro. 1). In
his sonnet on Torquato Tasso, Marino names pipe, lyre, and trumpet as the
three genres of Tasso’s poetry.
In the ‘‘Introduction’’ to Blake’s pastoral Songs of Innocence, the piper
‘‘pluck’d a hollow reed,’’ the material of his pipe, but ‘‘made a rural pen’’ out
of it to write his happy songs.
Planet
156
A planet is a ‘‘wandering star’’ (Greek aster planetes). In the pre-Copernican
view of the cosmos, established mainly by Aristotle and Ptolemy, there are
seven of them, seven heavenly bodies that seem to move against the backdrop
of the fixed stars. According to their distance from the earth, the center of the
cosmos, they are the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and
Saturn. Each is fastened to a solid translucent sphere, or perhaps a sphere
upon a sphere (to account for such complications as the retrogression of
Mars), all of which revolve at various speeds around the earth. The eighth
sphere is that of the fixed stars, and the ninth the primum mobile or ‘‘first
movable,’’ the sphere that communicates its motion to all the others.
Each planet has an ‘‘influence’’ on terrestrial life, usually in complex
synergy with stars and other planets, and each is associated with a metal on
earth, a day of the week, a human temperament, and so on. Thus Saturn’s
influence produces lead on earth, melancholy in people, and disastrous events
in history; Mars makes iron, a warlike temperament, and wars. In English six
of the planets, or the gods they embody, yield psychological terms still in use:
lunacy and lunatic (Latin luna, moon), mercurial, venereal, martial, jovial
Plow
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
(Jove = Jupiter), and saturnine. Three English day-names, Sunday, Monday, and
Saturday, come directly from the planets, and the other four are based on
equivalent Germanic gods. The Romance languages preserve more of the Latin
names: Italian lunedi is Monday, martedi is Tuesday, and so on.
If a planet has a malign influence it is said to ‘‘strike.’’ At Christmas-time,
according to Shakespeare’s Marcellus, ‘‘no planets strike’’ (Hamlet 1.1.162). The
great warrior Coriolanus ‘‘struck / Corioles like a planet’’ (Cor 2.2.114). A
character in Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour says, ‘‘sure I was struck with a
planet thence, for I had no power to touch my weapon’’ (4.7.121--22). As Sin
and Death spread their bane in Milton’s Paradise Lost, ‘‘the blasted stars looked
wan, / And planets, planet-strook, real eclipse / Then suffered’’ (10.412--14).
Traditional astrology takes the sky as a mirror of events on earth. Thus a
comet, for instance, spells a drastic change in regime or empire (see Comet),
and planets, though more orderly in their movements, create intricate
patterns from which astrologers prognosticate, and poets allegorize. We
cannot examine astrology here, but we will give two examples of ad hoc
planetary allegorizing. A mysterious passage in Blake’s America claims that
Mars ‘‘once inclos’d the terrible wandering comets in its sphere. / Then Mars
thou wast our center, & the planets three flew round / Thy crimson disk; so
e’er the Sun was rent from thy red sphere’’ (5.3--5). This is absurd as astronomy
or astrology, but as political allegory it makes sense: Mars, the planet of war,
is imperial England; the three planet-comets are Ireland, Scotland, and Wales,
threatening to leave its empire; the sun is America, now free of England’s
‘‘sphere of influence’’ and attracting the three wanderers. In an
autobiographical passage of Epipsychidion, Shelley makes the women of his life
into planets or comets: the ‘‘cold chaste Moon’’ seems to be Mary, the ‘‘Planet
of that hour’’ is Harriet, the ‘‘Comet beautiful and fierce’’ is Claire, and the
‘‘Incarnation of the Sun’’ is ‘‘Emily,’’ his latest ideal love.
See Moon, Star, Sun.
Plow
The plow (or plough) is almost as old as agriculture itself, and all the
civilizations of the ancient world relied on it. The plowman behind his ox or
horse was the typical laborer until quite recent times; indeed in some
languages plowing is the generic form of labor. French labourer means ‘‘to
plow,’’ and in Milton among others we find such phrases as ‘‘labouring the
soil’’ (PL 12.18). Greek erga, ‘‘work,’’ usually meant agricultural work unless
otherwise spelled out; Hesiod’s poem Works and Days is a georgic, a poem
about farming.
So fundamental to life was tilling the earth that the plow acquired sacred
and symbolic connotations as early as we have record. The Romans used the
plow to mark out the territory of new towns; see Virgil’s Aeneid 5.755, where
Aeneas delineates town borders. Ancient peoples used to raze conquered cities
with the plow, as if to return them to farmland; that was the actual fate of
Carthage in 146 bc and the legendary fate of Troy -- Aeschylus presents
Agamemnon as the man who ‘‘dug up Troy with the pick-axe of Zeus’’
(Agamemnon 525--26). Micah prophesied that ‘‘Zion shall be plowed like a field’’
(Jer. 26.18). Horace blames uncontrolled rage as the reason that city walls have
been ‘‘imprinted with the insolent enemy plow’’ (Odes 1.16.17--21); as
Shakespeare’s outcast Coriolanus turns against his city he says, ‘‘Let the
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Plow
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Volsces / Plough Rome and harrow Italy’’ (Cor 5.3.33--34). Byron’s General
Suwarrow vows ‘‘that shortly plough or harrow / Shall pass o’er what was
Ismail’’ (Don Juan 7.502--03).
According to Plutarch, Athens held several rites of plowing at different
seasons. After the passage where he describes them he gives one of the most
widespread of plowing metaphors. ‘‘The Athenians observe three sacred
plowings . . . But most sacred of all is the marital sowing and plowing for
procreation of children’’ (Moralia 2.144a--b). The figure is obvious and
irresistible. The earth is female, our nurturing mother; rain from father sky
fertilizes the earth; men with plows enter the earth and plant seeds in her. In
Greek aro meant ‘‘to plow’’ and ‘‘to beget [a child],’’ aroter meant ‘‘plowman’’
and (in poetry) ‘‘father,’’ while aroura meant ‘‘tilled field’’ and (again in poetry)
‘‘woman receiving seed.’’ According to Euripides, Priam was the plowman
(aroter) of fifty sons (Trojan Women 135). Theognis speaks of a lustful man who
wants to plow another man’s field (582). All three tragedians used the field
metaphor in the story of Oedipus’ incest with his mother: Aeschylus has him
‘‘sowing the sacred field of his mother’’ (Seven Against Thebes 753--54); Sophocles
has Oedipus say, when he learns the truth, ‘‘Bring me a sword, I say, / To find
this wife no wife, this mother’s womb, / this field of double sowing whence I
sprang / and where I sowed my children’’ (Oedipus Tyrannus 1255--57, trans.
Grene); and Euripides has Jocasta tell how Laius was warned not to ‘‘sow
the furrows of fateful sons’’ (Phoenician Women 18). A late Greek version of the
cycle of myths tells that ‘‘Cronus cut off his father’s male plowshare (arotron)’’
and sowed the sea with his seed (Nonnus, Dionysiaca 12.46).
The metaphor was less often used in Latin literature. It is found in
Lucretius, who frowns upon the sensuous movements of a harlot because she
thereby ‘‘diverts the furrow out of the direct path and place of the plow, and
turns away the impact of the seed from its plot’’ (4.1272--73; cf. 1107).
Jean de Meun revives it when he denounces at great length those who will
not plow (preferring celibacy), or who deliberately overturn the plow, or who
plow in sterile fields, and so on (Romance of the Rose 19513--722). Shakespeare
uses it, most succinctly in Antony and Cleopatra: ‘‘He ploughed her, and she
cropped’’ (2.2.228). Less bluntly, he asks, ‘‘For where is she so fair whose
uneared [unplowed] womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?’’ (Sonnets 3),
and Lucio in Measure for Measure announces that ‘‘her plenteous womb /
Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry’’ (1.4.43--44).
A similar metaphor is implicit in our words ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘cultivate.’’ Latin
cultura originally meant ‘‘tilling’’ or ‘‘agriculture’’ and later ‘‘education’’ or
‘‘cultivation of the mind.’’ Cowper brings this dead metaphor to life: ‘‘Their
mind a wilderness through want of care, / The plough of wisdom never
entering there’’ (Hope 234--35).
A minor tradition links plowing with poetry or with writing. Pindar calls
poets ‘‘plowmen of the Muses’’ (Nem. 6.32), and a poet who won contests ‘‘gave
the Muses a field for their tilling’’ (gave them work to do) (Nem. 10.26). Latin
aro and exaro (‘‘plow up’’) were occasionally used to mean ‘‘write’’; so Ovid: ‘‘to
her brother she plows [exarat] written letters’’ (Ex Ponto 3.2.90); and Atta: ‘‘Let
us turn the plowshare on the wax and plow with the point of bone’’ (quoted
in Isidore, Etymologiae 6.9.2). Greek grapho, Latin scribo, English ‘‘write’’ all go
back to roots meaning ‘‘cut’’ or ‘‘scratch,’’ and the similarity to plowing must
158
Plow
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
have been noted as soon as literacy arrived. One form of Greek writing, where
the lines go left-to-right and right-to-left alternately, was called boustrophedon,
‘‘turning like an ox’’ (plowing). Latin versus, ‘‘turn,’’ meant a plowed furrow as
well as a line of verse. Spenser likens his narrative line to a furrow where,
late in The Faerie Queene, he remembers some unfinished labor: ‘‘Now turne
againe my teme, thou jolly swayne, / Backe to the furrow which I lately left. / I
lately left a furrow, one or twayne, / Unplough’d, the which my coulter hath
not cleft’’ (6.9.1). Blake elaborates a complex symbolism of plow, harrow, and
mill to express three types of artistic labor, and when he says ‘‘Follow with me
my Plow’’ he may be evoking his use of the engraving tool or burin (Milton
8.20).
The plow, and especially the plowshare, resembled a sword, and the two
tools began to stand for the two ways of life, peace and war. The most famous
instance of this contrast is the prophecy of Isaiah, ‘‘and they shall beat their
swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not
lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more’’ (Isa. 2.4,
also Mic. 4.3), but note the less famous reversal, ‘‘Beat your plowshares into
swords, and your pruning hooks into spears’’ (Joel 3.10). It is interesting that
the passage from Oedipus Tyrannus quoted above includes a sword, and so
does the full speech from Antony and Cleopatra: ‘‘Royal wench! / She made
great Caesar lay his sword to bed; / He ploughed her, and she cropped’’
(2.2.226--28).
In the Christian tradition the plowman became an emblem of virtue,
especially of grace or charity, or of laboring in one’s calling, especially the
calling of the priest or preacher. The source is Christ’s saying, ‘‘No man,
having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of
God’’ (Luke 9.62), and it was richly elaborated in the Middle Ages. Some
church allegorists identified the plowman with the preacher of the word, and
St. Gregory used the phrase ‘‘plowshare of the tongue’’ (vomer linguae) as the
means by which the heart or mind of the Christian is opened to receive the
word. (Christ’s Parable of the Sower lies behind this idea as well.) Langland’s
Piers Plowman makes extensive use of this tradition. After a spiritual crisis
Piers vows ‘‘Of preyers and of penaunce my plow shall be hereafter’’ (b 7.119),
and another character explains that priests should go about the world ‘‘To
tulien [till] the erthe with tonge, and teche men to lovye [love]’’ (c 11.199).
Chaucer describes his Plowman as ‘‘A trewe swynkere [laborer] and a good was
he, / Lyvynge in pees and parfit charitee’’ (CT, Gen. Pro. 531--2), though he does
not preach.
It is interesting, again, that the ‘‘sword of Christ’’ (‘‘I came not to send
peace, but a sword,’’ in Matthew 10.34), was also interpreted to mean the
Word or the Gospel and assimilated to the sword that comes out of the
mouth of Christ in the Book of Revelation (1.16, 19.15). So sword and
plowshare could both serve the idea of preaching the word of God.
The plow finally, has been an emblem of Cincinnatus, the legendary Roman
general who was called from his plow to become dictator during a dangerous
war; he defeated the enemy and immediately resigned his powers and
returned to his farm. When George Washington surrendered his sword to
Congress and returned to his farm at Mt. Vernon, he earned the title of the
new Cincinnatus.
159
Pole star
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Several metaphorical extensions of plowing have been common in literature
since Homer. In the Odyssey ships often ‘‘cut’’ across the water (e.g., 3.174--75);
more explicitly, Arion has ships ‘‘cutting furrows in Nereus’ plain’’ (quoted in
Aelian 12.45). Since flying with wings resembles rowing with oars, as in
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 52, and chariots leave tracks that resemble furrows,
flying can be described as cutting or cleaving the air, especially flying in a
chariot (Hymn to Demeter 383; Euripides, Phoenissae 1--3).
See Seed.
Pole star
160
see Star
Poplar
The white poplar is mentioned only in passing in the Iliad (e.g., 13.389), but
Homer’s word for it (acherois) suggested a connection with the underworld,
through which the River Acheron flows. So Servius, commenting on Virgil,
tells how Pluto carried off Leuce (from Greek leuke, meaning ‘‘white [poplar]’’)
to the underworld and when she died caused poplars to grow by the Acheron.
When Virgil says that the oarsmen in the racing boats in the funeral games
are crowned with poplar leaves (Aeneid 5.134) he relies on another tradition as
well: that the poplar is the plant of Hercules, patron of athletes. He makes
that explicit later in describing King Evander: ‘‘two-colored poplar leaves were
placed on his hair, / like those which shaded Hercules’’ (8.276--77). Theocritus’
phrase, ‘‘the poplar, Heracles’ sacred plant’’ (2.121), may have been the source
for Virgil, who also mentions it in the Eclogues (‘‘poplar dearest to Alcides’’
7.61) and Georgics (‘‘the shady tree of Hercules’ crown’’ 2.66). A commentator on
Theocritus says that Heracles made a crown for himself after bringing
Cerberus up from the underworld. Servius ties this tale to the abduction of
Leuce, and explains the two colors as the dark of the underworld and the
silvery white bleached by Hercules’ sweat.
The poplar is the tree described by Spenser as ‘‘the stately tree / That
dedicated is t’Olympick Jove, / And to his sonne Alcides, whenas hee / In
Nemus gayned goodly victory’’ (FQ 2.5.31) -- referring to a different labor, the
killing of the Nemean lion. A character named ‘‘Prays-desire’’ (love of honor)
holds a poplar branch (2.9.37, 9).
A famous and seemingly symbolic poplar is the one Tennyson’s Mariana
looks upon in her desolation: ‘‘All silver-green with gnarlèd bark: / For leagues
no other tree did mark / The level waste, the rounding gray.’’ When the moon
is low ‘‘The shadow of the poplar fell / Upon her bed, across her brow’’; ‘‘and
the sound / Which to the wooing wind aloof / The poplar made, did all
confound / Her sense’’ (‘‘Mariana’’ 42--44, 55--56, 74--77). The tree seems to stand
for Mariana herself, for the lover who has abandoned her, and for something
like the slow hand of a clock. A possible source for it is the poplar whom
Oenone addresses in Ovid, Heroides 5.23--24; her lover Paris has carved in its
bark a promise never to desert her.
Poppy
In several varieties and in several colors, the poppy is a common plant in the
Mediterranean and northern Europe, often found growing amid grainfields.
The Greeks and Romans raised it in gardens and ate its seeds, usually mixed
with honey; from some kinds of poppy they extracted opium. Where it
Poppy
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
appears in classical literature the poppy is usually the papaver somniferum, the
‘‘sleep-bearing’’ or garden poppy (Greek mekon), the source of the narcotic.
The poppy, or rather its capsule or head (Greek kodeia), was associated with
the goddess Demeter (Latin Ceres), probably because it often flowers at harvest
time. Theocritus ends his Seventh Idyll with an evocation of Demeter of the
Threshing Floor ‘‘with wheatsheaves and poppies in either hand.’’ Perhaps the
poppy head, filled with seeds, represents fertility; perhaps it stands for the
beginning of the growing season as the wheatsheaves stand for the end; or
perhaps it alludes to the grief of Demeter in her search for Persephone (Latin
Proserpina): the opiate poppy would assuage her sorrow. Ceres, according to
Ovid, gave a child poppies in warm milk to make him sleep (Fasti 4.547--48). In
the Cave of Sleep, where Lethe flows, poppies bloom (Met. 11.605--07). Virgil
calls it the Cereale papaver, ‘‘the poppy of Ceres,’’ in Georgics 1.212 and
soporiferum papaver, ‘‘soporific poppy,’’ in Aeneid 4.486; the poppy is ‘‘perfused
with Lethean sleep’’ in Georgics 1.78.
Spenser’s Garden of Proserpina has various herbs and fruits ‘‘fitt to adorne
the dead,’’ including the ‘‘Dead sleeping Poppy’’ (FQ 2.7.52). Shakespeare
mentions it only once: it is one of the ‘‘drowsy syrups’’ that induce sleep, like
mandragora (Othello 3.3.330); Jonson also links it to mandrake (and hemlock)
in Sejanus 3.596. Among English poets Keats seems most fascinated with the
poppy. His Endymion is put to sleep by a breeze blowing through poppies
(Endymion 1.555, 566) and has a ‘‘soft poppy dream’’ (4.786). Even where there is
no literal poppy he speaks of ‘‘the poppied warmth of sleep’’ (‘‘Eve of St. Agnes’’
237); Sleep is ‘‘Wreather of Poppy buds’’ and wears a ‘‘poppy coronet’’ (‘‘Sleep
and Poetry’’ 14, 348). In ‘‘To Autumn,’’ the goddess of Autumn is ‘‘Drows’d with
the fume of poppies’’ in the midst of reaping, much like Theocritus’ Demeter.
Tennyson, in ‘‘The Lotos-Eaters,’’ describes a scene where ‘‘poppies hang in
sleep’’ (Choric Song 11). See also Francis Thompson, ‘‘The Poppy.’’
With this tradition of sleep, peaceful death, and oblivion so firm, it is
surprising that today, at least in Britain and the Commonwealth, the poppy
symbolizes remembrance of the fallen soldiers of World War I. Crimson
poppies were plentiful on the battlefields of France and Belgium, as they grow
easily on disturbed soil. Blood-colored -- the French poet Jammes had called
the poppy ‘‘that drop of blood’’ (Géorgiques [1911] p. 54) -- they were assimilated
into the tradition in which purple flowers symbolize the death of a young
man or god. ‘‘Poppies, whose roots are in man’s veins, / Drop, and are ever
dropping,’’ as the war poet Isaac Rosenberg writes (‘‘Break of Day in the
Trenches’’). In late Victorian and Edwardian England, poppies had gained an
erotic (and homoerotic) significance in the writings of Wilde, Douglas, and
others: Wilde’s Dorian says, ‘‘I must sow poppies in my garden’’ and Lord
Henry replies, ‘‘Life has always poppies in her hands’’ (Picture of Dorian Gray
chap. 8); this connotation may have fed into the war poetry. John McCrae’s
immensely popular poem ‘‘In Flanders Fields’’ established the poppy’s new
significance: ‘‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row
on row / That mark our place.’’
But there are classical sources for the connection between the poppy and a
fallen soldier. In the Iliad, a warrior, hit in the chest, ‘‘droops his head to one
side, as a garden poppy bends beneath the weight of its fruit and the spring
161
Purple
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rains’’ (8.306) (see also 14.499). Drawing also from Catullus 11.22--24, Virgil
imitates this beautiful simile in the Aeneid: Euryalus dies, and ‘‘his neck /
Collapsing let his head fall on his shoulder -- / As a purple flower
(purpureus . . . flos) cut by a passing plow / Will droop and wither slowly, or a
poppy / Bow its head upon its tired stalk / When overborne by a passing rain’’
(9.434--37; after Fitzgerald).
See Mandrake, Purple flower.
Purple
162
It seems that the Greek word porphureos, from which our word ‘‘purple’’
derives, did not originally name a color or hue but a sheen or iridescence, a
mixture of light or dark on the surface, like the deep, rich brightness of a
cloth dyed with an extract from the shell of the murex or purpura (Greek
porphura), a snail found in the Mediterranean Sea. In Homer, porphureos can
modify not only ‘‘cloth’’ but also ‘‘sea,’’ ‘‘blood,’’ ‘‘cloud,’’ ‘‘rainbow,’’ and
‘‘serpent.’’ It also occurs three times as a formulaic epithet of ‘‘death.’’ The
glittering movement of the sea may be the primary sense, as the verb porphuro
means ‘‘heave’’ or ‘‘swell.’’ ‘‘And at the cutwater / A porphureon wave rose and
shouted loudly as the ship went onward’’ (Iliad 1.481--82). The term must often
be translated as ‘‘bright,’’ ‘‘sparkling,’’ ‘‘lustrous,’’ ‘‘shining,’’ or the like, rather
than ‘‘purple.’’
Latin purpureus often referred to the hue, but Latin poetry borrowed from
Homer and other Greek writers its application to certain things that are not
purple. Horace writes of ‘‘purple swans’’ whose color is surely white (Odes
4.1.10); Ben Jonson makes them ‘‘bright swans’’ in his translation. Virgil has
Venus breathe the ‘‘purple light of youth’’ onto her son Aeneas (1.590); Dryden
blurs the sense with his translation, ‘‘breath’d a youthful vigor on his face,’’
but modern translators do better with ‘‘the glow of a young man’’
(Mandelbaum) or ‘‘bloom of youth’’ (Fitzgerald). See also Aeneid 6.641.
Occasionally in Ovid love (Amor) is purpureus (e.g., Amores 2.1.38), and it may be
at Ovid’s hint that Milton gives Love ‘‘purple wings’’ (PL 4.764) and Gray writes
‘‘The bloom of young desire and purple light of love’’ (‘‘Progress of Poesy’’ 41).
Another Greek word, phoinikeos (from Phoinikia, Phoenicia, where the dye
originates), was usually applied more narrowly to purple (or dark red) colors.
The same is true of the Latin derivative puniceus. In verse each is sometimes
used synonymously with porphureos/purpureus, as in successive lines (28--29) of
Bion’s ‘‘Lament for Adonis,’’ describing blood.
Homer’s purple sea continues in Catullus’ waves ‘‘glittering with purple
light’’ (64.275) and much more recently in Shelley’s ‘‘Ocean’s purple waves’’ (PU
1.109) and Yeats’s ‘‘glimmering purple sea’’ (Oisin 384).
Another striking usage is Virgil’s ‘‘purple spring’’ (ver purpureum) in Eclogues
9.40; it may mean ‘‘brilliant’’ but perhaps also evokes the color of spring
flowers. Here Dryden keeps ‘‘purple’’ in his translation, while Pope in ‘‘Spring’’
28 varies it to ‘‘purple year’’ (i.e., the phase of the year). The influential
fourth-century Latin poem Vigil of Venus has Venus painting the ‘‘purpling
year’’ (purpurantem . . . annum) with flowery gems (13). In his once-famous
opening of ‘‘Ode on the Spring,’’ Gray follows the Vigil and Pope: ‘‘Lo! where
the rosy-bosomed Hours, / Fair Venus’ train, appear, / Disclose the
long-expecting flowers, / And wake the purple year!’’ When Milton imitates the
somewhat rare Latin usage of ‘‘purple’’ as a verb in Lycidas 141 -- ‘‘purple all
Purple
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
the ground with vernal flowers’’ -- he is not claiming that all spring flowers in
England are purple in color. Indeed they may be white, as in Thomson’s
startling phrase, ‘‘one white-empurpled Shower / Of mingled Blossoms’’
(‘‘Spring’’ 110--11).
Latin poetry occasionally uses purpureus of the sun or its light, perhaps with
the sense ‘‘radiant’’ but perhaps to suggest the color of dawn or sunset.
Shakespeare opens Venus and Adonis with ‘‘the sun with purple-colour’d face.’’
Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘‘fields invested with purpureal gleams’’ (‘‘Laodamia’’
106), and Yeats’s ‘‘noon a purple glow’’ (‘‘Lake Isle of Innisfree’’) both have a
classical aura -- or a visionary one.
In The Eve of St. Agnes Keats presents his lover-hero Porphyro as a bringer of
bright color to the pale cold world of Madeline; in an echo of the Homeric
context of both blood and heaving seas, Porphyro’s thought of stealing into
her bedroom ‘‘in his pained heart / Made purple riot’’ (137--38).
A colorful or florid passage in an otherwise decorous and dignified poem is
called a ‘‘purple patch’’ (purpureus pannus), from Horace’s Art of Poetry 15.
Because of both the striking effect and great cost of the murex dye, often
called ‘‘Tyrian purple’’ (from the city of Tyre in Phoenicia), its use was
restricted largely to kings, emperors, and aristocrats (hence ‘‘royal purple’’). In
one of the most spectacular scenes of Greek drama, Clytemnestra insists that
Agamemnon walk upon a path of garments dyed in ‘‘the juice of porphura,
worth its weight in silver,’’ as he enters his palace (Aeschylus, Agamemnon
959--60). Roman consuls wore purple togas, and senators and knights had a
purple strip on their tunics. Dryden’s Antony gained ‘‘purple greatness’’ (All for
Love 1.1.298). A purple pall was used to cover the coffin of a person of high
rank.
In a mocking use of the royal purple, the soldiers of Pilate took Jesus and
‘‘clothed him with purple, and platted a crown of thorns, and put it about his
head, / And began to salute him, Hail, King of the Jews!’’ (Mark 15.17--18).
Blood and gore are typically purple in English poetry as they are in classical
poetry. Shakespeare has ‘‘purple blood’’ (3H6 2.5.99), ‘‘the purple testament of
bleeding war’’ (R2 3.3.94), ‘‘purple fountains issuing from your veins’’ (RJ
1.1.85), and so on. Blood is purple in Spenser’s Faerie Queene half a dozen times,
and so is gore; we also find ‘‘a purple lake / Of bloudy gore’’ (6.1.37). Among
many other examples, see ‘‘purple gore’’ (Marvell, Britannia 40), and ‘‘purple
Vengeance bath’d in Gore’’ (Pope, Windsor-Forest 417). Milton connects the two
most common meanings in Eikonoklastes: ‘‘covering the ignominious and
horrid purple robe of innocent blood that sat so close about him with the
glorious purple of royalty and supreme rule’’ (sec. 28).
Whether from the sign of rank or the color of blood, Horace refers to
‘‘purple tyrants’’ (Odes 1.35.12); Gray repeats it in ‘‘Ode on Adversity’’ 7, Blake in
‘‘The Grey Monk’’ 34; and in fact ‘‘purple’’ is often associated with tyrants in
eighteenth-century English poetry; e.g., ‘‘the purple tyranny of Rome’’
(Thomson, Summer 758), ‘‘the blood-purpled robes of royalty’’ (Southey, Wat
Tyler 2.1).
A Catholic priest is ‘‘raised to the purple’’ when he becomes a cardinal.
Purple is also the ecclesiastical color of Advent and Lent, and of the spirit of
penitence and mourning. Dante uses ‘‘purple’’ (porpora) only once in The Divine
Comedy, as the color of the robes of the four personified moral virtues, but
163
Purple flower
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scholars disagree over its significance: it might mean that these virtues are as
nothing without love, whose color is red (rossa) a few lines earlier; or that, as
the four ‘‘cardinal’’ virtues, they are not only pivotal but raised to the purple
like the clerical office; or that, as the four classical virtues, they wear the
color of empire (Purgatorio 29.131).
See Blood, Dawn.
Purple flower
Pyramid
164
In one of the earliest pastoral elegies, the ‘‘Lament for Adonis,’’ Bion imagines
flowers growing red with grief: purple blood from Adonis’ fatal wound turns
into a rose, tears from Aphrodite turn into an anemone; then his corpse lies
wreathed in flowers. Moschus begins his ‘‘Lament for Bion’’ by calling on
roses, anemones, and hyacinths to join him in mourning. Thus began the
literary existence of purple (or red) flowers as signs of mourning and as
regular features of the pastoral elegy.
Ovid tells the story of two of these flowers in the Metamorphoses. The
anemone grows from the blood of Adonis (10.731--39), while the hyacinth
grows from the blood of the youth Hyacinthus, beloved of Apollo, who then
inscribes on its petals the word ‘‘ai,’’ the cry of mourning (10.214--16; also in
Moschus 6). In his version of the former story, Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare is
vague as to Adonis’ flower, saying only that ‘‘A purple flower sprung up,
checker’d with white’’ (1168). Milton in his pastoral elegy Lycidas describes the
hyacinth as ‘‘that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe’’ (106); its color decorates
the robe of a mourner, but the flowers strewn on the hearse of Lycidas,
though the valley is asked to ‘‘purple’’ the ground with them (141), come in
many colors. Ovid also tells how the blood of Pyramus turns the berries of the
mulberry tree purple (4.121--27), and how the violet springs from the blood of
Attis (Fasti 4.283ff., 5.226).
Perhaps decisive for this tradition is the Aeneid, where purple flowers
(purpureos flores), not further identified, are cast on tombs on two occasions
(5.79, 6.884).
In his pastoral elegy Astrophel, Spenser tells how the two lovers are
transformed ‘‘Into one flowre that is both red and blew’’ (184). The dead
Adonais, in Shelley’s elegy of that name, lies with his head ‘‘bound with
pansies overblown, / And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue’’ (289--90).
Walt Whitman’s elegy on the death of Lincoln begins ‘‘When lilacs last in the
dooryard bloomed.’’ John McCrae’s poem ‘‘In Flanders Field’’ established the
poppy as the symbol of memory for the dead of World War I.
See Pansy, Poppy, Violet.
The great pyramids of Egypt, still imposing after five thousand years, have
nonetheless entered literature as bywords for impermanence or for the futile
vainglory of kings. Already to the Romans Egypt’s day seemed to have passed.
Horace opens his famous ode ‘‘Exegi monumentum’’ with what sounds like a
proverbial expression: ‘‘I have achieved a monument more lasting / than
bronze, and loftier than the pyramids of kings, / which neither gnawing rain
nor blustering wind / may destroy’’ (3.30.1--4, trans. Shepherd). His poetry will
keep him famous as long as Rome survives (longer, as it has turned out).
Propertius tells his girl she is lucky to be named in his poems, for while the
pyramids and other great monuments will be destroyed by wind, rain, and
Rain
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
time, the name achieved by wit shall be immortal (3.2.18ff.). Milton hearkens
to both these poets in his ‘‘On Shakespeare,’’ which begins, ‘‘What needs my
Shakespeare for his honored bones / The labor of an age in piled stones, / Or
that his hallowed relics should be hid / Under a star-ypointing pyramid?’’ He
lives on instead in our ‘‘wonder and astonishment.’’ Shelley often relished the
thought that the monuments tyrants built to guarantee their immortality will
crumble into dust: ‘‘Beside the eternal Nile, / The Pyramids have risen. / Nile
shall pursue his changeless way: / Those pyramids shall fall’’ (Queen Mab
2.126--29).
The origin of the word ‘‘pyramid’’ is unknown, but to the Greeks it
suggested pyr (‘‘fire’’). Plato thought that since the pyramid, or tetrahedron,
was the most mobile, the smallest, and the sharpest of the perfect (Platonic)
solids, it was ‘‘the element and seed of fire’’ (Timaeus 56b). It was also thought
to resemble a flame. Milton’s Satan ‘‘Springs upward like a pyramid of fire’’ (PL
2.1013). The Pyramid of Cestius in Rome, in Shelley’s words, ‘‘doth stand / Like
flame transformed to marble’’ (‘‘Adonais’’ 446--47).
R
Rain
Of the many symbolic aspects of rain we shall describe two, both obvious
developments of rain’s real effects: rain as suffering or bad luck and rain as
fertilizing force from above.
Rain often stands as a synecdoche for all bad weather and thus a symbol of
life’s unhappy moments. We save for a ‘‘rainy day’’; into every life some rain
must fall. The Lord’s mysterious ways include bringing sun and rain on the
just and unjust alike (Matt. 5.45). Feste’s song about the unpleasant events of
each phase of life (at the end of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night) has the refrain,
‘‘For the rain it raineth every day.’’ Lear on the heath finds wind and rain
responding to his inner fury and pain.
In the oldest Greek texts the subject of the verb ‘‘rains’’ is often ‘‘Zeus’’ (e.g.,
Homer, Iliad 12.25; Hesiod, Works and Days 488); later the subject is omitted, as
it always is in Latin pluit; in English and other modern languages a
place-holding ‘‘it’’ governs ‘‘rains’’ (cf. French il pleut). Zeus is
‘‘high-thundering,’’ ‘‘cloud-gathering,’’ ‘‘rejoicing in the thunderbolt,’’ while a
common epithet of Jupiter is Pluvius. In Latin poetry it is sometimes Sky that
sends rain, and it is the seed that fertilizes mother Earth. ‘‘Father Sky / pours
it down into the lap of Mother Earth,’’ says Lucretius (1.250--51); ‘‘And so we all
arise from sky-born seed. / There is one father for all. When the fostering
earth, / Our mother, takes within her his moist droplets, / Grown big, she
bears the glossy corn’’ (2.991--94 trans. Esolen). According to Virgil, ‘‘in spring,
the country swells / Clamouring for the fertilizing seeds. / Then the almighty
father Heaven descends / Into the lap of his rejoicing bride / With fecund
showers’’ (Georgics 2.324--26 trans. Wilkinson). Claudian uses similar sexual
imagery for dew, not always distinguished from rain: ‘‘[Zephyrus] shook his
wings wet with fresh nectar and played the bridegroom’s part to the soil with
fertile dew’’ (Rape of Proserpine 2.88--89, trans. Gruzelier). In Spenser’s variant,
165
Rainbow
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‘‘angry Jove an hideous storme of raine / Did poure into his Lemans [Lover’s]
lap’’ (FQ 1.1.6).
In Christian terms, of course, it is God who sends what Shakespeare’s Portia
calls ‘‘the gentle rain from heaven,’’ which she invokes as a simile for mercy
(MV 4.1.184). Rain is the cure for spiritual dryness or thirst, for the waste land
of ‘‘accidie’’ (torpor) or despair. So Eliot’s The Waste Land begins with a flight
from the cruel rain of spring, the surprising rain of summer, and ends with
the ‘‘dry sterile thunder without rain’’ that announces what the soul must
learn to do.
See Cloud, Dew, Lightning, Rainbow, Wind.
Rainbow
166
The seminal text for the symbolism of the rainbow is Genesis 9.8--17, where
God makes a covenant with Noah: there shall be no more floods, and ‘‘I do set
my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me
and the earth’’ (13). It is a ‘‘natural symbol’’ for a bond between earth and
heaven, as it is a product of the sun (heaven) and rain (falling from heaven to
earth), while its arc reaches from earth to heaven and back to earth. Milton,
who calls it the ‘‘humid bow’’ and ‘‘showery arch’’ (PL 4.151, 6.759), retells the
story: Noah ‘‘over his head beholds / A dewy cloud, and in the cloud a bow /
Conspicuous with three listed [banded] colours gay, / Betokening peace from
God, and Covenant new’’ (11.864--67).
In classical literature the rainbow is also a divine token, though not so
benign. Marked on clouds by Zeus, rainbows are portents to mortals; Zeus
sends a rainbow as a sign of war or storm (Iliad 11.27--28, 17.548--49). It is
personified as Iris, the messenger of the gods, but her rainbow-like qualities
are not brought out in Homer or Hesiod. In Virgil’s Aeneid, where she often
does Juno’s bidding, she descends ‘‘on the path of a thousand-colored arc’’ and
ascends by ‘‘cutting an arc under the clouds’’ (5.606, 9.15). Ovid’s Iris, ‘‘clad in
various colors,’’ also traces a rainbow path on her missions (Met. 1.270, 11.585).
The rainbow was thought to drink up moisture, which then falls as rain
(Plautus, Curculio 131a; Virgil, Georgics 1.380; Ovid, Met. 1.271).
For the most part Renaissance literature repeats classical and biblical usage,
but Shakespeare may be evoking a recent sense of ‘‘iris’’ as the circular colored
membrane of the eye when the Countess asks Helena why she weeps: ‘‘What’s
the matter, / That this distemperèd messenger of wet, / The many colored Iris,
rounds thine eye?’’ (AWEW 1.3.150--52).
For the Romantics rainbows retain their numinous character but they are
symbols of a covenant less with God than with nature. Wordsworth’s heart
leaps up at the sight of one in a surge of ‘‘natural piety’’ (‘‘My heart leaps up’’).
Goethe’s Faust turns his back on the sun at the opening of Part II, as if to say
he will cease trying to grasp Truth or the Absolute directly, and instead turns
to the rainbow, the Wechseldauer (‘‘change-permanence’’) of transient
waterdrops in eternal pattern, which symbolizes human life, lived in colored
reflections of the light (4715--27).
Newton’s theory of optics caused a stir among poets mainly for its explanation of the spectrum, and hence the rainbow. Thomson uses such optical
terms as ‘‘refracted’’ and ‘‘prism’’ to describe ‘‘the grand etherial bow,’’ which
looks one way to the ‘‘sage-instructed eye’’ (instructed by ‘‘awful Newton’’) and
Raven
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another to the ‘‘swain’’ filled with wonder and amazement as he ‘‘runs / To
catch the falling glory’’ (Spring 203--17). At a famous dinner with Wordsworth,
Lamb, Haydon, and others Keats lamented that Newton had ‘‘destroyed all the
poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colours’’ (Haydon’s
account). Drawing on the metaphor of weaving, which since Milton at least
was a commonplace in rainbow descriptions (see ‘‘Iris’ Woof,’’ Comus 83), Keats
in Lamia states, ‘‘There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: / We know her
woof, her texture; she is given / In the dull catalogue of common things’’
(2.231--33). The rainbow thus became the main exhibit in the contest of
science and poetry.
Raven
The raven and the crow are not consistently distinguished in biblical or
classical literature, and in English literature they are both sometimes grouped
among such similar birds as the chough, daw (or jackdaw), and rook. The
primary associations of these black carrion birds, not surprisingly, are
negative, but there are some interesting favorable associations.
The first raven in the Bible (Hebrew ‘oreb, which can refer to the crow as
well) is the first of four birds Noah sent forth to learn if land had appeared;
the raven ‘‘went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the
earth’’ (Gen. 8.7). As a carrion-eater the raven presumably found something
edible floating on the flood, so it did not return to the ark: a good sign.
Elsewhere in the Old Testament ravens are scavengers, and hence ‘‘unclean’’
(Lev. 11.15), but once, rather mysteriously, they bring bread and meat to Elijah
in the desert (1 Kgs 17.6). (Milton retells this story in Paradise Regained
2.266--69). One of the many rhetorical questions the Lord puts to the humbled
Job is ‘‘Who provideth for the raven his food?’’ (Job 38.41), a question answered
at Psalm 147.9 -- ‘‘He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens
which cry’’ -- and elaborated by Luke (12.24). God will provide. Shakespeare’s
Adam invokes these texts when he offers his life’s savings to Orlando in As You
Like It (2.3.43).
In the Song of Songs the lover’s locks are ‘‘black as a raven’’ (5.11), a phrase
that must be commonplace wherever ravens are found. It is very often hair
that provokes comparison with them, as in Chaucer’s description of the hair
of King Lygurge: ‘‘As any ravenes fethere it shoon for blak’’ (Knight’s Tale 2144).
‘‘Raven’’ has become an adjective meaning ‘‘black,’’ with little or no additional
connotation. Alluding perhaps to the Song of Songs Byron praises ‘‘the
nameless grace / Which waves in every raven tress’’ of a beautiful woman
(‘‘She Walks in Beauty’’). In Greek and Latin ‘‘white raven’’ was proverbial for
something extremely rare or unheard-of, like ‘‘black swan.’’
The raven was occasionally said to be the companion or messenger of
Apollo; it is ‘‘Phoebus’ bird’’ in Ovid, Met. 2.545 (see 5.329), and ‘‘the dark
attendant of Apollo’s tripod’’ in Statius, Thebaid 3.506.
It is mainly as an eater of carrion, including human carrion, that the raven
is known in classical literature. The raven (Greek korax) does not appear in
Homer, though it is a major theme in the Iliad that corpses may be devoured
by birds. Theognis complains that everything has ‘‘gone to the ravens’’ (833),
perhaps better translated as ‘‘to the crows,’’ the equivalent of ‘‘to the dogs’’ in
English. Several characters in plays by Aristophanes have a habit of saying es
167
Raven
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korakas! -- ‘‘to the ravens!’’ or ‘‘Go and be hanged!’’ (Wasps 852, 982; Birds 27;
etc.). In a memorable simile the chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon depicts
Clytemnestra after she murders Agamemnon: ‘‘standing on his body like a
loathsome raven she hoarsely sings her hymn of triumph’’ (1472--74).
The raven (and the crow) prosper when men slaughter one another, and so
they are associated with battlefields and gallows and more generally with
imminent death. Horace sardonically assures a servant, non pasces in cruce
corvos, ‘‘You won’t hang on a cross to feed ravens’’ (Epistles 1.16.48), while
Petronius records an insult: ‘‘a gallow’s tidbit, ravens’ food’’ (58).
The raven is one of the three beasts of battle (the others being the wolf and
the eagle/vulture) that occur as a formula or commonplace a dozen times in
Old English poetry. In Brunanburh, ‘‘The host of corpses behind them they
left / to the black raven (sweartan hraefn), the beak-faced one, / the dark-clothed
one, and to the dun eagle, / the white-tailed erne, hungry war-bird, / and to
the greedy wolf, grey beast of the woods, / to devour and relish’’ (60--65, trans.
Malone). On the eve of the great battle in Elene, the wolf howls a war-song and
the eagle shrieks (27--31); as the battle looms ‘‘over their heads the raven
cried, dark, thirsty for slaughter’’ (52); and then as the battle begins, raven,
eagle, and wolf rejoice. There is an interesting variation near the end of
Beowulf, where ‘‘the dark raven, / eager for the dying, will have much to say, /
to tell the eagle how it thrived at the feast, / while with the wolf he spoiled
the corpses’’ (3024--27).
The raven, like the wolf, belonged to Odin, the Norse war god, sometimes
called Hrafnagud, ‘‘Ravengod.’’ An epithet of ‘‘raven’’ in the Old English Exodus
(164) is wealceasig, ‘‘chooser of the slain’’ or ‘‘carrion-picker,’’ cognate with
Valkyrie (or Walkyrie), the terrible Norse goddesses of battle who work out the
fate of warriors. An early Old Norse poem, Hrafnsmal, is a dialogue between
one of the Valkyrie and a raven. Celtic traditions are similar. In the Irish Tain
Bo Cuailnge, the war goddess Badb Catha is called ‘‘Raven of Battle.’’ The
medieval ballad ‘‘The Twa Corbies’’ begins with a plan by the ravens to
breakfast off a slain knight. Joel Barlow gives sarcastic ‘‘Advice to a Raven in
Russia’’ who has been following Napoleon in 1812: the corpses will be too
frozen to eat -- ‘‘With beak and claw you cannot pluck an eye’’ -- so fly south,
fly anywhere, for there are plenty of men slain in Napoleon’s ubiquitous
battles.
It was proverbial that ravens peck out the eyes of the slain: see Proverbs
30.17 and Aristophanes’ Birds 582. Catullus wishes a miserable end to an
enemy: ‘‘your eyes torn out and swallowed by the raven’s black throat’’ (108.5).
Villon’s ‘‘Ballade of the Hanged’’ announces that ‘‘Magpies and ravens
[corbeaulx] have caved our eyes / And plucked out our beards and eyebrows’’
(23--24). Milton denounces bishops as ‘‘ravens . . . that would peck out the eyes
of all knowing Christians’’ (Animadversions sec. 13).
In Latin literature the raven (corvus) or crow (cornix) was thought to foretell a
rainstorm (Virgil, Georgics 1.382; Horace, Odes 3.27.10--11) and in both Greek and
Roman culture these birds, among many others, were used in augury or
bird-prophecy generally. Combined with its habit of eating corpses, this
association led to the widespread view that the raven (in particular) is a bird
of ill omen, usually foretelling death. The owls’ shriek and ‘‘revenes qualm
[croak]’’ both foretell evil in Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida 5.382. The crow has a
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Red
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‘‘vois of care’’ in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls 363. ‘‘The ominous raven with a
dismal cheer, / Through his hoarse beak of following horror tells’’ (Drayton,
Barons’ Wars 5.42). Marlowe’s Barabas opens the second act of The Jew of Malta
with a fine simile: ‘‘Thus like the sad presaging raven that tolls / The sick
man’s passport in her hollow beak, / And in the shadow of the silent night /
Doth shake contagion from her sable wings.’’ Lady Macbeth says, ‘‘The raven
himself is hoarse, / That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan / Under my
battlements’’ (Macbeth 1.5.38--40). And Othello cries, ‘‘O, it comes o’er my
memory, / As doth the raven o’er the infected house, / Boding to all’’ (Othello
4.1.20--22). The most famous raven of the foreboding sort is Edgar Allen Poe’s.
Aristophanes records the belief that the raven or crow lives five human
generations (Birds 609), while Ovid gives the crow (cornix) a life-span of nine
(Met. 7.274). The longevity of the bird was so well established that Martial
could write of an old woman, ‘‘Plutia, having outlived all crows . . . ’’ (10.67.5).
Shakespeare calls the crow ‘‘treble-dated’’ (‘‘Phoenix and Turtle’’ 17); Tennyson
calls it ‘‘many-winter’d’’ (‘‘Locksley Hall’’ 68).
The two ravens of Odin were named Huginn and Muninn, Thought and
Memory, faculties of the mind that quickly fly over space and time. This Norse
tradition may have combined with the classical notions of the birds’ longevity
and prophetic powers, and perhaps with Noah’s sending of the raven as scout,
to produce the idea that ravens know everything. In his catalog of birds,
Chaucer lists ‘‘the raven wys [wise]’’ (PF 363). This idea, seconded by the Elijah
story, may have led to the tradition of good and helpful ravens, as in these
lines by Shakespeare: ‘‘Some say that ravens foster forlorn children / The
whilst their own birds famish in their nests’’ (Titus 2.3.154--55).
Red
Red in literature is the color of fire, gold, and roses; it is the color of faces
when they show embarrassment, anger, or the flush of health or passion. It is
also the color of blood, of course, but less often than one might think, purple
being its traditional literary color.
In Renaissance poetry red and white are often paired as the colors of beauty
or love. Spring, according to Petrarch, is candida et vermiglia, ‘‘white and
vermilion’’ (Rime 310). Shakespeare’s Venus tells Adonis he is ‘‘More white and
red than doves or roses are’’ (10); when Adonis alternately blushes for shame
and turns pale with anger, she is pleased with both his red and white (76--77).
Viola says, ‘‘‘Tis beauty truly blent, whose red and white / Nature’s own sweet
and cunning hand laid on’’ (12N 1.5.239--40). Red and pale make another
contrast frequent in Shakespeare; it means cheerful and sad. ‘‘Looked he red
or pale,’’ asks Adriana, ‘‘or sad or merrily?’’ (CE 4.2.4); Hamlet asks Horatio the
same question about the ghost (1.2.232); Autolycus jokes, ‘‘the red blood reigns
in the winter’s pale’’ (WT 4.3.4). In Milton even angels blush red with love,
‘‘Celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue’’ (PL 8.619).
Red is sometimes the color of the devil, in a tradition that goes back to
Esau, who was ‘‘red, all over like a hairy garment’’ (Gen. 25.25). Mann invokes
this tradition with his eerie red-haired figures in Death in Venice and Doctor
Faustus.
The red cross of St. George is the old emblem of England; Spenser adopts it
for his Red Cross Knight in Faerie Queene book 1. The red planet is Mars; it
indeed looks pink, and it stands for the god of bloody war: ‘‘Ye shal be deed
169
Reed
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[dead],’’ a character in Chaucer vows, ‘‘by myghty Mars the rede!’’ (Knight’s Tale
1747).
See Purple, Rose, Scarlet.
Reed
Right
170
see Pipe
see Left and right
Ring
The ring is a sign of a pledge. In Terence’s Eunuch the phrase ‘‘made pledges’’ is
literally ‘‘gave rings’’ (541). In Beowulf and other Germanic epics rings are the
most prominent bonds between lord and vassal: Hygelac dispenses rings
(1970), Beowulf is called ‘‘ring prince’’ (2345), castles have a ‘‘ring hall’’ (2010,
2840), and so on. In modern literature the ring is more often a pledge
between a man and woman, either of betrothal or marriage. Shakespeare
makes good use of improper pledging and parting with rings in several of his
comedies, such as All’s Well that Ends Well, where Diana extracts a ring from
Bertram, who intends to break his vows to Helena, who passes her ring to
Diana, etc. In Merchant of Venice rings circulate like ideal money (real money
being the major source of conflict in the play): given away impulsively they
end up on the right fingers and bind their wearers more tightly together.
There are many magic rings in literature. To name a few: the ring that
makes Gyges invisible (Plato, Republic 359--60); The Ring of the Nibelung (the title
of Wagner’s opera cycle), which gives absolute power to its owner; the ring of
Canace in Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale, which lets her understand birds; the ring of
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, which gives power but also corrupts.
River
As rivers mark territorial boundaries, crossing them is often symbolically
important. The literal crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land by the
Israelites has served as the vehicle for many Christian and Jewish spiritual
concepts; Christian meanings are seconded by the baptism of Christ in the
Jordan by John the Baptist. In classical myths the shades of the dead had to
cross the river Acheron into Hades, ferried by Charon. When Dante drinks of
Lethe and Eunoe at the top of the mount of Purgatory he is ready to ascend
into heaven.
To ‘‘cross the Rubicon’’ has been proverbial since the seventeenth century
for an irrevocable step; the Rubicon marked the border between Italy and
Cisalpine Gaul, and when Julius Caesar crossed it with his army in 49 bc he
became an invader (see Lucan 1.183ff.). It is equivalent to ‘‘the die is cast,’’
which Caesar said as he crossed the stream (Suetonius, Julius 32). When young
Jane Eyre is punished by the hypocritical Mr. Brocklehurst, she began ‘‘to feel
that the Rubicon was passed’’ (C. Brontë, Jane Eyre, chap. 7).
Traveling up or down rivers might also mark changes in symbolic states.
Drifting down the Mississippi on a raft into slave territory, Huckleberry Finn
and Jim seem to give themselves to fate. In general, as George Eliot observes,
‘‘So our lives glide on: the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea
begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore’’ (Felix Holt chap. 27). As
Conrad’s Marlow steams up the Congo in search of Kurtz, he goes deeper into
something primitive and horrible, though whether it is Africa itself or the
character of the Europeans is left ambiguous (Heart of Darkness).
River
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In classical literature a country, region, or city was often named after its
rivers. Dionysus announces at the beginning of Euripides’ Bacchae, ‘‘I have
come to Dirce’s stream and Ismenus’ water,’’ that is, to Thebes, known as the
‘‘two-river city.’’ Dante reports that ‘‘I was born and grew up / Above the lovely
river Arno in the great city [i.e., Florence]’’ (Inferno 23.94--95). A poet might
then be identified as ‘‘the poet of River X,’’ as we occasionally call Shakespeare
the Bard of Avon. This habit combined with the symbol of the swan, the
singing river-bird, to produce Horace’s phrase for the Theban Pindar, ‘‘the
swan of Dirce’’ (4.2.25--27), imitated in ‘‘Swan of Avon,’’ and the like. (See
Swan.) A similar formula identifies inhabitants of a country by naming the
river that they drink. Homer reports a group of Trojan allies as those who
‘‘drink the black water of Aisepos’’ (Iliad 2.825). Horace refers to those who
‘‘drink the Don’’ (the Scythians) and those who ‘‘drink the deep Danube’’ (the
Dacians) (3.10.1, 4.15.21).
In the 1840s hundreds of poems and songs about the Rhine were published
in Germany as part of a surge in nationalist sentiment. ‘‘Father Rhine,’’
suffused with memories of the Nibelungen and the Lorelei, was taken as the
source and essence of the German spirit.
The river has been pressed into many metaphorical uses. A poet in the Greek
Anthology praises Stesichorus for channeling ‘‘the Homeric stream’’ into his
own verses (9.184). In one of his odes Horace praises another Greek poet for
his eloquence: ‘‘As a river swollen by the rains above its usual / banks rushes
down from the mountain, / so does Pindar surge and his deep / voice rushes
on’’ (4.2.5--8; trans. Shepherd). Cicero and Quintilian in their treatises on
rhetoric stress the importance of ‘‘fluency,’’ the flumen orationis or flumen
verborum, ‘‘river of speech’’ or ‘‘stream of words.’’ When Dante meets Virgil in
the opening of the Inferno, he asks, ‘‘Are you that Virgil, then, and that
fountain / Which pours out so broad a river (fiume) of speech?’’ (1.79--80). After
describing the river Thames, Denham addresses it: ‘‘O could I flow like thee,
and make thy stream / My great example, as it is my theme! / Though deep,
yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, / Strong without rage, without
ore-flowing full’’ (‘‘Cooper’s Hill’’ 189--92). Pope, in his imitation of Horace,
Epistle 2.2, writes, ‘‘Pour the full Tide of Eloquence along’’ (171). Thomson
distinguishes two sorts of eloquence among many: ‘‘In thy full language,
speaking mighty things, / Like a clear torrent close, or else diffused / A broad
majestic stream, and rolling on / Through all the winding harmony of sound’’
(Liberty 2.257--60). Poetic genius is compared to the Nile by Lebrun-Pindare: it
rises in the rocks ‘‘without glory or name,’’ sometimes ‘‘buries itself amid
unknown gulfs,’’ and then suddenly comes into the light and is worshipped by
all Egypt (‘‘Ode on Enthusiasm’’ 93--100). Shelley refers to ‘‘Poesy’s unfailing
River, / Which through Albion winds forever’’ (‘‘Euganean Hills’’ 184--85).
Mangan begins a poem by addressing it: ‘‘Roll forth, my song, like the rushing
river / That sweeps along to the mighty sea’’ (‘‘The Nameless One’’).
A tributary of this tradition traces the river of poetry back to Mount
Helicon, sacred to the Muses, on the slopes of which were Hesiod’s village of
Ascra and two springs, Aganippe, which produced the stream Olmeius, and
Hippocrene, which gave rise to the Permessus; the water of either of these
would inspire the poet who drank. Petrarch complains that ‘‘he is pointed to
as a strange thing / who wishes to make a river flow from Helicon’’ (Rime 7).
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River
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‘‘From Helicon’s harmonious springs,’’ Gray writes, ‘‘A thousand rills their
mazy progress take’’; they grow into a ‘‘rich stream of music’’ (‘‘Progress of
Poetry’’ 3--4, 7).
The inverse of the river of speech is the speech of the river. In English
‘‘babbling brook’’ is a cliché, and in literature every variety of speech has been
heard in rivers: they babble, brawl, murmur, prattle, rave, shout, sing, and so
on. Not surprisingly poets have found rivers companions, counterparts,
exemplars, and teachers. Near the opening of The Prelude, for instance,
Wordsworth remembers the river Derwent that flowed past his boyhood
home: ‘‘one, the fairest of all rivers, loved / To blend his murmurs with my
nurse’s song, / And . . . / . . . sent a voice / That flowed along my dreams’’ (1805
version 1.272--76).
If speech or poetry flows like a river, so does the mind. We commonly speak
of the ‘‘stream of consciousness’’ and the Freudian theory of the unconscious
is filled with hydraulic metaphors. Dante speaks of ‘‘the stream of mind’’ (or
‘‘memory’’: de la mente il fiume, Purgatorio 13.90). Wordsworth, finding the
sources of his mind unsearchable, asks who could say ‘‘This portion of the
river of my mind / Comes from yon fountain’’? (1805 Prelude 2.214--15). Shelley
speaks several times of ‘‘the stream of thought’’ (e.g., Alastor 644), and his
poem ‘‘Mont Blanc’’ begins with a complex simile likening the Ravine of Arve
before him with the ‘‘everlasting universe of things’’ that ‘‘Flows through the
mind,’’ while ‘‘from secret springs / The source of human thought its tribute
brings / Of waters’’ (punning on ‘‘tributary’’) (1--6).
It is common to speak of the phases of a river from its source to its mouth
as ages in a human life. So Thomson describes the Nile: rising from two
springs he ‘‘rolls his infant stream,’’ then ‘‘he sports away / His playful youth
amid the fragrant isles’’; ‘‘Ambitious thence the manly river breaks’’ and
‘‘Winds in progressive majesty along’’ (Summer 806--15). The metaphor is
implicit in the description of ‘‘Alph the sacred river’’ in Coleridge’s ‘‘Kubla
Khan,’’ which rises from a fountain that seems to be in labor, meanders for a
while, and then sinks into the ‘‘lifeless ocean.’’ In The Excursion Wordsworth
offers an elaborate simile: ‘‘The tenour / Which my life holds, he readily may
conceive / Whoe’er hath stood to watch a mountain brook / In some still
passage of its course . . . / . . . Such a stream / Is human Life’’ (3.967--87). ‘‘O
stream!’’ the Poet in Shelley’s Alastor asks, ‘‘Whose source is inaccessibly
profound, / Whither do thy mysterious waters tend? / Thou imagest my life’’
(502--05).
In Wordsworth again, that great poet of rivers, we find real rivers and
many of their possible symbolic meanings (speech, poetry, life) flowing
together. To give one more example from The Prelude (1805), book 9 opens with
a retrospect on the poem so far: ‘‘As oftentimes a river, it might seem, /
Yielding in part to old remembrances, / Part swayed by fear to tread an
onward road / That leads direct to the devouring sea, / Turns and will measure
back his course -- far back, / Towards the very regions which he crossed / In his
first outset -- so have we long time / Made motions retrograde.’’
Hölderlin was as interested in rivers as Wordsworth, and in several of his
Hymns, such as ‘‘The Rhine’’ and ‘‘The Migration,’’ he has a great river stand
for the life or spiritual history of a nation.
172
Rook
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Informing most of these meanings is the river as an image of time itself.
According to Plato (Cratylus 402a), Heraclitus said that ‘‘all things are in
process and nothing stays still, and likening existing things to the stream of a
river he says that into the same river you could not step twice.’’
Ovid has a catalogue of rivers in Met. 2.239--59. Spenser gives a short
catalogue of great rivers, from the Nile to the Amazon (FQ 4.11.20--21),
followed by a long one of English rivers (4.11.29--47).
See Fountain, Sea.
Rook
see Raven
Rose
There were several varieties of rose in the ancient world, as there are
hundreds in the modern, but the rose in poetry has always been red (or
‘‘rose’’) in color, unless otherwise described. ‘‘Red as a rose’’ is the prime poetic
cliché, and poets have used every other term for red to describe it, such as
Shakespeare’s ‘‘deep vermilion’’ (Sonnets 98) or the ‘‘crimson joy’’ of Blake’s
‘‘Sick Rose’’. The rose blooms in the spring, and does not bloom long; the
contrast is striking between its youth in the bud and its full-blown maturity,
and again between both these phases and its final scattering of petals on the
ground, all in the course of a week or two. It is rich in perfume, which seems
to emanate from its dense and delicate folds of petals. It is vulnerable to the
cankerworm. And it grows on a plant with thorns. All these features have
entered into its range of symbolic uses.
The rose is ‘‘the graceful plant of the Muses,’’ according to the Anacreontic
Ode 55; indeed Sappho had called the Muses themselves ‘‘the roses of Pieria’’
(frag. 55). So it is only right that the rose has been the favorite flower of poets
since antiquity. The most beautiful poems, in fact, were compared to the
flower, as when Meleager praises some of Sappho’s as roses (in ‘‘The Garland’’),
a metaphor in keeping with the meaning of the word ‘‘anthology,’’ which is a
gathering of poetic flowers. (See Flower.)
Homer does not mention the rose (Greek rhodon), but his favorite epithet for
Dawn is ‘‘rosy-fingered’’ (rhododaktylos). (Sappho also liked ‘‘rose’’ compounds,
calling the moon ‘‘rosy-fingered’’ and both Dawn and the Graces ‘‘rosyarmed.’’) The Greek tragedians do not mention the rose, either. But thereafter
the rose comes into its own: it is the flower of flowers, their glory, their
queen, their quintessence. In Achilles Tatius’ novel (2.1), Leucippe sings a song
in praise of the rose: ‘‘If Zeus had wished to give the flowers a king, he would
have named the rose, for it is the ornament of the world, the glory of plants,
the eye of flowers, the blush of the meadow . . . the agent of Aphrodite.’’
Another Anacreontic poem (no. 44) goes on in the same vein: ‘‘rose, best of
flowers, / rose, darling of the spring, / rose, delight of the gods,’’ and so on.
Goethe theorized that the rose was the highest form of flower. Cowper wrote:
‘‘Flow’rs by that name promiscuously we call, / But one, the rose, the regent of
them all’’ (‘‘Retirement’’ 723--24).
Almost any flower can represent a girl, but the rose has always stood for the
most beautiful, the most beloved -- in many languages ‘‘Rose’’ remains a
popular given name -- and often for one who is notably young, vulnerable, and
virginal. Shakespeare’s Laertes, when he sees his sister Ophelia in her
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Rose
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madness, cries ‘‘O Rose of May!’’ (Hamlet 4.5.158), bringing out not only her
uniqueness but the blighting of her brief life. Othello, on the verge of killing
Desdemona, thinks of her as a rose which he is about to pluck (Othello
5.2.13--16); Orsino tells Viola, ‘‘women are as roses, whose fair flower / Being
once display’d, doth fall that very hour’’ (12N 2.4.38--39). The French poet Baïf
vows, ‘‘I will not force the Rose / Who hides in the bosom / Of a tightly closed
bud / The beauty of her flower’’ (‘‘La Rose,’’ in Livre des Passetems II).
Ronsard writes, ‘‘such a flower only lasts / From morning until evening’’
(Odes 1.17, ‘‘A sa maistresse’’); Quevedo asks, ‘‘What good does it do you, /
rosebush, to presume on your good looks, / when no sooner are you born /
than you begin to die?’’ (‘‘Letrilla lirica’’ 4--7); but its brevity has made it the
more cherished. ‘‘Loveliest of things are they / On earth that soonest pass
away. / The rose that lives its little hour / Is prized beyond the sculptured
flower,’’ according to Bryant (‘‘Scene on the Banks of the Hudson’’). Lamenting
the passing of great Persian kings, Omar Khayyam, in Fitzgerald’s famous
version, says, ‘‘Each Morn a thousand Roses brings, you say; / Yes, but where
leaves the Rose of Yesterday? / And this first Summer month that brings the
Rose / Shall take Jamshyd and Kaikobad away’’ (33--36).
A sexual connotation of Greek rhodon, the hymen or female genitalia (as in
the modern French phrase, ‘‘to lose her rose’’), was combined with the brevity
of the rose-bloom to embody the common ancient theme of carpe diem (‘‘seize
the day,’’ from Horace 1.11): make the most of your brief time on earth, or
your even briefer youth. In another ode Horace urges us to bring wine and
perfume and ‘‘the too brief blooms of the lovely rose’’ (2.3.13--14). Anacreon
uses rose imagery in his odes on this theme, but it was Ausonius who
explicitly equated the brevity of our life with that of the rose. His influential
poem De Rosis Nascentibus has the much-translated line Collige, virgo, rosas, dum
flos novus et nova pubes (‘‘Pluck roses, girl, while flower and youth are new’’ 48);
it is interesting that he addresses a virgin, not a boy or man who might pluck
her, a displacement not unlike the girl-gathered-while-gathering-flowers motif
common in classical poetry. (See Flower.) Ausonius’ symbol is repeated in the
bird song in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (16.15) -- ‘‘So in the passing of a day,
passes / The flower and the youth [or ‘‘green’’] of one’s mortal life . . . Gather
the rose of Love’’ -- which in turn inspired the song meant to tempt Guyon
into the Bower of Bliss in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: ‘‘Ah! see the Virgin Rose, how
sweetly shee / Doth first peepe forth with bashfull modestee . . . Lo! see soone
after how she fades and falls away. // So passeth, in the passing of a day, / Of
mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre; . . . Gather therefore the Rose whilest
yet is prime, / For soone comes age that will her pride deflowre’’ (2.12.74--75).
Ronsard has ‘‘Gather from this day the roses of life’’ (Second Sonnets for Hélène
43). The best-known example in English is Herrick’s stanza ‘‘Gather ye
Rose-buds while ye may, / Old Time is still a flying: / And this same flower that
smiles today, / To morrow will be dying’’ (‘‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of
Time’’). In a poem addressed to a lady, Perswasions to Love, Carew offers a
variant where the rose is a rose-tree: ‘‘The faded Rose each spring, receives / A
fresh red tincture on her leaves: / But if your beauties once decay, / You never
know a second May’’ (75--78). In another famous example, Milton’s Comus fails
to persuade the Lady despite his rosy simile: ‘‘If you let slip time, like a
neglected rose / It withers on the stalk with languish’t head’’ (Comus 743--44).
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Lamartine revives the motif in his ‘‘Elégie’’: ‘‘Let us gather the rose in the
morning of life.’’ And so it goes into at least Victorian times, as we see in
William Henley’s ‘‘O, gather me the rose, the rose, / While yet in flower we
find it, / For summer smiles, but summer goes, / And winter waits behind it!’’
There have been attempts to Christianize the carpe diem theme, whereby
time is to be put to good spiritual uses, but many devout Christians have
scorned it, taking the rose to be an emblem of the false and fleeting pleasures
of this world, especially those of lust. Herbert, however, in ‘‘The Rose,’’ offers
the flower as an antidote to worldly joys, and in doing so implicitly appeals
to the medieval tradition that Christ is the Mystic Rose. In another tradition it
is the Virgin Mary who is the Mystic Rose, sometimes a white rose, a rose
without thorns. Both associations are derived in part from the ‘‘Rose of
Sharon’’ in the Song of Solomon 2.1. The Hebrew word habasselet, which is
found only there and at Isaiah 35.1 (‘‘the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as
the rose’’ in the AV), is an uncertain flower, probably not a rose, more likely a
crocus or daffodil; but the rose was established early as the official translation. Thanks in part to St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the rose (alongside the lily)
became Mary’s symbolic flower. Mary is ‘‘the rose in which the divine word
became flesh,’’ as Dante puts it in Paradiso 23.73--74. In the fifteenth-century
English carol ‘‘There is no rose of swich vertu’’ presses the image: ‘‘For in this
rose conteined was / Hevene and erthe in litel space.’’
If red and white roses are distinguished, the red stands for charity or
Christian love, the white for virginity. The red rose can also represent
Christian martyrdom, red for the love martyrs showed and for the blood they
shed. Shelley, writing of atheist martyrs to Christian bigotry, nonetheless
preserves the image: ‘‘earth has seen / Love’s brightest roses on the scaffold
bloom’’ (Queen Mab 9.176--77).
The rose had been the flower of Aphrodite (Venus) and Dionysus (Bacchus).
The Anacreontic Ode 44 begins, ‘‘Let us mix the rose of the Loves [plural of
Eros] with Dionysus [wine],’’ and a connection between wine and roses was
established that has lasted in common phrases to this day. Horace describes
rose petals scattered about in a scene of love-making (1.5.1), and Propertius
writes, ‘‘I am glad that plenteous Bacchus enchains my mind, / And that I
always keep my head in vernal roses’’ (3.5.21--22). The statue of Venus in
Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale wore ‘‘A rose gerland, fressh and wel smellynge’’ on her
head (1961). The rose garden, or ‘‘bed of roses,’’ is the traditional place of love,
as in the medieval French allegorical Romance of the Rose (where the lover’s goal
is to pluck the rosebud), in Walther von der Vogelweide’s medieval German
poem ‘‘Under der Linden,’’ or in Tennyson’s Maud 1.22. So the transformation
of the rose into a symbol of Christian charity or chastity is a good example of
the cultural expropriation of pagan culture by the church. As Spenser tells it,
God planted the rose in Paradise and then replanted it in earthly stock so
women may wear it as a symbol ‘‘Of chastity and vertue virginall’’ (FQ
3.5.52--53; cf. ‘‘fresh flowring Maidenhead’’ in the next stanza). While Adam
and Eve slept (before the Fall), according to Milton, ‘‘the flow’ry roof / Show’r’d
Roses, which the Morn repair’d’’ (PL 4.772--73).
The penultimate vision of Dante’s Paradiso is the gathering of all the
redeemed souls into a formation like an ‘‘eternal rose’’ (30.124), white with
the light of God’s love (31.1).
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A familiar proverb, repeated in many poems, is ‘‘Roses have thorns’’
(Shakespeare, Sonnets 35) or ‘‘ne’er the rose without the thorn’’ (Herrick, ‘‘The
Rose’’). If you go about plucking roses, gentlemen, you may get pricked. In his
famous ‘‘Heidenröslein,’’ Goethe presents a dialogue between a boy and a rose:
‘‘The boy said, ‘I shall pick you, / Little rose on the heath.’ / The little rose said,
‘I shall prick you / So you’ll always think of me.’’’ Ovid combines the carpe diem
theme with a reminder of thorns: ‘‘While it flowers, use your life; / the thorn
is scorned when the rose has fallen’’ (Fasti 5.353--54). Shakespeare’s Diana alters
the image nicely when she tells Bertram, ‘‘when you have our roses, / You
barely leave our thorns to prick ourselves’’ (AWEW 4.2.17--18). Blake’s ‘‘My Pretty
Rose Tree’’ tells how he foreswears a beautiful flower to remain loyal to his
rose tree, but nonetheless ‘‘my Rose turnd away with jealousy: / And her
thorns were my only delight.’’ Thomas Moore’s ‘‘The Pretty Rose-Tree’’ is also
about promised faithfulness, for ‘‘the thorns of thy stem / Are not like them /
With which men wound each other.’’ In the Christian transfiguration of the
rose, of course, the thorns were omitted: Mary, according to St. Ambrose, is a
rose without thorns, as Herrick’s ‘‘The Rose’’ tells us. In Paradise, according to
Milton, was every sort of flower ‘‘and without Thorn the Rose’’ (PL 4.256).
The rose is also renowned for its perfume -- ‘‘And the rose herself has got /
Perfume which on earth is not,’’ as Keats says (‘‘Bards of Passion’’) -- which
lingers on after the flower has blown and fallen; perhaps that underlies its
use as a symbol of martyrdom. As Shakespeare puts it in Sonnet 54, which is
an extended rose simile, ‘‘Sweet roses do not so [die to themselves]; / Of their
sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.’’ Another form of rose immortality is
oil or attar of rose, known to the Greeks and Persians and probably earlier.
The rose has two traditional enemies, both of which are common in poetry:
worms and winds. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 95 begins, ‘‘How sweet and lovely dost
thou make the shame / Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose, / Dost spot
the beauty of thy budding name!’’ (‘‘Canker’’ means ‘‘cankerworm’’; see also
Sonnets 35 and 70.) The loss of Lycidas, Milton writes, is ‘‘As killing as Canker
to the Rose’’ (Lycidas 45). Herbert likens the Church to a rose, made red by the
blood of Christ, and disputes within the Church to a worm (‘‘Church-Rents
and Schisms’’). Perhaps the most resonant use of the canker image is Blake’s
‘‘The Sick Rose’’: ‘‘O Rose thou art sick. / The invisible worm, / That flies
through the night / In the howling storm: // Has found out thy bed / Of
crimson joy: / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.’’ As for howling
storms, Keats writes, ‘‘love doth scathe / The gentle heart, as northern blasts
do roses’’ (Endymion 1.734--35).
In the late nineteenth century was founded the mystical cult of
Rosicrucianism, whose central symbols were the rose of perfection or eternity
and the cross of time; we may gain the ‘‘inconsolable rose,’’ in Villiers de
l’Isle-Adam’s phrase (in Axel), through suffering and renunciation in this
world. Yeats adopts this symbolism in the poems in The Rose and the stories in
The Secret Rose: the first poem is addressed ‘‘To the Rose upon the Rood [Cross]
of Time.’’
The rose is often associated with the lily, both to express a contrast in colors
and to symbolize two usually complementary virtues, love and purity (or
virginity): both flowers, of course, are emblems of the Virgin Mary. Tennyson
has ‘‘My rose of love for ever gone, / My lily of truth and trust’’ (‘‘The Ancient
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Sage’’ 159--60). Roses and violets are often joined as two flowers of love, both
rich in aroma; Keats strikingly assigns the rose to Madeline and the violet to
her lover Porphyro (whose name means ‘‘purple’’): ‘‘Into her dream he melted,
as the rose / Blendeth its odour with the violet’’ (Eve of St. Agnes 320--21).
The phrase ‘‘under the rose,’’ more often used in the Latin sub rosa, means
‘‘in secret’’ or ‘‘silently.’’ It was supposed to be a practice in ancient Greece and
Rome to swear a council to secrecy by placing a rose overhead during its
deliberations. Many council chambers in Europe for that reason have roses
sculpted into their ceilings.
The Wars of the Roses (1455--85) were fought between the Houses of
Lancaster and York. Shakespeare presents Henry VI (of Lancaster) putting on a
red rose (1H6 4.1.152) and Richard Duke of York announcing he will ‘‘raise
aloft the milk-white rose’’ (2H6 1.1.252).
S
Sable
see Black
Saffron
Saffron, made from the dried stigmas of the crocus, has been used since
ancient times as a dye, flavoring, perfume, and medicine. It is mentioned once
in the Bible (Hebrew karkôm) as one of the condiments and incenses of the
garden of the beloved in Song of Solomon 4:14. The related Greek word krokos
referred not only to the flower but to saffron and, more often in classical
poetry, to the yellow or orange-yellow color of the dye. It was expensive, like
Tyrian purple, and like purple it connoted majesty and rank; it also connoted
purity, and was often worn by girls in sacred rituals.
It was particularly associated with Artemis, the protectress of virgins and
hunted animals. Because Agamemnon offended her, Artemis demanded the
sacrifice of his virgin daughter Iphigenia, who wore a ‘‘saffron-dyed robe’’ at
her death (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 238). It is also sometimes the color of
Bacchus and his (usually female) followers.
In Homer and Virgil, Dawn is saffron-robed (krokopeplos in Homer) and
saffron-haired, her chariot-wheels are saffron, and so is the bed of Tithonus.
(See Dawn.)
Perhaps because brides often wore it, saffron became the color of the robe
of Hymen, god of weddings, as in Ovid, Met. 10.1. The chief association of
saffron in English poetry is with Hymen: ‘‘Hymen, the god of marriage, in a
saffron coloured robe’’ (Jonson, Hymenaei, 42--43); ‘‘There let Hymen oft
appear / In Saffron robe’’ (Milton, L’Allegro 125--26).
Salamander
This small amphibian, according to Pliny, could live inside fire because it was
too cold-blooded to be burned (Natural History 10.86). A notion also arose that
the salamander could extinguish fire as well. Thus it was almost inevitable
that it would be recruited into the fire imagery of passionate love. After being
both nourished and set afire by glances at his beloved’s face, Petrarch reports,
‘‘I feed on my death and live in flames, / strange food and wondrous
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salamander!’’ (Rime 207.38--41). The French King Francis I adopted the
salamander surrounded by flames as his emblem, with the motto Nutrisco et
extinguo (‘‘I feed [on fire] and extinguish it’’). After citing this ‘‘royal serpent,’’
Scève addresses his mistress: ‘‘O would that you were by your cold nature /
The Salamander dwelling in my fire! / You would find delicious pasture there /
And extinguish my burning passion’’ (‘‘Sans lésion le Serpent Royal vit’’).
Robert Browning refers to the king’s ‘‘Salamander-sign-- / Flame-fed creature:
flame benign / To itself or, if malign, // Only to the meddling curious,’’ in
‘‘Cristina and Monaldeschi’’ 14--17.
Pope enjoys imagining that when fair ladies die their souls return to their
‘‘first elements’’; some become earth, some water, some air, while ‘‘The
Sprights [spirits] of fiery Termagants in Flame / Mount up, and take a
Salamander’s Name’’ (Rape of the Lock 1.59--60). Keats calls one of his four
elemental fairies Salamander in ‘‘Song of Four Fairies.’’
Of the sunken ship Titanic Hardy envisages her ‘‘Steel chambers, late the
pyres / Of her salamandrine fires’’ (‘‘Convergence of the Twain’’). See Fire.
178
Scarlet
As an expensive cloth, and a color derived from costly dyes, scarlet in the
Bible is associated with wealth and luxury. David reminds the daughters of
Israel that Saul clothed them in scarlet (2 Sam. 1.24), Jeremiah laments that
those ‘‘brought up in scarlet’’ now ‘‘embrace dunghills’’ (Lam. 4.5), and
Belshazzar announces that whoever interprets the mysterious writing ‘‘shall
be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about his neck’’ (Dan. 5.7). So
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s ‘‘hosen [stockings] weren of fyn scarlet reed’’ (CT Pro.
456), and Spenser describes some ‘‘costly scarlot of great name’’ (FQ 1.12.13).
Its conspicuous brightness makes it appropriate for Isaiah to say, ‘‘though
your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow’’ (Isa. 1.18), and scarlet
has become the common color of sin. Shakespeare’s Surrey calls Wolsey’s
ambition ‘‘thou scarlet sin’’ (H8 3.2.255); before Wilde’s Dorian Gray, ‘‘Out of
the black cave of Time, terrible and swathed in scarlet, rose the image of his
sin’’ (chap. 18).
The Isaiah passage may have seconded scarlet’s aura of luxury in John of
Patmos’s vision of the woman on a scarlet beast, herself arrayed in purple and
scarlet, who is Mystery, Babylon, the Mother of Harlots (Rev. 17.3--5). The
‘‘scarlet whore’’ became the standard term for whatever rich and powerful
enemy a Christian wanted to denounce; in English Protestant usage it usually
meant the Roman Catholic Church. The ‘‘faithlesse Sarazin’’ (Sans Foy) of
Spenser has a woman companion ‘‘clad in scarlot red’’ (1.2.13), who turns out
to be the ‘‘scarlot whore,’’ Duessa (1.8.29). Scarlet then became associated with
real as well as allegorical whores. Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne is made to wear
a letter A (for ‘‘adultery’’) embroidered in scarlet on her dress (The Scarlet
Letter).
Scorpion
When Gilgamesh begins his journey to bring back his dead friend Enkidu (in
the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh), he encounters the terrible Scorpion People,
who live on the mountain that guards the coming and going of Shamash the
sun; they allow him to enter and follow the path of Shamash. Little symbolism
survives about these monsters beyond this connection with the sun.
Sea
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Scorpions are mentioned several times in the Bible as dangerous creatures
of the wilderness (e.g., Deut. 8.15, Ezek. 2.6). The plague of locusts prophesied
in Revelation will be made worse when they are given the power of scorpions;
those men who are not sealed by God will be tormented by them for five
months (9.3--5).
Simply because its sting is in its tail, the scorpion became an emblem of
fraud or deception. Geryon, the monster that guards the circle of fraud in
Dante’s Inferno, has a tail like a scorpion’s (17.27). Following Vincent of
Beauvais, Chaucer likens unstable Fortune to ‘‘the scorpion so deceyvable, /
That flaterest with thyn heed [head] whan thou wolt stynge; / Thy tayl is
deeth, thurgh thyn envenymynge’’ (Merchant’s Tale 2058--60) (see also Book of the
Duchess 636--41). Feeling deceived by his son Samson’s defeat, Manoa asks why
God gave him a son, if the gift should ‘‘draw a Scorpion’s tail behind?’’
(Milton, Samson Agonistes 360).
Perhaps inspired by Macbeth’s cry, ‘‘O! full of scorpions is my mind, dear
wife!’’ (3.2.36), some later English poets took scorpions as emblems of remorse.
Dryden has Ventidius tell Antony he is ‘‘too conscious of your failings; / And,
like a scorpion, whipt by others first / To fury, sting yourself in mad revenge’’
(All for Love 1.313--15). ‘‘Remorse,’’ according to Cowper, ‘‘proves a raging
scorpion in his breast’’ (Progress of Error 239--42). Coleridge says ‘‘vain regret’’
has ‘‘scorpion stings’’ (sonnet: ‘‘To Rev. Bowles,’’ 1st version, 10). It seems
implicit in Shelley: ‘‘the sting / Which retributive memory implants / In the
hard bosom of the selfish man’’ (Queen Mab 1.173--75).
The legend that when surrounded by fire scorpions commit suicide by
stinging themselves is not ancient; it is first reported by Paracelsus. Shelley
makes frequent use of it: he predicts, for instance, that the truths that
virtuous people speak ‘‘Shall bind the scorpion falsehood with a wreath / Of
ever-living flame, / Until the monster sting itself to death’’ (Queen Mab 6.36--38).
E. B. Browning’s heroine remembers a period in her life as ‘‘A weary, wormy
darkness, spurred i’the flank / With flame, that it should eat and end itself /
Like some tormented scorpion’’ (Aurora Leigh 1.220--22). Byron adds this idea to
the scorpion as remorse: ‘‘The Mind, that broods o’er guilty woes, / Is like the
Scorpion girt by fire, / . . . / One sad and sole relief she knows, / The sting she
nourish’d for her foes’’ (Giaour 422--29).
Sea
We are at home on the land. The sea has always been alien and dangerous,
and those who have made it a second home have learned special skills and
habits. For that very reason the literature of the sea is ancient and vast: from
the Odyssey, the Argonautica, and the story of Jonah through Melville’s
Moby-Dick, London’s The Sea-Wolf, several novels of Conrad’s, Hemingway’s The
Old Man and the Sea, and Patrick O’Brian’s recent Master and Commander and
its sequels. Science fiction is largely derivative of sea stories (Jules Verne
providing a link), as the word ‘‘spaceship’’ and ‘‘astronaut’’ (from Greek
nautes, ‘‘sailor’’) remind us; planets are islands in the sea of space. Among
many other things, the sea has symbolized chaos and the bridge among
orderly lands, life and death, time and timelessness, menace and lure,
boredom and the sublime. Out of this welter of contrary symbols we shall
select a few prominent ones.
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In Middle Eastern mythology the sea is the primordial element. The
Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish posits the male Apsu and the female
Tiamat as the parents of the gods; they are ‘‘sweet water’’ (or fresh water) and
‘‘bitter water’’ (salt water), and their union begets the world. Later Marduk
slays Tiamat and divides her body, placing half of it in the sky. The creation in
Genesis begins with a formless earth covered with water; the ‘‘deep’’ (1.2) is
tehom in Hebrew, cognate with ‘‘Tiamat,’’ and like her it is divided by a
‘‘firmament’’ into two waters (6--8); then comes the emergence of land from
the gathering of the lower waters (9--10). The Greek creation story as Hesiod
tells it begins with Chaos but it is not water; Earth emerges first (Theogony
116--17), and later generates Sea (Pontos) by herself and Ocean (Okeanos) by lying
with Heaven (131--33). Ocean is a ‘‘perfect river’’ (242) that surrounds the
world. There are two passages in Homer, however, that suggest Ocean is the
source of all things: it is called the ‘‘begetter’’ or ‘‘origin (genesis) of the gods’’
and the ‘‘begetter of all things’’ (Iliad 14.201, 14.246). Plato quotes the former
passage twice; he takes Homer to be saying that all things are the offspring of
flux and motion (Theaetetus 152e). In the first Iliad passage Homer includes
‘‘Mother Tethys’’ in parallel to (father) Ocean; in Hesiod she mates with Ocean
to produce the rivers and water nymphs (337--70), but here she seems simply a
female equivalent of Ocean.
With Tiamat and Tethys, then, we have a ‘‘mother sea,’’ a rich mythological
element half suppressed by the biblical creation story where a male sky god
does everything. This idea also had to contend with the obvious facts that sea
water is not drinkable -- it is not ‘‘living water,’’ in the Hebrew phrase for fresh
water (Gen. 26.19; cf. John 4.10) -- and that, of course, the sea has claimed
countless lives through drowning. An epithet for sea in both Hesiod and
Homer is ‘‘sterile’’ or ‘‘barren’’ (though there is some debate about the word).
The biblical Flood destroys all life not in the ark, and there is the ‘‘Dead Sea’’
in Palestine. Salvation through Christ is often imagined as rescue from
drowning: Christ walks on water, he makes Peter a fisher of men, baptism by
immersion is a death and rebirth, and the church is the ‘‘antitype’’ of Noah’s
ark; when the new heaven and earth come, there will be ‘‘no more sea’’ (Rev.
21.1). Dante, having narrowly escaped the dark wood of sin, likens his state to
that of one who ‘‘with laboring breath / has just escaped from sea to shore’’
(Inferno 1.22--23). Milton mourns Lycidas, who drowned, but ‘‘Sunk though he
be beneath the wat’ry floor,’’ he is ‘‘mounted high, / Through the dear might
of him that walk’d the waves’’ (167, 172--73). Ancient cosmologies and philosophies and their modern descendants often posited this life as watery,
indeed as underwater; the Naasene gnostics considered this mortal world of
generation to be a sea into which the divine spark has sunk, while Blake
imagines ‘‘the sea of Time & Space,’’ beneath which fallen man is ‘‘a Human
polypus of Death’’ (Four Zoas 56.13,16).
Modern theories of the origin of life restored the sea as its source, but in
literature birth is often not far from death. Goethe stages a debate between
Thales the ‘‘Neptunist’’ and Anaxagoras the ‘‘Vulcanist’’ (Faust, II 7851ff.);
Thales wins, and the fiery Homunculus plunges into the Aegean, filled with
sea goddesses, to be reborn and evolve. Faust will go on, however, to combat
the sea, which ‘‘unfruitful itself, pours out unfruitfulness’’ in floods on the
land, by building dikes and channels (10198ff.). Swinburne announces ‘‘I will
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go back to the great sweet mother, / Mother and lover of men, the sea,’’ but it
is to lose himself and forget his grief: ‘‘Save me and hide me with all thy
waves, / Find me one grave of thy thousand graves’’ (‘‘Triumph of Time’’
257--58, 269--70).
A parallel to this pattern is the water cycle: evaporation from the sea
creates clouds, which pour down rain, which collects in rivers, which flow
into the sea. The older symbolism generally had rivers rising from springs,
representing birth, through the widening and slowing course of life, into the
sea of death. (See River.)
The deadliness of the sea sometimes seems the worse for its not being a
god, for its blind heedlessness. ‘‘Alas! poor boy!’’ Shelley has a character say, ‘‘A
wreck-devoted seaman thus might pray / To the deaf sea’’ (Cenci 5.4.41--43).
Yeats has the great phrase ‘‘the murderous innocence of the sea’’ (‘‘Prayer for
my Daughter’’ 16).
Writers have nonetheless given the sea a voice, just like babbling or
murmuring rivers, usually as heard from shore. Homer’s epithet for the sea
can scarcely be bettered: polyphloisbos, ‘‘much-roaring,’’ (e.g., Iliad 1.34), which
Fitzgerald forgivably overtranslates as ‘‘the tumbling clamorous whispering
sea.’’ Seas can roar, rage, bellow, pound, and ‘‘chide’’ (Emerson, ‘‘Seashore’’ 1).
But even on calm days the repeating sound of waves on the shore may seem
to have a message. ‘‘Listen!’’ Arnold enjoins, ‘‘you hear the grating roar / Of
pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the high
strand, / Begin, and cease, and then again begin, / With tremulous cadence
slow, and bring / The eternal note of sadness in’’ (‘‘Dover Beach’’ 9--14). When
Tennyson listens to the waves he feels akin to it in his inarticulateness:
‘‘Break, break, break, / On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! / And I would that my
tongue could utter / The thoughts that arise in me’’ (‘‘Break, Break, Break’’). In
different moods Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay finds the sea a mother and a destroyer:
‘‘the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach . . . for the most part beat a
measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to
repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old
cradle song, murmured by nature, ‘I am guarding you -- I am your support,’
but at other times . . . [it] made one think of the destruction of the island and
its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one
quick doing after another that it was all as ephemeral as a rainbow’’ (To the
Lighthouse 1.3).
As the sea has so much to say, it has sometimes stood for great poets.
Homer, likened in ancient times to a fountain and a river, was compared to
the ocean by Quintilian (Institutes 10.1.46). Dante describes Virgil as ‘‘the sea of
all sense’’ (Inferno 8.7). Byron playfully compares himself to Homer as a war
reporter, but concedes, ‘‘To vie with thee would be about as vain / As for a
brook to cope with ocean’s flood’’ (Don Juan 7.638--39). Keats likens his discovery
of Chapman’s version of Homer to Cortez’s discovery of the Pacific (‘‘On First
Looking into Chapman’s Homer’’). (See Fountain, River.)
The waves are a measure of time. ‘‘Like as the waves make toward the
pebbled shore, / So do our minutes hasten to their end’’ (Shakespeare, Sonnets
60). ‘‘Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, / Ocean of time’’ (Shelley,
‘‘Time’’). Emily Brontë speaks of ‘‘Time’s all-severing wave’’ (‘‘Remembrance’’ 4).
‘‘Consider the sea’s listless chime: / Time’s self it is, made audible’’ (D. G.
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Rossetti, ‘‘Sea-Limits’’). So are the tides; indeed ‘‘tide’’ originally meant
‘‘time.’’ ‘‘The little waves, with their soft, white hands, / Efface the footprints
in the sands, / And the tide rises, the tide falls’’ (Longfellow, ‘‘Tide Rises’’). But
the endless repetitiveness of both of them, and the sheer enormousness of the
sea, has made the sea an emblem of infinity and eternity, and as such it both
dwarfs our human doings, as Mrs. Ramsay feels, and also lures us as if to a
peaceful sleep or death. Tennyson imagines one day putting out to sea on
‘‘such a tide as moving seems asleep, / Too full for sound and foam, / When
that which drew from out the boundless deep / Turns again home’’ (‘‘Crossing
the Bar’’). Mann has Aschenbach sit on the shore gazing out to the Adriatic
sea from the Lido as he yields to an infinite longing and dies (Death in Venice).
Even on an inland hill, thoughts about eternity may summon a metaphorical
sea, as Leopardi writes: ‘‘So in this / immensity my thoughts are drowned: /
and shipwreck is sweet to me in this sea’’ (‘‘L’Infinito’’).
A ‘‘sea’’ of something can mean a vast quantity of it, as when Spenser speaks
of a ‘‘sea of deadly daungers’’ (FQ 1.12.17) or Byron of a ‘‘sea of slaughter’’ (Don
Juan 7.399). When Hamlet ponders whether ‘‘to take arms against a sea of
troubles’’ (3.1.59) he is using ‘‘sea’’ in a similar sense but also evoking an
ancient metaphor. Psalm 69 begins, ‘‘Save me, O God; for the waters are come
into my soul. / I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing; I am come into
deep waters, where the floods overflow me.’’ A variant is the sea of stormy
passion, which goes back at least to Horace, who pities a boy in love with the
experienced Pyrrha; she will overwhelm him with ‘‘black winds’’ as she did
Horace, who now stays ashore, having ‘‘hung / My dank and dripping weeds /
To the stern God of Sea’’ (1.5., trans. John Milton). Less wise, Petrarch is aboard
ship in a storm of sighs, hopes, and desires (Rime 189). Sitting on shore,
watching the surf, Spenser’s Britomart, separated from her knight, complains
to the ‘‘Huge sea of sorrow, and tempestuous griefe, / Wherein my feeble bark
is tossed long, / Far from the hoped haven of relief’’ (FQ 3.4.8). (See Ship.)
Seasons
182
‘‘Symbols,’’ Dylan Thomas says, ‘‘are selected from the years’ / Slow rounding
of four seasons’ coasts’’ (‘‘Here in this Spring’’). Many of the meanings of the
trees and flowers, beasts and birds found in this dictionary depend on their
comings and goings at certain seasons of the year. And of course the seasons
themselves have long been applied metaphorically to human lives, as we see
in this conventional passage from James Thomson’s ‘‘Winter’’: ‘‘See here thy
pictur’d Life; pass some few Years, / Thy flowering Spring, thy Summer’s ardent
Strength, / Thy sober Autumn passing into Age, / And pale concluding Winter
comes at last, / And shuts the Scene’’ (1029--33).
The ancients did not at first distinguish four seasons. There is some
evidence that the oldest Indo-European division was into two, winter and
summer, traces of which we find in the English phrases ‘‘midwinter’’ and
‘‘midsummer,’’ which refer to the winter solstice (or Christmas) and summer
solstice, and the absence of such terms for spring and autumn. We find
evidence as well in the use of ‘‘winter’’ and ‘‘summer’’ as synonyms for ‘‘year.’’
Juvenal writes of an old man, ‘‘Thus many winters and his eightieth solstice
he saw’’ (4.92--93). In the oldest English poetry ‘‘winter’’ is often used in this
way: Beowulf held the land ‘‘fifty winters’’ (Beowulf 2209); ‘‘no man may
become wise before he endure / His share of winters in the world’’ (‘‘The
Seasons
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Wanderer’’ 64--65). Counting by winters continues into the twentieth century;
for example, Yeats advises us ‘‘from the fortieth winter’’ to look on everything
in the light of death (‘‘Vacillation’’ 29). Seemingly absent from Old English,
but fairly common later, is ‘‘summer’’ in the same sense; so Shakespeare: ‘‘Five
summers have I spent in farthest Greece’’ (CE 1.1.132) and ‘‘Till twice five
summers have enriched our fields’’ (R2 1.3.141); and Milton: ‘‘Summers three
times eight save one / She had told’’ (‘‘Epitaph on the Marchioness of
Winchester’’ 7--8). ‘‘Spring’’ and ‘‘autumn’’ or ‘‘fall’’ are seldom so used, and
then usually in an elaboration of the figure with ‘‘winter’’ or ‘‘summer’’; e.g.,
‘‘Four lagging winters and four wanton springs’’ (R2 1.3.214; see Sonnets 104).
Ovid does have Tiresias spend ‘‘seven autumns’’ as a woman (Met. 3.326--27),
and ‘‘five autumns’’ pass before Procne visits her sister (6.439).
Homer and Hesiod generally recognize three seasons, spring, summer, and
winter. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Demeter tells her daughter
Persephone she must ‘‘go to the depths of the earth, / to dwell there a third
part of the seasons every year, / but two of them with me and the other
immortals’’ (398--400). In the Odyssey, however, Homer distinguishes ‘‘summer’’
from the latter part of it (e.g., 12.76). Alcman was the first to list the four
seasons, but the passage where he does so (quoted by Athenaeus) reflects the
older tripartite division: ‘‘and he created three seasons, summer and winter
and autumn the third, and the fourth the spring, when things grow but there
is not enough to eat.’’ Four became the norm, though three remained
common. Shelley, a good classicist, can write in Epipsychidion of ‘‘the seasons
three,’’ though it is a little surprising that he names them as spring, autumn,
and winter (364--66). Ovid names the four seasons and applies them, like
Thomson many centuries later, to the ages of human life (Met. 15.199--213).
Though the Athenian or Attic year began with summer, as the Alcman
passage suggests, the Roman year (originally) began with spring in March, a
sequence that lends itself better to the phases of human life. In England the
year officially began in March until 1753: ‘‘the month in which the world
bigan, / That highte March, whan God first maked man’’ (Chaucer, Nun’s Priest’s
Tale 3187--88).
The Greek word for season, hora, borrowed by Latin and passed through
French into English as ‘‘hour,’’ was personified in various ways. In Homer the
Horai guard the gates of the sky (e.g., Iliad 5.749--51); in Hesiod they are the
daughters of Zeus and Themis (Theogony 901); in both Hesiod and the Homeric
Hymns they are associated with the three Graces, though they are not
themselves enumerated. Hora in both Greek and Latin had a broader range of
meaning than ‘‘season’’: it could also mean a year, a day, or a time of day
(‘‘hour’’). In Attic cult two Horai were named Thallo and Karpo, not summer
and winter but spring (‘‘I bloom’’) and autumn or late summer (‘‘I bear fruit’’).
Ovid mentions the Horae but distinguishes them from the four seasons (Met.
2.26).
In Hellenistic times the description of the seasons or times (ekphrasis
chronon) became a set theme in poetry and rhetoric. In ancient paintings and
in literature at least as old as Ovid we find Spring holding flowers, usually as a
young woman and often identified as Flora or Venus; Summer with a sickle
and ears or sheaf of grain, often taken as Ceres; Autumn with grapes and vine
leaves, taken as Bacchus; and Winter shivering and thickly clothed, often an
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old man, sometimes Boreas or Vulcan. The most frequently personified season
is Spring; Ovid explains that the Greek maiden Chloris, raped and married by
Zephyrus (the west wind), is the same as Roman Flora (Fasti 5.197ff.). In the
Metamorphoses Ovid offers four brief personifications (2.27--30), Lucretius
describes them at slightly greater length at 5.737--47, while Horace portrays
their march through the year as a reminder that death awaits us (Odes 4.7).
Among many poetic descriptions of the seasons in English one of the best
known is Spenser’s, who gives a stanza each to ‘‘lusty Spring, all dight in
leaves of flowres,’’ ‘‘jolly Sommer, being dight / In a thin silken cassock
coloured greene,’’ ‘‘Autumne all in yellow clad,’’ and ‘‘Winter cloathed all in
frize’’ (FQ 7.7.28--31), and then twelve more to the months, starting with March
(32--43), one to day and night, one to the Hours, and one to Life and Death
(44--46). Thomson’s The Seasons is perhaps the culmination of this descriptive
genre in English. The four seasons were an equally popular theme in painting,
sculpture, and music (e.g., Vivaldi’s The Seasons).
In English the terms for summer and winter have remained constant, but
those for spring and autumn have varied a good deal. Beginning with Old
English (and setting aside spelling differences), for spring we find ‘‘lencten’’ (or
‘‘lenten’’), ‘‘new time,’’ ‘‘prime time,’’ ‘‘first summer,’’ ‘‘springing time,’’ ‘‘spring
of the year,’’ ‘‘springtime,’’ and ‘‘springtide’’; for autumn or fall we find
‘‘harvest’’ and ‘‘fall of the leaf.’’
See April, Autumn, Spring, Summer, Winter.
Seed
184
‘‘Seed’’ (Hebrew zera) is the standard biblical term for ‘‘offspring’’ or ‘‘progeny.’’
‘‘Unto thy seed will I give this land,’’ the Lord promises Abraham (Gen. 12.7; cf.
13.15, 15.18, etc.). The phrases ‘‘seed of Abraham’’ or ‘‘Abraham and his seed’’
occur four times in the Old Testament and nine times in the New. ‘‘Fear not:
for I am with thee: I will bring thy seed from the east, and gather thee from
the west’’ (Isa. 43.5). On the ‘‘seed of Abraham’’ formula, Paul makes the
hair-splitting comment, ‘‘Now to Abraham and his seed [Greek sperma] were
the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And
to thy seed, which is Christ’’ (Gal. 3.16). The Authorized Version rightly does
not substitute ‘‘offspring’’ or ‘‘children’’ for the many instances of ‘‘seed,’’ for
sometimes the seed is literally semen (from Latin semen, ‘‘seed’’), as when
Onan spills his seed on the ground: ‘‘And Onan knew that the seed should not
be his [it would be his brother’s, whose widow Onan was expected to marry];
and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled
it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother’’ (Gen. 38.9). The
concreteness of ‘‘seed’’ is never far from its other meaning, as indeed God’s
promise of ‘‘land’’ for Abraham’s seed suggests; we may also have here the
reason for the rite of circumcision, the identifying mark of Abraham’s seed on
the organ that produces it.
In classical literature ‘‘seed’’ could also mean ‘‘offspring’’ but it more often
had the slightly different sense of ‘‘race’’ or ‘‘lineage.’’ Oedipus says he would
like to see his seed (ancestry) (Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus 1077); the chorus
asks him what seed he comes from on his father’s side (Oedipus at Colonus 214).
Agamemnon’s father Atreus is ‘‘he who sowed you’’ (Ajax 1293). Cicero uses the
phrase Romani generis et seminis, ‘‘of the race and seed of the Romans’’ (Philippics
Seed
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
4.13). Lucretius and Virgil both use ‘‘seed’’ for the ‘‘brood’’ of a lion (3.741--42,
Georgics 2.151--52). Rejected by women he desired, Villon decides ‘‘I must plant
in other fields’’ (The Legacy 31).
Spenser is fond of such phrases as ‘‘sonnes of mortall seed,’’ i.e., ordinary
mortal men (FQ 1.7.8), and ‘‘thy race and royall sead’’ (3.2.33). The term
continues into recent times, mainly in religious contexts, as in R. Browning’s
line, ‘‘Adam’s sin made peccable his seed’’ (Ring and Book 8.1425).
In classical literature also ‘‘seed’’ could mean ‘‘germ,’’ ‘‘spark,’’ or ‘‘element.’’
The only instance of sperma in Homer’s epics is the ‘‘seed of fire’’ (a burning
log buried in ashes for the next day) in a simile for the way the naked
Odysseus buries himself in leaves (Odyssey 5.490); Pindar also has ‘‘seed of
flame’’ (Olymp. 7.48). Lucan has the line, ‘‘Quickly let him [Caesar] carry off the
evil seeds of cursed war’’ (3.150). Anaxagoras uses sperma for the basic
elements or ingredients of all things, and it comes to mean ‘‘element’’ in the
Epicurean system as well (e.g., Lucretius 1.501).
In his conversation with Phaedrus, Socrates plants a fruitful metaphor,
comparing the dispensing of knowledge with the planting of seeds by a
careful farmer. The unserious man will write in ink, ‘‘sowing words through
his pen,’’ but the serious man will select a soul of the right type and ‘‘plant
and sow words of knowledge’’ by conversation, words which contain a seed of
new words (Plato, Phaedrus 276b--77a). The most famous version of this
metaphor is Jesus’ Parable of the Sower, in which a man casts seeds on various
grounds; some seeds grow and some do not; Jesus explains that the seed is
the word of the kingdom and the grounds are different sorts of hearers (Matt.
13.3--23). A related parable is that of the Mustard Seed (Matt. 13.31--32). Partial
precedents may be found in the Old Testament, e.g., speech is like dew or rain
(Deut. 32.2), or like rain or snow that will make the earth bring forth and
‘‘give seed to the sower’’ (Isa. 55.10--11).
Augustine develops the image when he speaks dismissively of his father’s
attempt to have him ‘‘cultured,’’ ‘‘though his ‘culture’ really meant a lack of
cultivation from you, God, the one true and good landlord and farmer of this
field of yours, my heart’’ (Confessions 2.3, trans. Warner). Our words ‘‘seminar’’
and ‘‘seminary’’ denote places where a student’s mind is implanted with seeds
of knowledge (Latin seminarium, ‘‘plantation,’’ from semen); we say knowledge is
‘‘disseminated,’’ and we ‘‘conceive’’ an idea. Novalis titles his Romantic
manifesto Bluthenstaub (‘‘Pollen’’), and in the epigraph writes, ‘‘Friends, the soil
is poor, we must richly scatter / Seeds to produce even a modest harvest’’ (trans.
O’Brien). Wordsworth is grateful that ‘‘Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew
up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear’’ (1805 Prelude 1.305--06). Emerson
imagines the spring as renovating the earth, ‘‘Planting seeds of knowledge
pure, / Through earth to ripen, through heaven endure’’ (‘‘May-Day’’ 467--68).
The Greek myth of Persephone (Latin Proserpina) seems to have something
to do with seed, as Cicero among others claimed (Nature of the Gods 2.66): she
must spend a third of the year with Hades, and returns in the spring. A
modern personification of seed is Burns’s ‘‘John Barleycorn,’’ which takes him
through burial, resurrection, harvest, soaking, threshing, roasting, milling,
and distilling into whiskey.
See Plow.
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Serpent
186
All cultures that know them have found serpents fascinating. Indeed serpents
are said to ‘‘fascinate’’ their prey, cast a spell on them with a look; human
cultures seem to have fallen under their sway. Snakes can be extremely
dangerous, being both venomous and ‘‘subtle’’ or sneaky; they strike without
warning from grass or coverts; they can look beautiful in their glittering
multi-colored skin; they creep on their bellies but can rear up; they shed their
skin and seem rejuvenated; they sidle or meander; and in legend at least
some can fly, some swallow their own tails, and some have a head at each
end. The symbolic possibilities are rich and often ambiguous.
The most important serpent for western literature, of course, is the one in
the garden of Eden, who persuaded Eve to eat of the tree of knowledge of
good and evil and thus brought about the expulsion of Adam and Eve from
the garden and the advent of death. He was ‘‘more subtil than any beast
of the field’’ and simple Eve was no match for him (Gen. 3.1--7). St. Paul
worries that ‘‘as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty,’’ the minds of
Christians might be ‘‘corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ’’ (2 Cor.
11.3). The serpent was thus connected with knowledge or wisdom, though a
false or even fatal knowledge, and with human mortality. Behind these
connections may lie the notion that serpents are themselves immortal
because they shed their skins; their wisdom might be due to their great age
or to their intimate relation with the earth (they even look wise). In the
Sumerian/Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, a snake denies Gilgamesh the plant of
immortality by snatching it, eating it, and then shedding its skin; a
structuralist would call this a variant of the Eden story. As for wisdom, despite
the serpent’s evil connotations, Christ calls on his followers to be ‘‘wise as
serpents’’ (Matt. 10.16).
In the Christian scheme the serpent of Eden became ‘‘the great dragon,’’
‘‘that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole
world’’ (Rev. 12.9); ‘‘Oure firste foo, the serpent Sathanas,’’ in Chaucer’s phrase
(Prioress’s Tale 1748); ‘‘The infernal Serpent’’ of Milton (PL 1.34). Goethe’s devil
Mephistopheles invokes ‘‘my aunt, the famous snake’’ (Faust I 335). The
‘‘dreadful Dragon’’ that Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight vanquishes after a terrible
battle (FQ 1.11.4--55) is the dragon of Revelation, and the Knight reenacts the
victory of Michael and the angels (Rev. 12.7).
The older belief that serpents are wise, and not just subtle or cunning, was
revived in the gnostic sects of snake-worshippers, known as the Naasenes
(from Hebrew nahas, ‘‘serpent’’) and Ophites (from Greek ophis, ‘‘serpent’’). They
seem to have believed that the serpent in the garden was trying to bring true
wisdom and divinity to Adam and Eve, who were trapped in the fallen world
by a wicked creator god; as the embodiment of gnosis or wisdom the serpent
descends again as Christ. Something of this inversion of Christian symbols
may be found in Shelley, who stages an elaborate allegorical contest between
‘‘An Eagle and a Serpent wreathed in flight’’: the Serpent, ‘‘the great Spirit of
Good did creep among / The nations of mankind, and every tongue / Cursed
and blasphemed him as he passed; for none / Knew good from evil’’ (Laon and
Cythna 193, 373--76). Keats’s poem Lamia might be taken as another swerve
from orthodoxy, for the lovely serpent-woman whom Lycius loves is defeated
by a cold skeptical philosopher; the wisdom of this serpent is imagination
and love.
Serpent
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Another biblical serpent is the one Moses made out of brass at God’s
command, the sight of which cured the Israelites of snakebite (Num. 21.8--9).
Much later this piece of magical homeopathy did not sit well with Hezekiah,
who destroyed it (2 Kgs 18.4). Nonetheless John cites it as a type of Christ
crucified, faith in whom cures us of all ills (John 3.14--15).
‘‘Serpent’’ comes from Latin serpens, serpent-, from a root meaning ‘‘crawl’’ or
‘‘creep.’’ A meandering river could be called ‘‘a serpent river’’ (Jonson, ‘‘To
Robert Wroth’’ 18) without evoking Satan. The river in London’s Hyde Park is
called The Serpentine, as several Greek rivers were called Ophis or Drakon.
When Milton describes the early rivers of creation ‘‘With serpent error
wandering’’ (PL 7.302), however, it is hard to rule out suggestions of the Fall. If
to sin is to wander in error (Latin errare means ‘‘wander’’), a snake’s sidling,
meandering motion seconds its evil associations.
In Homer snakes are often omens. The Greeks recall a ‘‘great sign’’: a snake
(drakon) devours eight sparrow nestlings and their mother, and the seer
interprets it to mean that nine years must pass before they sack Troy (Iliad
2.301--30); it is as if the snake symbolizes time, or eternity, which swallows the
bird-years. Another omen is the appearance of the eagle with a serpent in its
talons; the serpent stings the bird, who lets it drop; the Trojan seer takes the
portent to mean they will not drive the Greeks away (12.200--29).
A similar image grips Orestes in Aeschylus’ Choephoroe. He sees himself and
his sister as fledglings of eagle-Agamemnon, who was killed by a deadly viper
(echidna), Clytemnestra (246--59). The imagery continues in the play: the viper
stands for underhand domestic treachery, as it does in Sophocles’ Antigone,
where Creon denounces Ismene as ‘‘a viper lurking in the house’’ (531). Close
to this sense of betrayal is Aesop’s fable of ‘‘The Snake and the Rustic’’: the
peasant rescues a frozen snake by placing it in his bosom, but when it thaws
out it bites him. ‘‘You are nourishing a viper in your bosom’’ (Petronius,
Satyricon 77) became proverbial: ‘‘O familier foo, . . . // Lyk to the naddre [adder]
in bosom sly untrewe’’ (Chaucer, Merchant’s Tale 1784--86); ‘‘O villains,
vipers, . . . // Snakes, in my heart-blood warmed, that sting my heart!’’
(Shakespeare, R2 3.2.129--31). Racine’s Oreste warns Pyrrhus against raising the
son of Hector in his home ‘‘lest this serpent reared in your bosom / Punish
you one day for having saved him’’ (Andromaque 1.2.167--68). Dryden’s Antony
accuses Cleopatra and Dolabella of being ‘‘serpents / Whom I have in my
kindly bosom warmed, / Till I am stung to death’’ (All for Love 4.1.464--66). This
snake thus becomes the emblem of ingratitude. ‘‘How sharper than a serpent’s
tooth it is,’’ Lear cries, ‘‘To have a thankless child’’ (1.4.288--89).
The snake in the bosom grew more internal and metaphorical until it could
represent an entirely mental pain or poison. In Envy’s bosom, according to
Spenser, ‘‘secretly there lay / An hatefull Snake’’ (FQ 1.4.31), while Malbecco,
followed by jealousy and scorn, was ‘‘So shamefully forlorne of womankynd, /
That, as a Snake, still lurked in his wounded mynd’’ (3.10.55). Cowper seems to
echo Milton on rivers as he begins his ‘‘Progress of Error’’ by asking the Muse
to sing how ‘‘The serpent error twines round human hearts’’ (4). ‘‘Every
mortal,’’ says Chénier, ‘‘hides in his heart, even from his own eyes, / Ambition,
the insidious serpent’’ (‘‘Le Jeu de Paume’’ st. 15).
The most common snake in the mind or heart since the Romantics, at least,
is remorse or guilt. Coleridge addresses a dissolute man who gaily laughs
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during nightly orgies ‘‘while thy remembered Home / Gnaws like a viper at
thy secret heart!’’ (‘‘Religious Musings’’ 285--86); later he dismisses his own
‘‘viper thoughts’’ of remorse in ‘‘Dejection’’ (94). Wordsworth writes of a man
suffering from ‘‘the stings of viperous remorse’’ (1850 Prelude 9.576). Shelley
imagines a bloated vice-ridden king trying to sleep, but ‘‘conscience, that
undying serpent, calls / Her venomous brood to their nocturnal task’’ (Queen
Mab 3.61--62). Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin is ‘‘gnawed by the snake of memory
and repentance’’ (1.46); Pushkin himself, in the darkness, feels ‘‘the bite of all
the burning serpents of remorse’’ (‘‘Remembrance’’). (See Worm.)
Homer compares Paris’ sudden fear at the sight of Menelaus to that of a
man who comes upon a snake and suddenly steps back ‘‘and the shivers come
over his body, / and he draws back and away, cheeks seized with green pallor’’
(Iliad 3.33--35, trans. Lattimore; see Virgil, Aeneid 2.379--81). Half a line of
Virgil’s, ‘‘a cold snake lurks in the grass’’ (Eclogues 3.93), has led to a proverbial
phrase. Fortuna, according to Dante’s Virgil (who quotes himself), shifts the
world’s goods about according to her judgment, ‘‘which is hidden like a snake
in grass’’ (Inferno 7.84). Spenser’s Despair comes ‘‘creeping close, as Snake in
hidden weedes’’ (1.9.28). This image merges with the biblical account of the
subtle serpent in the garden, and with the traitor cherished in one’s home, to
yield the symbolism of King Hamlet’s murder. The Ghost tells his son ‘‘‘Tis
given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent stung me’’ (1.5.35--36);
young Hamlet has already felt that the world is ‘‘an unweeded garden / That
grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely’’ (1.2.135--37);
the serpent turns out to be the king’s brother. (See Garden.)
The Greek word for the slough or skin of a snake, which it casts in the
spring, was geras, which also meant ‘‘old age.’’ When Pyrrhus the son of
Achilles leads the final assault on Troy, ‘‘he is like a snake that, fed on
poisonous plants / and swollen underground all winter, now / his slough cast
off, made new and bright with youth, / uncoils his slippery body to the light’’
(Aeneid 2.471--74, trans. Mandelbaum); he is his father reborn. Spenser imitates
this passage in his account of a knight who fights with newborn strength
after being wounded, ‘‘Like as a Snake, whom wearie winters teene
[affliction] / Hath worne to nought, now feeling summers might, / Casts off his
ragged skin and freshly doth him dight’’ (4.3.23). Shelley concludes Hellas with
a chorus singing of hope for a new world: ‘‘The world’s great age begins
anew, / The golden years return, / The earth doth like a snake renew / Her
winter weeds outworn’’ (1060--63). Saying ‘‘Farewell to Florida’’ as he sails for
his New England home, Stevens urges his ship on: ‘‘Go on, high ship, since
now, upon the shore, / The snake has left its skin upon the floor. // . . . and the
past is dead.’’
Stories of the foundation of a settlement or city sometimes include the
slaying of a monstrous serpent or dragon. Cadmus slays one at the site of
Thebes and sows his men with its seeds (told by Ovid, Met. 3.28--130); later he
is himself tranformed into a snake (Euripides, Bacchae 1330; Met. 4.563--614).
The cliché of the damsel in distress from a dragon rescued by a knight goes
back at least to the story of Perseus and Andromeda (Met. 4.614--803). Every
hero has to slay a dragon, it seems: Heracles (the Lernaean Hydra), St. George,
Siegfried, Beowulf, Orlando (in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso), and the Redcross
Knight, to name a few.
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Serpent
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There are other snaky creatures in classical legend, such as the Medusa, one
of the Gorgons, who had hair made of snakes. The Furies were similar ladies:
as Orestes describes the ‘‘Eumenides’’ (Furies) who come to avenge his mother,
‘‘they come like gorgons, they / wear robes of black, and they are wreathed in
a tangle / of snakes’’ (Choephoroe 1048--50, trans. Lattimore). The best-known
Fury is Allecto, whom Juno summons to start a war between the Latins and
Aeneas’ Trojans. She casts a serpent into Queen Amata’s breast and then
inflames Turnus by throwing a torch into his (Aeneid 7.349--56, 445--57). She
becomes a stock figure of terror and vengeance, as we hear from the lips of
Shakespeare’s Pistol: ‘‘Rouse up revenge from ebon den with fell Alecto’s
snake, / For Doll is in [prison]’’ (2H4 5.5.37--38).
The infant Heracles strangled two serpents in his cradle (see Theocritus,
Idyll 24). Virgil’s brief reference to this tale in the Aeneid (8.288--89) is
assimilated into a larger pattern of snake pairs: the two serpents who strangle
Laocoon (representing the two Atreidae, who will sack Troy), the two snakes
who stand out on Allecto’s head as she incites Turnus, and Cleopatra’s two
asps. The French revolutionary republic adopted Hercules, the people’s hero,
as its emblem; Wordsworth recounts the defeat of the Austrian and Prussian
troops in France: ‘‘the invaders fared as they deserved: / The herculean
Commonwealth had put forth her arms, / And throttled with an infant
godhead’s might / The snakes about her cradle’’ (1805 Prelude 10.361--64).
Perhaps because they seem to renew themselves, serpents were sometimes
held to have the power to heal. Apollo the healer god was associated with
serpents, and so was Asclepius/Aesculapius; the staff of the latter, with a
serpent around it, is the symbol adopted by the modern medical profession.
A similar staff, with two snakes twined around it, is the caduceus of
Hermes/Mercury, with which he tames Furies and conducts the shades of the
dead to the underworld. Tennyson puts it metonymically: Persephone’s eyes
‘‘oft had seen the serpent-wanded power / Draw downward into Hades with
his drift / Of flickering spectres’’ (‘‘Demeter and Persephone’’ 25--27).
The amphisbaena is an interesting snake. Its first appearance comes in a
speech of Cassandra’s in the Agamemnon; she calls Clytemnestra an
‘‘amphisbaena’’ with perhaps only the sense of treacherous ‘‘viper’’ (1233). But
it was thought to have a head at both ends, making it duplicitous or at least
unpredictable. Lucan includes it among many other serpents as ‘‘dangerous
Amphisbaena, which moves towards both its heads’’ (9.719). The Spirit of the
Hour in Shelley’s Prometheus tells how his steeds will cease from toil (time will
stop) but a sculpture will remain of his chariot and horses ‘‘Yoked to it by an
amphisbaenic snake,’’ the snake without a direction (like time), and thus a
symbol of timelessness (3.4.119).
An old symbol of eternity, apparently going back to Egypt, is the ouroboros
(or uroboros), the snake with its tail in its mouth. It appears on the coffin of
Clarissa Harlowe: ‘‘The principal device . . . is a crowned Serpent, with its tail in
its mouth, forming a ring, the emblem of Eternity’’ (Richardson, Clarissa, 3rd
edn., vol. 7 letter 82). Shelley evokes it as the ‘‘vast snake Eternity’’ (Daemon of
the World 100). Frost’s character Job speaks of ‘‘The serpent’s tail stuck down
the serpent’s throat, / Which is the symbol of eternity / And also of the way all
things come round’’ (‘‘A Masque of Reason’’ 340--42). In Yeats’s eternity: ‘‘There
all the serpent-tails are bit’’ (‘‘There,’’ in ‘‘Supernatural Songs’’).
189
Seven
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Lucan gives a catalog of horrible snakes in Libya (9.700--33), which is echoed
and outdone by Dante (Inferno 24.82--90, 25.94ff.).
Seven
Sewing and
quilting
190
see Number
‘‘The works of women are symbolical,’’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning writes. ‘‘We
sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, / Producing what? A pair of
slippers, sir . . . ’’ (Aurora Leigh 1.456--58). In countless works of literature, as in
life, women’s distinctive labor is stitching, darning, knitting, embroidering,
etc., if it is not the more fundamental labor of spinning and weaving. Where
it rises to thematic importance, it is often seen as emblematic of the
confinement, if not the enslavement, of women to endless tedious tasks, as it
is for Aurora Leigh, who escapes it first by taking walks and then by writing
poetry. It may be used as an expression or metonym of the difference between
two female characters, as for instance Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill
on the Floss has learned only plain hemming while Lucy Deane can do pretty
embroidery. But it may turn into an inward escape from confinement or
source of self-esteem, as it does for Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, whose
needlework gains her respect in town (The Scarlet Letter), or for Celie in
Walker’s The Color Purple, who sews clothing and curtains for others and gains
economic independence through her skill.
Quilting may be emblematic of social integration, both because it creates a
large and often beautiful object out of many little fragments and because they
are sometimes made collectively by women at quilting bees. In Steinbeck’s
Grapes of Wrath the communal spirit of quilt-making contrasts with the
isolation of the individual. Aunt Mehetabel, the mouselike old maid who does
much of the drudgery of the family in Canfield Fisher’s story ‘‘The Bedquilt,’’
slowly grows in importance and esteem as her genius for quilting becomes
manifest and she wins first prize for her quilt at the county fair. Not only
quilting but any needlework might connote social unifying; Woolf’s Mrs.
Dalloway takes a little time from her busy day planning her party to mend
her dress: she collects the folds together with needle and thread as she
gathers her friends at the party.
Any of this needlework may become a metaphor for telling stories or
writing poems, as both spinning and weaving have done. Dickinson’s poem
‘‘Don’t put up my Thread and Needle’’ (#617) seems to be an implicit vehicle
for the subtle craft, even perfection, of poetry. Aunt Mehetabel felt ‘‘the
supreme content of an artist who has realized his ideal.’’ The drab quilt with
two ‘‘wild’’ orange patches in Morrison’s Beloved may at first symbolize life in
the household but by the end it seems to suggest the nonlinear plot of the
novel itself with its gathering of fragments. Though women writers have
recently enriched this symbolic pattern, it may be traced back to the Greek
word rhapsodos, the ‘‘rhapsode’’ or reciter of poetry, which is a compound of
rhapt- ‘‘stitch’’ and ode, ‘‘ode’’ or ‘‘song’’; a rhapsode stitches together words to
make a song. Pindar has ‘‘bards stitching words’’ (Nem. 2.2). Our word
‘‘rhapsody’’ has entirely lost its link to sewing or weaving or labor of any
sort.
See Weaving and Spinning.
Sheep
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Sheep
For thousands of years sheep-raising was the primary industry of the hilly
regions of the Mediterranean lands, so it is not surprising that imagery of
sheep and shepherds permeates biblical and classical literature. It was only
slightly less important in several western European regions; as late as 1750
woollen goods made up half the value of all British exports. Many current
English phrases and proverbs, some of biblical or classical origin, testify to the
continuing presence of the world of sheep in our culture: we count sheep to
fall asleep, we may be fleeced of our possessions, we beware of a wolf in
sheep’s clothing, someone is a black sheep in the family, babies are innocent
lambs, and so on.
‘‘Sheep’’ is the generic term in English. The male is a ram, the female a
ewe, the young a lamb. A ram, especially if castrated, may be called a wether
(as in ‘‘bell-wether’’). A new-born lamb was until recently called a yeanling or
eanling, from the verb ‘‘yean’’ or ‘‘ean,’’ which is related to ‘‘ewe’’; see
Shakespeare, MV 1.3.79, 87, for ‘‘eanling’’ and ‘‘eaning time.’’ A newly weaned
lamb is called a weanling. Sheep are herded in a flock, and sometimes kept in
a sheepfold, sheepcote, or sheeppen. To fold is to shut sheep in the fold; to
unfold is to lead them out. ‘‘And sheep unfolded with the rising sun / Heard
the swains shout and felt their freedom won,’’ writes John Clare (‘‘The Mores’’
27--28). ‘‘The Star that bids the Shepherd fold’’ (Milton, Comus 93) is the
evening star (Vesper or Hesperus), called the ‘‘folding star’’ in Collins’s ‘‘Ode to
‘‘Evening’’ 21 and Wordsworth’s Evening Walk 280, while ‘‘th’unfolding star’’
that ‘‘calls up the shepherd’’ (Shakespeare, MM 4.2.203) is the morning star
(Lucifer or Phosphorus). (See Star.)
The Old Testament is filled with sheep metaphors. ‘‘I saw all Israel scattered
upon the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd’’ (1 Kgs 22.17). ‘‘All we like
sheep have gone astray’’ (Isa. 53.6). ‘‘My people hath been lost sheep: their
shepherds have caused them to go astray’’ (Jer. 50.6). But the 23rd Psalm
reminds us that ‘‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. / He maketh me
to lie down in green pastures’’ (1--2), while the 80th begins, ‘‘Give ear, O
Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest Joseph like a flock.’’
The New Testament makes Jesus Christ the shepherd of Israel. ‘‘I am the
good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,’’ unlike the
‘‘hireling’’ who flees at the sight of a wolf (John 10.11--16); ‘‘My sheep hear my
voice, and I know them, and they follow me’’ (10.27). Christ is particularly sent
‘‘unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel’’ (Matt. 15.24), and tells a parable of
the shepherd who leaves his ninety-nine sheep to find the one in a hundred
that is lost (Luke 15.4--7). In one of his appearances after the resurrection,
Jesus tells his disciples to ‘‘Feed my sheep’’ (John 21.15--17): they are to become
the shepherds of the endangered flock of Christians.
This metaphor remains in Christian churches today. Christians are a flock
or congregation (from Latin grex, ‘‘flock’’ or ‘‘herd’’), their minister may be
called a pastor (Latin for ‘‘shepherd’’; cf. English ‘‘pasture’’), and if they have a
bishop he may carry a shepherd’s crook or crosier. ‘‘Perhaps the use of this
particular convention,’’ Northrop Frye writes (Anatomy of Criticism 143), ‘‘is due
to the fact that, being stupid, affectionate, gregarious, and easily stampeded,
the societies formed by sheep are most like human ones.’’ But Dante has a
profounder meditation on the sheeplike character of the true Christian in a
191
Sheep
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wonderful simile: ‘‘Even as sheep that move, first one, then two, / then three,
out of the fold -- the others also / stand, eyes and muzzles lowered, timidly; /
and what the first sheep does, the others do, / and if it halts, they huddle
close behind, / simple and quiet and not knowing why: / so, then, I saw those
spirits in the front / of that flock favored by good fortune move -- / their looks
were modest; seemly, slow, their walk’’ (Purgatorio 3.79--87, trans. Mandelbaum).
He calls both the Baptistry of San Giovanni (St. John) and the city of Florence
a ‘‘sheepfold’’ (ovile) (Paradiso 16.25, 25.5--6).
Christ’s denunciation of ‘‘hireling’’ shepherds also continues in Dante: he
calls Clement V a ‘‘lawless shepherd’’ (Inferno 19.83), for example, and in a
variant of the wolf in sheep’s clothing he denounces ‘‘rapacious wolves /
clothed in the cloaks of shepherds’’ (Paradiso 27.55--56; cf. 9.132). Milton in
Lycidas has St. Peter denounce the false shepherds that ‘‘for their bellies’ sake, /
Creep and intrude and climb into the fold’’; they are ‘‘Blind mouths! that
scarce themselves know how to hold / A Sheep-hook,’’ and they leave their
sheep hungry, infected by disease, and prey to the wolf (113--29).
Kings have been called ‘‘shepherd of the people’’ in many cultures since
ancient Egypt. In the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh the king is the
‘‘Shepherd of Uruk.’’ ‘‘Shepherd of the people’’ is a frequent epithet of
Agamemnon in Homer’s Iliad. Also in the Iliad is a strangely effective simile
that likens the Trojan army clamoring for battle to a flock of milk-swollen
ewes bleating incessantly when they hear their lambs (4.333--35). In Beowulf
the word hyrde (‘‘herd,’’ i.e., ‘‘shepherd’’) is a synonym for cyning (‘‘king’’).
The classical tradition of pastoral poetry, hinted at in Homer but generally
taken to date from Theocritus in the third century bc, is based on an
idealized and simplified version of the life of shepherds and goatherds.
Pastoral literature is no longer popular, but for over two thousand years the
greatest poets, playwrights, and even novelists used the pastoral mode for
elegy, comedy, tragedy, romance, and satire. Two of Shakespeare’s plays, for
example, are pastoral: As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale. This classical
tradition could combine with the Christian, as it does in the passage just
quoted from Lycidas, Milton’s pastoral elegy.
Another metaphor in the New Testament combines uneasily with that of
the shepherd: Jesus as the Lamb. In Exodus 12 God institutes the ceremony of
Passover (Hebrew pesach), which requires each household to sacrifice a lamb:
‘‘your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year’’ (5). The Last
Supper was the meal (seder) of the first night of Passover, and the Crucifixion
then seemed a sacrifice of a human lamb for the salvation of his household.
John the Baptist anticipates the events of Easter when he greets Jesus by
saying, ‘‘Behold the Lamb of God [Greek ho amnos tou theou, Latin agnus dei],
which taketh away the sin of the world’’ (John 1.29). John of Patmos constantly
calls Christ the Lamb (Greek to arnion) in his vision of the Second Coming. The
faithful ‘‘have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the
Lamb’’ (Rev. 7.14) and they are invited to ‘‘the marriage supper of the Lamb’’
(19.9). ‘‘Lamb’’ in Revelation becomes a name or title that loses its connection
to real lambs: John even speaks, absurdly, of ‘‘the wrath of the Lamb’’ (6.16).
Sheep were regularly sacrificed in Greek and Latin culture as well. The ram
was particularly offered to Aphrodite. Lambs are sacrificed several times in
Homer’s two epics.
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Shell
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The traditional enemy of sheep, and especially lambs, is the wolf. ‘‘Till the
wolf and the lamb be united’’ seems to have been a Greek equivalent to
‘‘never’’ (Aristophanes, Peace 1076). But Isaiah memorably imagines a time
when the land is restored to the Lord’s favor: ‘‘The wolf shall also dwell with
the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the
young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them’’ (11.6).
To leave someone behind ‘‘as a sheep among wolves’’ was also proverbial in
Greek (e.g., Herodotus 4.149). ‘‘Baneful to folds is the wolf,’’ is Virgil’s succinct
if obvious comment (Eclogues 3.80). Shakespeare’s Cassius comments on Julius
Caesar’s tyranny: ‘‘I know he would not be a wolf / But that he sees the
Romans are but sheep’’ (1.3.104--05). Jesus’ use of the metaphor to his disciples,
‘‘Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves’’ (Matt. 10.16), has
had a long influence, notably in Silone’s novel Bread and Wine. (See Wolf.) So
also has Jesus’ prophecy of Judgment Day, when the Son of Man shall separate
the nations ‘‘as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: / And he shall
set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left’’; the sheep shall be
saved and the goats damned (Matt. 25.32--33).
In English poetry adjectives such as ‘‘harmless,’’ ‘‘humble,’’ and ‘‘simple’’ got
attached to ‘‘sheep’’ and ‘‘lambs’’ -- e.g., ‘‘harmless sheep’’ in Shakespeare’s 3H6
5.6.8 and ‘‘harmless Race’’ in Thomson’s ‘‘Summer’’ 388 -- but one adjective
whose meaning has since changed was once the distinctive epithet: ‘‘silly.’’
Sometimes found in the form ‘‘seely,’’ its oldest sense is ‘‘blissful’’ and
‘‘blessed’’ (cf. modern German selig, ‘‘blessed’’) and by extension ‘‘innocent,’’
‘‘harmless,’’ and ‘‘simple,’’ then ‘‘pitiable’’ and ‘‘helpless.’’ It is the perfect
epithet of Christians, and hence of sheep. Spenser has ‘‘silly/seely sheep/lamb’’
about ten times, and ‘‘silly/seely shepherd’’ twice. In Shakespeare we hear of
‘‘shepherds looking on their silly sheep’’ (3H6 2.5.43) and ‘‘silly lamb(s)’’ (Venus
1098, Lucrece 167). The phrase was so well established by Shakespeare’s day that
his comic characters can play on it in their badinage: ‘‘A silly answer, and
fitting well a sheep’’ 2GV 1.1.81). Milton imagines the unsuspecting shepherds
on the first Christmas: ‘‘Perhaps their loves, or else their sheep, / Was all that
did their silly thoughts so busy keep’’ (‘‘Nativity’’ 91--92). The term remained in
use through the nineteenth century, though with an archaic ring, as in
Matthew Arnold’s pastoral elegy ‘‘Thyrsis’’ (45).
Shell
Shield
Ship
see Harp
see Armor
A fragment of the early Greek lyric poet Alcaeus describes a ship struggling
through a fierce storm at sea: ‘‘one wave rolls in from this side, another from
that . . . bilge-water covers the mast-hold; all the sail lets the light through
now . . . ’’ (frag. 208, trans. Campbell). There is nothing in what survives to
suggest that this is anything other than what it seems, but Heraclitus of
Helicarnassus tells us that it is an allegory for political strife; Archilochus, he
says, another poet, used the same symbolism (Homeric Allegories). If Heraclitus
is right, these are the earliest examples of the ship-of-state metaphor, whereby
the king or tyrant is the captain or helmsman, the citizens are the crew, the
weather is all political, and the goal is safe harbor. It is found in a poem
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Ship
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attributed to Theognis, where he complains of a mutinous crew that has
deposed the pilot and refused to bail (667 -- 82). It is found throughout
Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes (1--3, 62--64, 208--10, 652), and in Sophocles’
Antigone (163, 189); in both cases it is Thebes that is rocked by waves or set
straight again. It is explicitly developed in Plato’s Republic 488a--89b.
The Alcaeus poem probably inspired a similar allegory by Horace (Odes 1.14).
It begins: ‘‘Oh Ship! New billows sweep thee out / Seaward. What wilt thou?
Hold the port, be stout’’; this translation is by W. E. Gladstone, who captained
the British ship of state for many years. Dante denounces Florence as ‘‘a ship
without a helmsman in a great storm’’ (Purgatorio 6.77). The metaphor is
concealed in the words ‘‘govern’’ and ‘‘government,’’ which descend from Latin
guberno, from Greek kuberno, ‘‘steer (a ship).’’ It has informed many modern
literary works, more or less by implication in Shakespeare’s Tempest and
Melville’s Moby-Dick, and explicitly in the anonymous fifteenth-century poem
‘‘The Ship of State’’ (where the mast is Prince Edward, the stern is the Duke of
Somerset, etc.); Longfellow’s ‘‘The Building of the Ship’’; Whitman’s lament for
Lincoln, ‘‘O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done’’; and Auden’s ‘‘The
Ship.’’ The whole of humankind might be thought of as launched upon a sea,
an idea encapsulated in the recent catch-phrase ‘‘Spaceship Earth.’’
A partly parallel symbolism lies in the identification of the Christian
church as a ship, which derives largely from the typological mode of reading
the Old Testament. Noah’s ark is the ‘‘type’’ of the church, outside of which
there is no salvation. So the long central room of a Gothic church is called
the nave, from Latin navis, ‘‘ship.’’ The mast is inevitably likened to the cross.
Thousands of literary works, of course, including many central to the
western tradition, are based on voyages across perilous seas, through narrow
straits, past whirlpools and sea-monsters, against divine or magical forces,
with stops at islands friendly or hostile, and so on; Homer’s Odyssey,
Apollonius’ Argonautica, Virgil’s Aeneid, Camoens’ The Lusiads, Coleridge’s Rime of
the Ancient Mariner, and Melville’s Moby-Dick are a few examples. W. H. Auden
has observed (in The Enchafed Flood) that for most of human history no one
went to sea unless one had to, in literature as in life, whereas in the Romantic
era a shift took place: now the sea beckoned for its own sake, and life ashore
seemed tame and unworthy. So Byron: ‘‘Once more upon the waters! yet once
more! / And the waves bound beneath me as a steed / That knows its rider.
Welcome to their roar! / Swift be their guidance, wheresoe’er it lead!’’ (Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage 3.10--13); Baudelaire: ‘‘But true travellers are those, and
those alone, who set out / Just to set out; light hearts, like balloons, / They
never swerve from their destiny, / And, without knowing why, always say:
Onward!’’ (‘‘Le Voyage’’ 17--20); or John Masefield’s ‘‘Sea Fever.’’ Sometimes the
voyage stands for one’s progress through ‘‘the sea of life,’’ as Arnold calls it in
‘‘Human Life’’ (27). (See Path.)
In classical myth a small boat piloted by Charon takes the dead to Hades, as
if to show that death is on ‘‘the other shore’’ (as we still sometimes say)
opposite this life. This boat is itself symbolized, for example, by the Venetian
gondola, painted ‘‘coffin-black,’’ that ferries Gustav Aschenbach to his
destination in Mann’s Death in Venice.
Pindar likens the composition of a work to a nautical voyage (Nem. 3.27) and
asks the Muse to send the ‘‘wind of song’’ (Pyth. 4.3) or ‘‘wind of words’’ (Nem.
194
Siege
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6.28). In his poem about farming Virgil invites his patron Maecenas to ‘‘Set
sail with me on this my enterprise,’’ while later in the same work he furls his
sail and points prow to land (Georgics 2.41, 4.117). The final ode of Horace’s four
books begins, ‘‘For wishing to speak of battles and conquered cities Phoebus
rebukes me with his lyre, lest I set my little sail on the great Tyrrhenian Sea’’
(4.15.1--4). Propertius elaborates this conceit in the same context: Apollo warns
him away from writing epics, for ‘‘Your talent’s skiff is not to be overladen. /
Let one oar scour the water, the other sand, / And you’ll be safe: at sea, the
tumult’s vast’’ (3.3.22--24, trans. Shepherd). Dante’s Purgatorio begins with the
same trope: ‘‘To course across more kindly waters now / my talent’s little
vessel lifts her sails, / leaving behind herself a sea so cruel’’ (1.1--3, trans.
Mandelbaum); a greatly elaborated version comes early in the Paradiso (2.1--15).
Chaucer imitates: ‘‘Owt of thise blake wawes [waves] for to saylle, / O wynd, o
wynd, the weder gynneth clere; / For in this see the boot hath swych
travaylle, / Of my connyng [skill], that unneth [hardly] I it steere’’ (Troilus 2.1--4).
Camoens makes the same comparison, and adds that he is on a real voyage
even as he writes (Lusiads 7.78). As Spenser launches the final canto of book 1
of The Faerie Queene (1.12.1) he calls his poem ‘‘my feeble barke’’; he concludes
the canto by declaring the poem must land some passengers and repair her
tackles before setting out again (1.12.42; see 6.12.1). After saying he has left
out a long tale of two tragic lovers, Wordsworth adds, ‘‘But our little
bark / On a strong river boldly hath been launched; / And from the driving
current should we turn / To loiter wilfully within creek, / Howe’er attractive,
Fellow voyager! / Would’st thou not chide?’’ (1850 Prelude 9.559--64). Keats
promises to ‘‘steer / My little boat, for many quiet hours, / With streams that
deepen freshly into bowers’’ (Endymion 1.46--48). After five cantos of Don Juan,
Byron takes stock: ‘‘Thus far our chronicle, and now we pause, / Though not
for want of matter; but ‘tis time, / According to the ancient epic laws, / To
slacken sail and anchor with our rhyme’’ (5.1265--68; see 10.23--32). As
Pushkin nears the end of Eugene Onegin he turns to his reader for the last
time: ‘‘Let us congratulate / each other on attaining land’’ (8.48.12--13, trans.
Nabokov).
Siege
The main metaphorical use of a military siege of a city or fortress is the
wooing or seduction of a woman, especially a maiden. This metaphor is
probably prehistoric, for many ancient citadels were identified with a virgin
goddess, notably Athena, protectress of the Acropolis of Athens and several
other Greek cities. Only after Odysseus and Diomedes stole Troy’s sacred
statue of Athena, the Palladion, did the city fall to its besiegers. Possibly in
two passages of Homer the city is likened to a woman pursued: Achilles
wishes that he and Patroclus could alone ‘‘loosen Troy’s sacred girdle,’’ though
kredemna might mean ‘‘veil’’ or ‘‘head-bindings’’ (Iliad 16.100; cf. Odyssey 13.388).
More important, the two epics that inaugurate western literature, however
much they differ, begin in a curiously similar situation. In the Iliad Greeks
besiege a city in order to rescue a woman who has been abducted from
another citadel, while in the Odyssey a woman is the object of a host of
unwelcome suitors. The rescuer of Penelope is the same who devised the sack
of Troy for Helen’s sake, in both cases by devious means; in both epics he is
the favorite of Athena.
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Silver
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In English an unconquered city is a ‘‘maiden’’ city. Venice, writes
Wordsworth, ‘‘was a maiden City, bright and free; / No guile seduced, no force
could violate’’ (‘‘On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic’’). We say a fortress
is ‘‘impregnable,’’ as if to say it cannot be raped, though that word respells a
different root from the one in ‘‘pregnant.’’
Perhaps the greatest elaboration of this metaphor is found in de Lorris and
de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, where a woman is a besieged tower, defended by
Rebuff, Evil Tongue, Jealousy, and the like, coaxed open by Fair Welcome,
assaulted by an army of Love, and so on. When Sidney’s Stella is asleep
Astrophel decides, ‘‘Now will I invade the fort’’ to steal a kiss, but he retreats
(‘‘Stella Sleeping’’). Spenser’s Sansloy first tries to seduce Una with words -‘‘her to persuade that stubborne fort to yilde [yield]’’ -- and then, when his
flattery fails, ‘‘with greedy force he gan the fort assayle, / . . . / And win rich
spoils of ransackt chastitee’’ (FQ 1.6.3,5; see 1.2.25). Tennyson combines literal
with figurative in his account of fair Lyonors, in her castle, and a knight who
‘‘so besieges her / To break her will, and make her wed with him’’ (‘‘Gareth
and Lynette’’ 601--02).
It is not only a woman or a woman’s honor that may be thought of as a
fortress under attack. ‘‘What warre so cruel, or what siege so sore,’’ Spenser
asks, ‘‘As that which strong affections doe apply / Against the forte of
reason . . . ?’’ He goes on to paint an elaborate allegorical scene of the siege,
where enemy batteries, for example, assail five bulwarks representing the five
senses. A ‘‘noble Virgin,’’ of course, is the ‘‘Ladie of the Place,’’ Alma, the soul
(FQ 2.11.1--16). Sidney reverses the standard trope and portrays his heart as
conquered by Stella and ‘‘Whole armies of thy beauties entered in’’ (‘‘Astrophel
and Stella’’ 36). Hamlet tells how one’s innate vice might grow, ‘‘Oft breaking
down the pales and forts of reason’’ (1.4.28), a metaphor with large resonance
in a play set in a fort under threat by an external enemy but already taken by
internal subterfuge.
Silver
196
Silver is ‘‘the second metal,’’ in Saint-Amant’s phrase (‘‘Winter in the Alps’’),
following gold. ‘‘Gold and silver’’ or ‘‘silver and gold’’ are commonplaces in
classical literature, and they occur in the same or successive verses scores of
times in the Bible; often there is no distinction in meaning. Both ‘‘gold’’ and
‘‘silver’’ are synonyms for money in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and many modern
languages (cf. French argent). But wherever there is a ranking, silver comes
second, as the monetary value of the metal is always less than that of gold.
The silver race was the second of the five races described by Hesiod, and it
was much inferior to the golden (see Metal); ‘‘It was the silver age that saw the
first adulterers,’’ according to Juvenal (6.24). In literary history the distinction
between a golden and silver age of Roman literature has been current since
the seventeenth century. ‘‘With Ovid,’’ Dryden says, ‘‘ended the golden age
of the Roman tongue’’ (‘‘Preface’’ to the Fables); the silver age was the period
from the death of Augustus to that of Hadrian. A witty essay by Peacock called
‘‘The Four Ages of Poetry’’ traces two cycles from iron through gold and silver
to brass, the second brass age being the contemporary one; it was this
scornful survey that prompted Shelley’s ‘‘A Defence of Poetry.’’ A well-known
anthology by Gerald Bullet, Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947),
defines a set of ‘‘minor’’ English poets (Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Raleigh, Davies),
Sirius
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
while C. S Lewis defines a ‘‘Golden Age’’ of English poetry, that of the
Elizabethans (Spenser, Sidney, Marlowe), as ‘‘innocent or ingenuous’’ (English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century [London, 1954] 64).
As a bright, precious metal silver belongs to the classical gods only less
insistently than gold. Apollo is particularly associated with a silver bow;
‘‘silverbow’’ is a title of his in the Iliad (1.37); Pindar refers to ‘‘the silver bow
of Phoebus’’ (Olymp. 9.32--33). The Homeric Hymn to Artemis gives Apollo’s sister
a golden bow (5), as does Ovid (Met. 1.697), but later Artemis (or Diana) seems
to have acquired a silver one, probably to align her better with the moon, of
which she is regent. So ‘‘the moon, like to a silver bow / New bent in heaven,’’
suggests the reign of Diana the huntress in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1.1.9--10); Pericles refers to Diana’s ‘‘silver livery’’ (Per 5.3.7); while in Milton’s
Comus Diana is the ‘‘Fair silver-shafted Queen forever chaste’’ (442). For the
moon is always silver. ‘‘Silver moon’’ and various more decorative phrases such
as ‘‘faire Phebe with her silver face’’ recur in Spenser (FQ 2.2.44), Shakespeare,
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and many other poets. The sun, however, is always
golden. In parallel couplets Spenser has ‘‘Phoebus golden face’’ and ‘‘silver
Cynthia’’ (1.7.34), and after centuries of this pairing Stevens states as a dull
fact ‘‘The sun is gold, the moon is silver’’ (‘‘Mandolin and Liqueurs’’). (For more
examples, see Gold.)
‘‘Silver-eddying’’ is an epithet of rivers in Homer, and it has been attached to
rivers and other forms of water ever since. In a persistent display of the power
of poetry over fact, the Thames has been silver for centuries: ‘‘the christall
Thamis wont to slide / In silver channell’’ (Spenser, ‘‘Ruins of time’’ 134--35);
‘‘silver Thames’’ (Jonson, Forest 6.15); ‘‘silver Thames’’ (twice in Wordsworth);
but in a novel, a more realistic touch: ‘‘A lodging . . . which looked out upon
the silver Thames (for the Thames was silver then)’’ (Kingsley, Westward Ho! 12).
A beautiful voice or other sound is frequently silver. When Spenser’s
Belphoebe speaks one hears ‘‘A silver sound, that heavenly musicke seemd to
make’’ (FQ 2.3.24); hearing Juliet say his name, Romeo notes ‘‘How silver-sweet
sound lovers’ tongues by night’’ (2.2.166); evoking silver rivers as well as music
Shelley’s Asia feels ‘‘My soul is an enchanted Boat / Which, like a sleeping
swan, doth float / Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing’’ (PU 2.5.72--74);
Keats imagines Spenser blowing a ‘‘silver trumpet’’ (‘‘Ode to Apollo’’ 30);
Emerson mourns the loss of his boy with his ‘‘silver warble wild’’ (‘‘Threnody’’
12). It was already such a cliché by Shakespeare’s day that a servant in Romeo
and Juliet can ask why a song has the phrase ‘‘music with her silver sound’’;
none of the musicians knows the answer, so they resort to quips: ‘‘I say ‘silver
sound’ because musicians sound for silver’’ (4.5.128--41).
See Metal, Moon.
Sirius
Skylark
Sleep
Snake
see Dog star, under Star
see Lark
see Dream, Night
see Serpent
197
Sowing
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Sowing
Sparrow
Spider
198
see Seed
Sparrows occur once in Homer as the helpless birds swallowed by a snake in
an omen forecasting the length of the war (Iliad 2.308--30); the eight fledglings
and their mother stand for the nine years already devoured by time.
There are three more distinctive ancient associations of sparrows. It is one
of the birds of Aphrodite, for it is sparrows not doves that pull her chariot in
Sappho’s ‘‘Ode to Aphrodite,’’ probably because they seemed the most lustful
of common birds. An ancient commentator on the Iliad passage states the
sparrow is sacred to the goddess. Sparrows escort Venus’ dove-driven chariot in
Apuleius (Met. 6.6). Strouthos (‘‘sparrow’’) in Greek could mean a ‘‘lewd fellow’’
or ‘‘lecher,’’ as did passer in Latin (Juvenal 9.54); the latter could also be a term
of endearment between lovers. Chaucer’s Summoner was ‘‘As hoot . . . and
lecherous as a sparwe’’ (CT Gen. Pro. 626). In his list of distinctive bird features
Sidney has ‘‘Sparrow’s letchery’’ (First Eclogues 10.79). Shakespeare’s Lucio
complains of the puritanical Angelo that ‘‘Sparrows must not build in his
house-eaves because they are lecherous’’ (MM 3.2.175--76). There are no Latin
examples of the sparrows of Venus, but in his bird catalog Chaucer lists ‘‘The
sparwe, Venus sone’’ (Parliament of Fowls 351), Sidney sees ‘‘a chariot faire by
doves and sparrowes guided’’ that carries Venus and Diana (Fourth Eclogues
73.59), and Marlowe’s Hero tells Leander that ‘‘I play / With Venus’ swans and
sparrows all the day’’ (351--52). Robert Browning writes ‘‘spring bade the
sparrows pair’’ (‘‘Youth and Art’’ 33).
The most famous individual sparrow is Lesbia’s pet, celebrated in two
poems by Catullus (2 and 3). The first is addressed to the bird and describes
the way his girl plays with it, the second is a lament over its death. So well
known were these poems that Martial refers to the bird half a dozen times,
once claiming that his Stella’s pet dove surpasses Catullus’ sparrow (1.7.1--3);
see also Juvenal 6.8. (There is some question whether the bird, passer, is really
a sparrow and not a thrush or goldfinch.) Skelton’s long poem Phyllyp Sparowe,
an elegy for a woman’s pet bird killed by a cat, seems inspired by Catullus.
Byron translated Catullus’ lament into English.
The third ancient use of the sparrow is Jesus’ example of God’s providence:
‘‘Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on
the ground without your Father’’; ‘‘Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value
than many sparrows’’ (Matt. 10.29,31). It marks the final turn in Hamlet’s
readiness that he cites Matthew: ‘‘We defy augury. There is a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow’’ (5.2.215--16). According to Pope, God sees
‘‘with equal eye . . . / A hero perish, or a sparrow fall’’ (Essay on Man 1.87--88).
A charming poem that tries to see sparrows with fresh eyes, without
literary connotations, is W. C. Williams’s ‘‘The Sparrow.’’
Most of the spider’s literary appearances have to do with spinning and
weaving. The Greek tale of the girl Arachne (Greek for ‘‘spider’’) and her
weaving contest with Athena is memorably told by Ovid (Met. 6.1--145). The
word ‘‘spider,’’ from Old English spithra, is from the same root as ‘‘spin’’; the
German word for ‘‘spider’’ is Spinne. (The source of Greek arachne and Latin
araneus is unknown.)
Spleen
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Spider webs are of course a sign of neglect or decay (as in Catullus 68.49),
but an interesting use of them in Homer with that sense -- where Telemachus
wonders whether his mother has remarried and the bed of Odysseus lies
empty ‘‘holding evil spider webs’’ (Odyssey 16.35) -- resonates with the only
other appearance of the word, in a simile for the net Hephaestus contrives to
catch his unfaithful wife Aphrodite in bed with Ares (8.280). With a similar
set of associations, the image is used by the chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon,
who bewail the dead Agamemnon, ‘‘lying in this web of the spider,’’ his
faithless wife Clytemnestra (1492). We are reminded that spiders weave webs
to catch unwary insects.
Spider webs are used as examples of fineness or delicacy, as in Hephaestus’
skillful net or the hair of a girl Ovid describes (Amores 1.14.7--8). Spenser has
Clotho the Fate show ‘‘thrids so thin as spiders frame’’ (FQ 4.2.50).
The fact that spiders produce their threads out of their own abdomen, to
weave what Shakespeare calls a ‘‘self-drawing web’’ (H8 1.1.63), has suggested a
symbolic contrast to the bee, which gathers its materials from many sources.
Swift’s Battle of the Books centers on a debate between the ‘‘modern’’ spider,
who spins books out of his own entrails (‘‘the guts of modern brains’’), and
the ‘‘ancient’’ bee, who ranges over nature and collects knowledge with great
labor; the one produces dirt and poison, the other honey and wax. (See Bee.)
The modern Walt Whitman, by contrast, compares the human soul to ‘‘A
noiseless patient spider’’ (the title of a poem); the spider launches forth
filaments into the vast space around it, as the soul must, ‘‘Till the gossamer
thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.’’
Jonathan Edwards famously adduces a spider dangling over a fire as a type
or symbol of the human sinner (‘‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’’).
Robert Frost finds a white spider on a white flower holding a dead white moth
as something like another type, perhaps an instance of the ‘‘design of
darkness to appall’’ (‘‘Design’’).
After Emma Bovary’s marriage, ‘‘boredom, like a silent spider, was weaving
its web in the shadows, in every corner of her heart’’ (Flaubert, Madame Bovary,
chap. 7).
Spleen
see Bile
Spring
Spring is the most celebrated of seasons. Poets since antiquity have delighted
in spring’s return and relished its many distinctive features. Certain
conventions were established early that have influenced poetry up to the
present.
The Greeks and Romans considered spring the beginning of the year,
whence the Latin phrase primum tempus, ‘‘first season,’’ which yields French
printemps and the Middle English translation ‘‘prymetyme.’’ In English
‘‘prime’’ by itself could mean ‘‘spring’’ as well as the first hour of the day; so
Shakespeare: ‘‘The lovely April of her prime’’ and ‘‘The teeming autumn, big
with rich increase, / Bearing the wanton burden of the prime’’ (Sonnets 3.10,
97.6--7). The main Latin word for spring, ver (whence English ‘‘vernal’’), was
combined with prima to give the Italian and Spanish primavera. Latin ver is
cognate with Greek ear; the season of spring (hore earos) is one of the three
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Spring
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seasons (horai) distinguished by Hesiod. In Homer hore alone occasionally
means ‘‘spring,’’ as if it were the season.
The Old English word for ‘‘spring’’ was ‘‘lencten’’ or ‘‘lenten’’ (probably akin
to ‘‘length,’’ for it is the time when days noticeably lengthen), shortened to
‘‘lent’’ and now restricted to the church season before Easter; German Lenz
preserves the original meaning. A Middle English lyric begins: ‘‘Lenten ys
come with love to toune.’’ The word ‘‘spring,’’ as its other meanings today
imply, meant a rise or leap of something, hence a first onset; the phrase
‘‘springing time’’ was used in the fourteenth century, and ‘‘spring of the year’’
and ‘‘spring of the leaf’’ were once common. As a verb it was often found in
poems: ‘‘When the nightingale sings the woods waxen green, / Leaf and grass
and blossom springs in April’’ (MS Harley 2253). Shakespeare has ‘‘springing
things’’ (young growths) and ‘‘tender spring’’ (young shoot or bud) (Venus 417,
656). The King James Bible has ‘‘spring of the day’’ (1 Sam. 9.26) and
‘‘dayspring’’ (Job 38.12, Luke 1.78) for dawn. ‘‘Springtide’’ adds ‘‘tide,’’ meaning
‘‘time.’’ Shakespeare also has ‘‘spring of time’’ (R2 5.2.50), and, most striking,
‘‘middle summer’s spring’’ (MND 2.1.82). German Fruhling and (less common)
Fruhjahr are from fruh, ‘‘early.’’
Latin poetry has several descriptions of spring that set the conventions:
winter thaws and relaxes its grip, Venus or love pervades the land, the Graces
and Nymphs dance, swallows or cuckoos and then nightingales sing, birds and
then beasts seek their mates, showers descend as heaven impregnates the
earth, the west wind (Zephyrus or Favonius) gently blows, the land turns
green and then bright or purple with buds and blossoms, Flora strews flowers,
dew falls on them, boys and girls seek each other, and so on. See Lucretius
1.10--20, 250--61, 2.991--98, 5.737--47; Horace, Odes 1.4, 4.7, 4.12; Virgil, Georgics
2.323--35. These conventions were crystallized in medieval Latin poetry, such
as the Carmina Burana, and in Provençal and Old French songs; a common
type of dance song in Old French, for example, was the reverdie or
‘‘regreening.’’ The best-known brief description of spring in Middle English is
the opening of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. (See West wind.)
A common theme in medieval poetry was the ‘‘debate’’ or conflictus between
Winter and Spring. The Owl and the Nightingale (c. 1200) is such a poem, where
the owl represents winter and the nightingale, of course, spring. An echo of
this theme is found in the concluding song of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Another great influence on post-classical poetry of spring is this passage
from the Song of Solomon: ‘‘For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and
gone; / The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is
come, and the voice of the turtle [dove] is heard in our land; / The fig tree
putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good
smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away’’ (2.11--13).
Spring is the season of love, ‘‘For love is crowned with the prime, / In
spring-time’’ (Shakespeare, AYLI 5.3.32--33). A nearly formulaic epithet for
spring in medieval and Renaissance poetry is ‘‘lusty.’’ The most often quoted
English line on the subject is probably Tennyson’s: ‘‘In the spring a young
man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’’ (‘‘Locksley Hall’’ 20).
The biblical Paradise and the classical Golden Age (as found in Ovid,
Metamorphoses 1.107--10) were thought of as places of perpetual spring. The
orchard of Alcinous in Homer’s Odyssey is the classical prototype: it always has
200
Spring (Wellspring)
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some trees with ripe fruit, for ‘‘always Zephyrus blowing on the fruits brings
some to ripeness while he starts others’’ (7.112--21). Virgil speculates in the
Georgics that spring was the season at the dawn of the infant world (2.337--43).
Genesis 1.11 was read as suggesting that seed and fruit were once
simultaneous, but the classical sources were sufficient to prompt descriptions
of the Garden of Eden as the site of ‘‘Eternal Spring’’ where there are
‘‘goodliest Trees loaden with fairest Fruit, / Blossoms and Fruits at once,’’ as
Milton puts it (PL 4.268, 147--48); ‘‘spring and autumn here / Danced hand in
hand’’ (5.394--95). Spenser’s account of the Garden of Adonis elaborates the
tradition: ‘‘There is continuall Spring, and harvest there / Continuall, both
meeting at one tyme; / For both the boughes doe laughing blossoms beare, /
And with fresh colours decke the wanton Pryme, / And eke attonce the heavy
trees they clyme, / Which seeme to labour under their fruites lode’’ (FQ 3.6.42).
In the masque of The Tempest, Ceres blesses the lovers with the wish that
‘‘Spring come to you at the farthest / In the very end of harvest’’ (4.1.114--15).
‘‘Great Spring, before [the Deluge], / Green’d all the Year,’’ according to
Thomson (‘‘Spring’’ 320). And Shelley’s vision of the renovated world in Queen
Mab is a garden with ‘‘ever verdant trees’’ where ‘‘fruits are ever ripe, flowers
ever fair, / And autumn proudly bears her matron grace, / Kindling a flush on
the fair cheek of spring’’ (8.118--21).
Spring, of course, is metaphorical of youth. The ‘‘prime of youth’’ used to
refer to one’s twenties, and phrases such as ‘‘springtime of life’’ are
commonplaces (French printemps de la vie, German Lenz des Lebens).
See Autumn, Seasons, Summer, Winter.
Spring (Wellspring)
Staff
Stage
Star
see Fountain
see Bread
see Theatre
Among their many meanings, stars have stood for numerousness, glory,
prophecy, times of night or year, and fate or ‘‘influence’’; many particular
stars, of course, have had particular senses.
In biblical and classical literature ‘‘star’’ can refer to any of the heavenly
bodies, including (occasionally) to the sun and the moon. What we call a
planet was a ‘‘wandering star’’ (Greek aster planetes), what we call a comet was
a ‘‘hairy star’’ (aster kometes); today we still call a meteor a ‘‘shooting star’’ or
‘‘falling star,’’ though we know it is not a star in the strict sense. Ovid once
uses sidus (‘‘star’’) for the sun (Met. 1.424); Virgil likens an advancing army to a
storm-cloud ‘‘cutting off the star’’ (abrupto sidere), where the star must be the
sun (Aeneid 12.451). Seneca calls the moon the ‘‘star of the night’’ (Medea 750).
After their awe-inspiring beauty and distance, perhaps the most striking
fact about stars is the sheer number of them, indeed a numberless number.
Stars in the Bible are a commonplace for numerousness or innumerability.
The Lord promises Abram: ‘‘Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if
thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, so shall thy seed be’’
(Gen. 15.5; see 26.4). Stars are sometimes coupled with sand for the same
purpose: ‘‘I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand
201
Star
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which is upon the sea shore’’ (22.17; see Hebr. 11.12). Thus a dramatic way of
expressing the mightiness of God is to say ‘‘He telleth the number of the
stars; he calleth them all by their names’’ (Ps. 147.4).
In the Iliad there is a striking simile that, in typical Homeric fashion,
elaborates a scene beyond its point, which is simply numerousness: ‘‘As when
in the sky the stars about the moon’s shining / are seen in all their glory,
when the air has fallen to stillness, / And all the high places of the hills are
clear, and the shoulders out-jutting, / and the deep ravines, as endless bright
air spills from the heavens / and all the stars are seen, to make glad the heart
of the shepherd; / such in their numbers blazed the watchfires the Trojans
were burning ‘‘ (8.555--60, trans. Lattimore).
Catullus tells Lesbia he wants as many kisses as the sand in Libya and the
stars at night (7.3--7). After a long list of Nereids, Spenser relies on that
commonplace to express their countlessness: it would be easier ‘‘To tell the
sands, or count the starres on hye’’ (FQ 4.11.53). Milton’s Satan leads ‘‘an host, /
Innumerable as the stars of night, / Or stars of morning’’ (PL 5.744--46). ‘‘But
who can count the Stars of Heaven?’’ Thomson asks (‘‘Winter’’ 528), forgetting,
perhaps, that the Psalmist had already answered that question.
Stars in the Bible sometimes stand for glory, human or otherwise. Daniel
concludes his prophecy by claiming ‘‘they that be wise shall shine as the
brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the
stars for ever and ever’’ (12.3). At the resurrection, Paul writes, we shall have
incorruptible heavenly bodies with a ‘‘glory’’ (Greek doxa) like those of the
sun, moon, and stars (1 Cor. 15.41).
Several times in Homer the fame (kleos) of a person or thing ‘‘goes up to
heaven’’ (e.g., Iliad 10.212, Odyssey 9.20). Homer does not make the next step
explicit by likening the famous to stars, though he does compare the
appearance of Achilles in armor to a star. He also names a few constellations -the Bear (or Wagon), the Pleiades, Orion, Bootes -- behind some of which lie
stories about the translation of heroes or objects from earth to heaven.
Euripides takes the next step when he has a chorus call Hippolytus ‘‘the
brightest star of Athens’’ (Hippolytus 1121). Virgil has Aeneas boast that his
fame goes above the sky (Aeneid 1.378--89), Dido hope her former fame was
going up to the stars (4.322), and a voice tell Latinus that strangers’ blood
‘‘will carry our name to the stars’’ (7.99); but Virgil like most Hellenistic and
Roman poets reserves the stars themselves for deified heroes and emperors. He
imagines the zodiac, for instance, making room for the new star of Octavian,
not yet dead (Georgics 1.32). Chaucer alludes to this process of ‘‘catasterism’’ or
transformation into a star in, appropriately, The House of Fame 599.
Shakespeare’s Bedford invokes the ghost of Henry V, asking it to ‘‘Combat with
adverse planets in the heavens! / A far more glorious star thy soul will make /
Than Julius Caesar’’ (1H6 1.1.54--56). Shelley hopes his fame will become ‘‘A star
among the stars of mortal night’’ (Revolt of Islam 6). In this ancient and
traditional use we have the origin of ‘‘movie star’’ and ‘‘superstar,’’ the
metaphorical force of which is now spent.
Because he or she stands out among all others, one’s beloved is often called
a star. Since Plato’s epigrams to a young man whom he calls Aster, ‘‘star’’ has
become a conventional name: Martial writes of Stella, Sidney (who dubs
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Star
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himself ‘‘Astrophil’’ or ‘‘Star-Lover’’) has a Stella, Swift also has a Stella, and
Dickens’s Pip loves Estella in Great Expectations.
Several stars in the Bible are prophetic or symbolic. Balaam prophesies,
‘‘there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel,’’
who shall smite the enemy (Num. 24.17); Christians have taken this as
referring to Christ. At Jesus’ birth there was the star of the Magi, or star of
Bethlehem, that appeared in the east (Matt. 2.2ff.); the Magi were astrologers,
so they particularly recognized the significance of this stella nova or new star
as the sign of a new reign, and new kind of reign, on earth. Milton insists on
its newness whenever he mentions it: ‘‘A Star, not seen before in Heaven
appearing / . . . thy Star new-grav’n in Heaven’’ (PR 1.249--53; see PL 12.360). That,
surely, is the main point, a point completely effaced by well-meaning modern
attempts to ‘‘explain’’ the star by finding a conjunction of planets at about
4 bc, the sort of thing astrologers would not find unusual in the least.
In a nice example of the internalization of Jewish and pagan symbols, Peter
refers to ‘‘a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take
heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the
day star arise in your hearts’’ (2 Pet. 1.19); the ‘‘day star’’ in the Authorized
Version is phosphoros, the morning star, Venus. When Jesus in the Book of
Revelation says, ‘‘I will give him [the faithful] the morning star’’ (2.28) he
seems to be promising salvation, the entrance into a new day in heaven, but
near the end of the book he announces that he himself is ‘‘the bright and
morning star’’ (22.16). The morning star has been taken as prophetic generally
ever since; to give one modern example, Hugo’s ‘‘Stella’’ is a dream vision in
which the morning star announces ‘‘I am fiery Poetry’’ sent ahead as herald by
Liberty and Light.
The acknowledgment by the Wise Men that Jesus is the new king may be
taken as the defeat of Magian star-worship. Though Joseph dreamt of symbolic
stars and Daniel was a star-reader, there are a number of passages of the Bible
that denounce the star cults widespread in the Middle East. Moses warns his
followers ‘‘lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the
sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be
driven to worship them, and serve them’’ (Deut. 4.19). Isaiah sarcastically
offers: ‘‘Let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the monthly prognosticators,
stand up, and save thee from these things that shall come upon thee. / Behold,
they shall be as stubble; the fire shall burn them’’ (47.13--14). In other passages,
however, astrology of some sort seems to be assumed. In Judges we are told
that ‘‘the stars in their courses fought against Sisera’’ (5.20), and Jesus himself
tells us that during the time when ‘‘Nation shall rise against nation,’’ ‘‘there
shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars’’ (Luke 21.10, 25).
Early interpreters of the Bible, if not its authors, took stars sometimes to
mean angels. A chief passage justifying that meaning is from Job: ‘‘When the
morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy’’ on the
day the foundations of the earth were laid (38.7). Isaiah’s cryptic verse (in
the AV), ‘‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!’’
(14.12), refers to two star-deities in Hebrew, Helel and Shahar, but in various
translations the passage has been enormously influential on later stories of
fallen angels. The ‘‘great star’’ that falls from heaven and is given a key to the
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bottomless pit (Rev. 9.1) must be an angel of some kind, and perhaps the
‘‘Lucifer’’ of Isaiah. John of Patmos makes explicit that the seven stars in the
right hand of Christ (Rev. 1.16) are the angels of the seven churches he
addresses (1.20). The dragon’s tail ‘‘drew the third part of the stars of heaven,
and did cast them to the earth’’ (12.4). Milton compares Lucifer to ‘‘the
morning star that guides / The starry flock, allured them, and with lies/ Drew
after him the third part of heaven’s host’’ (PL 5.708--10). To take stars as angels
may help clarify many mysterious passages in William Blake, such as the one
about the stars throwing down their spears in ‘‘The Tyger.’’
Stars of course tell direction and time of year. Hesiod’s Works and Days and
Virgil’s Georgics are filled with precise information about risings and settings
of various stars. Navigating by stars must have been widely practiced for
centuries, though only one instance of it is found in Homer (Odyssey 5.272ff.).
Certain constellations show up frequently in literature. On Achilles’ shield
Hephaestus puts the sun and moon and ‘‘all the constellations that festoon
the heavens, / the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion / and the
Bear, whom men give also the name of the Wagon, / who turns about in a
fixed place and looks at Orion / and she alone is never plunged in the wash of
the Ocean’’ (Iliad 18.485--89, trans. Lattimore; repeated with Bootes for Hyades
at Odyssey 5.272--75). Pleiades, Hyades, and Bear are together in Georgics 1.138,
Bootes and Pleiades in Propertius 3.5.35, Orion and Bear in Ovid’s Art of Love
2.53. ‘‘The Bear,’’ Greek Arktos, is the Great Bear, Ursa Major; the Greek word
gives us ‘‘arctic’’ and ‘‘antarctic.’’ Today it is often called the Big Dipper, but
the older term is still used, the Wain (wagon) or Charles’ Wain. It is the most
prominent of the north circumpolar constellations, and in ancient times, at
Greek latitudes, it never set, never bathed in Ocean’s stream (no longer true,
thanks to the precession of the equinoxes). The heliacal rising of the Pleiades
marked the beginning of summer (mid-May), that of Arcturus, the brightest
star of Bootes, the beginning of winter (mid-September), and so on.
The twelve signs or constellations of the zodiac, the band of the sky
through which the sun, moon, and planets pass, have been widely cited in
literature at least since Statius as ways of indicating the season. The most
famous English example comes in the ‘‘General Prologue’’ of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales: it is April, when ‘‘the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his halve
cours yronne’’ (7--8); the sun is young because it is early in the year, which
began in March, and it is now emerging from the constellation Aries, the
Ram, the first sign of the zodiac.
Despite the strictures against it in the Bible and some of the church
fathers, astrology remained a rich source of literary imagery. The common
meanings of ‘‘influence’’ today have their origin in the belief that the stars
sent an etherial fluid down to earth. A ‘‘sphere of influence’’ in the
geopolitical sense draws twice from celestial notions, for the pre-Copernican
model of the heavens posited solid transparent spheres surrounding the earth.
A ‘‘disaster’’ is etymologically a ‘‘bad star’’ or unfavorable aspect of a star or
planet; Shakespeare’s Horatio speaks of ‘‘disasters in the sun’’ (Hamlet 1.1.118).
To ‘‘consider’’ was originally to consult the stars (Latin sidera).
Many people read the horoscope today for amusement, but many others
still believe in ‘‘natal stars’’ or planets that were dominant or prominent at
the time of their birth or at other crucial moments. Chaucer likens the
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heavens to a large book written with stars; at one’s birth one can determine
one’s death, ‘‘For in the sterres, clerer than is glas, / Is writen, God woot
[knows], whoso koude it rede, / The deeth of every man, withouten drede
[doubt]’’ (Man of Law’s Tale 194--96). A lady in Spenser asks her lord, ‘‘what evill
starre / On you hath frownd, and poord his influence bad’’ (FQ 1.8.42), while
another hails a knight as ‘‘borne under happie starre’’ (1.1.27); in Spenser stars
can also be ‘‘cruel,’’ ‘‘unhappy,’’ or ‘‘luckless.’’ Many characters in Shakespeare
feel predetermined by ‘‘favourable,’’ ‘‘auspicious,’’ ‘‘inauspicious,’’ ‘‘thwarting,’’
‘‘angry,’’ or ‘‘malignant and ill-boding’’ stars; Romeo and Juliet are ‘‘A pair of
star-crossed lovers’’ (Prologue 6); Malvolio thanks his stars he is happy (12N
2.5.170--71); and so on. But the contrary view is also frequent. Cassius argues
that ‘‘Men at some time are masters of their fates. / The fault, dear Brutus, is
not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings’’ (JC 1.2.139--41),
though heavenly portents at Caesar’s murder suggest Cassius is wrong. The
wicked Edmund dismisses his father’s belief in ‘‘heavenly compulsion,’’
‘‘spherical predominance,’’ and ‘‘planetary influence’’ as fopperies (King Lear
1.2.118--33). More convincing is Helena in All’s Well: she grants she is born
under ‘‘baser stars’’ or ‘‘homely stars’’ (1.1.183, 2.5.75), that is, of humble
parents, but she acts on the knowledge that ‘‘the fatal sky / Gives us free
scope’’ (1.1.216--18); by contrast Polonius tells Ophelia that ‘‘Lord Hamlet is a
prince out of thy star’’ or sphere (Hamlet 2.2.141). Helena’s view is expressed by
Basilio in Calderón’s Life is a Dream, where he states that ‘‘the most impious
planet’’ can ‘‘only incline the free will, not force it’’ (1.6.789--91); events bear
him out. Or, as Southey states it, ‘‘for though all other things / Were subject
to the starry influencings, / . . . / The virtuous heart and resolute mind are
free’’ (Curse of Kehama 18.10.129--32).
Particular stars are not uncommonly recruited for symbolic meanings.
Melville’s Billy Budd, for instance, always aloft in the foretop of the ship, is
associated with the constellation Taurus and its brightest star Aldebaran,
which are high above the celestial equator, while Claggart is likened to
Scorpio, which lies far below it.
The ‘‘day star’’ has sometimes meant the morning star, but in poetry it is
usually the sun. In Milton’s Lycidas the ‘‘day-star’’ is almost certainly the sun,
for it sinks in the ocean and yet soon ‘‘Flames in the forehead of the morning
sky’’ (168--71), whereas Venus cannot be both evening and morning star in the
same season. It is the ‘‘diurnal star’’ of PL 10.1069, and the ‘‘star of noon’’ of
Young’s Night Thoughts 9.1683. Wordsworth sees the day-star sinking in the
west in his Evening Walk 190--91. Carew calls the sun ‘‘the Planet of the day’’
(‘‘Boldness in Love’’ 5).
The ‘‘dog star’’ (Latin Canicula, ‘‘little dog’’) is Sirius, the brightest fixed star
in the sky, found in the constellation Canis Major, the ‘‘Great Dog,’’ which
Homer calls Orion’s Dog (Iliad 22.29). Sirius rises just before the sun (its
‘‘heliacal rising’’) in mid-July, or rather it did so in ancient times; hence it is a
sign of the dangerous heat of high summer. Sirius ‘‘parches head and knees,’’
as Hesiod puts it (Works and Days 587), as if it is the star itself that sends the
feverish heat. The name ‘‘Sirius’’ seems to be an adjective, Greek seirios,
meaning ‘‘burning’’ or ‘‘sparkling’’: Hesiod once has seirios aster, which might
be translated either ‘‘blazing star’’ or ‘‘Sirian star’’ (Works 417), and Aeschylus
writes of foliage providing shade against the seiriou kunos or ‘‘Sirian dog’’
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(Agamemnon 966--67). Ibycus once uses it in the plural for stars generally
(314).
It appears twice in similes in the Iliad, first for the shining of Diomedes’
shield (5.5--6), and then, in an elaboration that rests not only on its brightness
but on its balefulness, for Achilles himself, who looks ‘‘like that star / which
comes on the autumn and whose conspicuous brightness / far outshines the
stars that are numbered in the night’s darkening, / the star they give the name
of Orion’s Dog, which is brightest / among the stars, and yet is wrought as a
sign of evil / and brings on the great fever for unfortunate mortals’’ (22.26--31;
trans. Lattimore). Apollonius tells the story behind the sacrifices to Sirius by
the priests of Keos -- to keep it from ever again burning the islands with its
fire from heaven (2.516--27); he also likens Jason’s impression on Medea to that
of Sirius, for he is both brilliant and the bringer of the hot disease of love
(3.956--61). In the Aeneid ‘‘Sirius burns the sterile fields’’ while men die of
pestilence (3.141); it also appears in a simile for the shining helmet of Aeneas
(10.273--75), a reworking of the Iliad similes. In the Georgics Virgil calls Sirius
canis aestifer, ‘‘dog the summer-bearer’’ (2.353). The Greeks and Romans
designated the hottest weeks of summer the ‘‘dog days’’ (hemerai kunades, dies
caniculares), a phrase still used in English. Spenser imagines the July sun
hunting the lion (the constellation Leo) ‘‘with Dogge of noysome breath, /
Whose balefull barking bringes in hast / pyne, plagues, and dreery death’’
(SC ‘‘July’’ 22--24); like Aeschylus he calls it ‘‘the hot Syrian Dog’’ (Mother
Hubberd 5).
Milton calls Sirius the ‘‘swart Star’’ in Lycidas 138, ‘‘swart’’ meaning ‘‘black’’
or ‘‘dark.’’ Unusually for Milton no classical precedent for this epithet has
turned up: it may mean ‘‘evil,’’ or perhaps it is a transference from the
vegetation scorched black by the star.
The ‘‘evening star,’’ called hesperos in Greek and vesper in Latin, both
meaning ‘‘evening’’ (and cognate with ‘‘west’’), is the planet Venus, which is
never far from the sun, sometimes rising before it (‘‘morning star’’) and
sometimes setting after it (‘‘evening star’’). It is named once in Homer: ‘‘as a
star moves among stars in the night’s darkening, / Hesper, who is the fairest
star who stands in the sky, such / was the shining from the pointed spear
Achilleus was shaking / in his right hand’’ (Iliad 22.317--20, trans. Lattimore). In
the tradition of the epithalamium or wedding song, the appearance of the
evening star, with its link to the goddess of love, is the signal to light the
bridal lamp and lead the bride to the bridegroom. Catullus’ epithalamium (62)
begins by announcing, ‘‘Vesper is here, young men, stand up.’’ Milton evokes
this tradition when Adam describes his nuptial evening with Eve (PL 8.519).
The ‘‘morning star,’’ called phosphoros in Greek and lucifer in Latin, both
meaning ‘‘light-bringer,’’ is also the planet Venus. In Homer once it is called
Heosphoros, ‘‘Dawn-bringer’’ (Iliad 23), and once it is described as ‘‘that brightest
star, which beyond others / comes with announcement of the light of the
young Dawn goddess’’ (Odyssey 13.93--94, trans. Lattimore). The epigram of
Plato’s mentioned earlier reads: ‘‘Aster, once you shone as the Dawn Star
among the living; now you shine as the Evening Star among the dead.’’
Shelley uses this as an epigraph to his elegy on the death of Keats, Adonais,
which is filled with star imagery. Milton relies on the traditional name of the
unfallen Satan, Lucifer, in likening him to the morning star.
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The ‘‘pole star’’ or ‘‘polar star’’ is Polaris, the North Star, the brightest star in
Ursa Minor, the Lesser Bear or Wain (or Little Dipper), and in recent centuries
very near the north celestial pole. It is ‘‘the stedfast starre’’ (Spenser, FQ 1.2.1)
around which all the other stars revolve. In a circumlocution for ‘‘night’’
Tennyson describes the time ‘‘when the lesser wain / Is twisting round the
polar star’’ (In Memoriam 101.11--12).
The ‘‘fixed stars’’ are what we call stars today. They do not move relative to
each other, but revolve together once a day around the pole. According to the
Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system they are affixed to the eighth sphere from the
earth.
The ‘‘wandering stars’’ are the planets (Greek aster planetes, ‘‘wandering
star’’); Chaucer calls them the ‘‘erratik sterres’’ (TC 5.1812). They move relative
to the fixed stars in complex patterns, moving at varying rates through the
zodiac night after night, some of them even retreating for a time before
resuming their progress. There were seven of them: the moon, Mercury,
Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in order of distance from the earth,
each affixed to its own sphere, which rotated according to its own rules.
Dante’s ‘‘planet that leads men straight on every road’’ is the sun (Inferno
1.17--18). (See Planet.)
The ‘‘star of the sea’’ (Latin stella maris) is a title given to the Virgin Mary in
the Middle Ages, apparently in the belief that ‘‘Mary’’ (or Hebrew ‘‘Miriam’’)
was the same as the Latin word for ‘‘sea.’’ She is the Hope of Sailors, or as
Joyce puts it, ‘‘a beacon ever to the storm-tossed heart of man, Mary, star of
the sea’’ (Ulysses, ‘‘Nausicaa’’ para. 1).
The ‘‘watery star’’ is the moon. ‘‘Nine changes of the watery star’’
(Shakespeare, WT 1.2.1) means nine months. It is associated with water
because it is ‘‘the governess of floods’’ or tides (MND 2.1.103). Shakespeare also
calls it ‘‘the moist star, / Upon whose influence Neptune’s empire stands’’
(Hamlet 1.1.121--22).
The ‘‘lode star’’ or ‘‘load star’’ is the guiding star (‘‘load’’ is related to ‘‘lead’’),
that is, the north star.
For the ‘‘folding star’’ and ‘‘unfolding star,’’ see under Sheep.
Stork
The stork is mentioned occasionally in the Bible with no particular symbolic
meaning, but the Hebrew word for it, hasidah, means ‘‘pious.’’ That suggests
that the Hebrews shared the Greek view that the stork (pelargos) is notable for
its parental and especially filial piety. In Aristophanes’ The Birds a character
cites an ancient law in the tablets of the storks: ‘‘When the old stork has
brought his storklings up, / And all are fully fledged for flight, then they /
Must in their turn maintain the stork their father’’ (1355--57, trans. Rogers).
(Aristophanes also wrote a play called The Storks, but it is lost.) Sophocles may
be referring to storks in Electra 1058ff.: ‘‘We see above our heads the birds, /
true in their wisdom, / caring for the livelihood / of those that gave them life
and sustenance’’ (trans. Grene). Socrates alludes to storkling piety at the end of
his first dialogue with Alcibiades: ‘‘So my love will be just like a stork; for
after hatching a winged love in you it is to be cherished in return by its
nestling’’ (Plato, Alcibiades 1.135e).
Pliny believes that storks nourish their parents in old age (Natural History
10.31). Dryden expands on a hint in Juvenal’s first Satire: ‘‘the Stork on
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high / Seems to salute her Infant Progeny: / Presaging Pious Love with her
Auspicious Cry’’ (173--75). Drayton describes the ‘‘carefull Storke’’ who ‘‘his ag’d
Parents naturally doth feed, / In filiall duty’’ (Noahs Flood 1395--98). Dante
makes use of this tradition in a simile for his relation to the image of the
Eagle of Justice in Heaven: ‘‘Just as, above the nest, the stork (cicogna) will
circle / When she has fed her fledglings, and as he / whom she has fed looks
up at her, so did / the blessed image do, and so did I, / The fledgling, while the
Eagle moved its wings’’ (Paradiso 19.91--95, trans. Mandelbaum).
The ancients seem to have extended the notion of filial and parental
devotion to constancy in marriage. Aelian, for example, tells a story of a stork
that struck out the eyes of a servant who committed adultery with his
master’s wife (De Natura Animalium 8.20), and it was believed that the male
stork destroys or abandons a female he finds unfaithful. That idea must lie
behind Chaucer’s sole reference to the stork as ‘‘the wrekere of avouterye’’
(‘‘the avenger of adultery’’) (Parliament of Fowls 361), and this by Skelton: ‘‘The
storke also, / That maketh his nest / In chymneyes to rest; / Within these
walles / No broken galles [open sores?] / May there abyde / Of cokoldry syde’’
(Phyllyp Sparowe 469--75). ‘‘Constancy is like unto the stork,’’ Lyly writes,
‘‘who wheresoever she fly cometh into no nest but her own’’ (Euphues and his
England).
Occasionally the stork has a negative meaning, as in Spenser’s
Epithalamion 345--52, where he wishes that the screech owl, the stork, the
raven, ghosts, vultures, and frogs all kept silent during the night; some of
these creatures are listed together in Deuteronomy 14.12--19 as unclean (not to
be eaten).
Storm
Summer
208
see Wind
Summer and winter were once probably the only seasons distinctly named,
and both have long been used to indicate a year, especially when several of
them are counted. Dido calls on Aeneas to tell his tale, for ‘‘now the seventh
summer carries thee / a wanderer over every land and sea’’ (Virgil, Aeneid
1.755--56). Shakespeare’s Egeon has spent ‘‘five summers’’ in Greece (CE 1.1.132).
Wordsworth begins ‘‘Tintern Abbey’’ by counting the years: ‘‘Five years have
passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters!’’ On other
occasions Wordsworth remembers ‘‘twice five summers’’ (1850 Prelude
1.560) and ‘‘two-and-twenty summers’’ (8.349). (For more examples, see
Seasons.)
Summer is the most pleasant season, at least in the temperate zone, not
only for its warmth but its long days. ‘‘As fressh as is the brighte someres day’’
(Chaucer, Merchant’s Tale 1896) became something of a commonplace.
Shakespeare can evoke it, if only to find fault with it (it can be too hot or too
windy), in comparison with his beloved (Sonnets 18). Spenser calls him ‘‘jolly
Sommer’’ and describes him clothed in green, and sweating (FQ 7.7.29).
If one’s life is figured as a year, summer is maturity, the full flowering of a
man’s powers, ‘‘Summer’s ardent strength,’’ in Thomson’s phrase (‘‘Winter’’
1030). Wordsworth imagines Coleridge ‘‘with the soul / Which Nature gives to
poets, now by thought / Matured, and in the summer of its strength’’ (1805
Prelude 10.998--1000). With women, however, summer is already a bit late; as
Sun
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Byron puts it, ‘‘Some said her years were getting nigh their summer’’ (Don Juan
6.277).
See Autumn, Seasons, Spring, Winter.
Sun
The sun is so overwhelming a phenomenon and so fundamental to earthly life
that its meanings in mythology and literature are too numerous to count. The
sun is not only the most striking thing to be seen but the very condition of
sight; light and seeing, some have argued, lie at the root of all symbolism.
What follows, then, must be a highly selective discussion.
For the Greeks, to be alive was to see the sun. When a child was born he
was brought ‘‘into the light, and he saw the sun’s rays,’’ according to Homer,
while during one’s life one sees the light and when one dies one ‘‘must leave
the light of the sun’’ (Iliad 16.188, 18.61, 18.11). The realm of Hades is never
illuminated by the sun (Odyssey 11.15--19); it is located in the far west, where
the sun sets. Wordsworth succinctly states the Greek view when he laments
that so many friends have passed ‘‘From sunshine to the sunless land’’
(‘‘Extempore Effusion’’ 24). Leopardi borrows the ancient idea in his phrase
‘‘give to the sun’’ (dare al sole) for ‘‘give birth’’ (‘‘Canto notturno’’ 52).
Plutarch wrote that ‘‘sunlight is the symbol of birth’’ (Aetia Romana 2).
Shelley was to echo this idea frequently, as in his phrase ‘‘birth’s orient
portal’’ (Hellas 202). To live on earth is to live ‘‘under the sun and starry sky’’
(Iliad 4.44). A similar idea is found in Hebrew thought. ‘‘Under the sun’’ is the
formulaic expression of Ecclesiastes for ‘‘in this life’’: ‘‘there is no new thing
under the sun’’ (1.9), and ‘‘I saw vanity under the sun’’ (4.7). In Latin literature,
lux (‘‘light’’) can mean ‘‘life’’: Virgil has invisam . . . lucem (‘‘hateful life’’; Aeneid
4.631). Similarly ‘‘day’’ can mean ‘‘life’’ in several languages. Death ‘‘shuts up
the day of life’’ (Shakespeare, RJ 4.1.101). When one dies, as Gray puts it, one
leaves ‘‘the warm precincts of the cheerful day’’ (‘‘Elegy’’ 87). At the end of it,
our life can seem no longer than a day; we are ‘‘ephemeral’’ beings (from
Greek epi ‘‘on’’ and hemera ‘‘day’’). The comparison of human life in its brevity
to a day is indeed ancient. Mimnermus says one’s youth is ‘‘short as the
sunlight spreads on the earth’’ (2.8). Catullus urges his Lesbia to give
thousands of kisses, for time is short: ‘‘suns can set and rise again; / For us,
once our brief light has set, / There’s one unending night for sleeping’’ (5.4--6,
trans. Lee). It became a commonplace, but variously evoked. After urging his
‘‘Coy Mistress’’ to hold out no longer but ‘‘sport us while we may,’’ Marvell
concludes, ‘‘Thus, though we cannot make our sun / Stand still, yet we will
make him run’’ (45--46). Hopkins concludes a sonnet, ‘‘all / Life death does end
and each day dies with sleep’’ (‘‘No worst, there is none’’).
Sophocles wrote that ‘‘everyone worships the turning wheel of the sun’’
(frag. 672). In Homer Helios the sun is invoked as a god who sees everything
and hears everything (Iliad 3.277, Odyssey 11.109, etc.); for that reason he is the
god of oaths (like the Mesopotamian sun-god Shamash), the ever-present
witness. Aeschylus’ Prometheus calls on the ‘‘all-seeing circle of the sun’’ to
witness his sufferings (Prometheus 91). (The phrase ‘‘circle of the sun’’ or ‘‘wheel
of the sun’’ is a common Indo-European expression: cognate forms are found
in Sanskrit and Old English poetry.) Sol sees all things in Ovid, Metamorphoses
2.32, 4.227--28, and 14.375. In Shakespeare, the ‘‘all-seeing sun’’ (RJ 1.2.92) has a
‘‘burning eye’’ (RJ 2.3.5), a ‘‘precious eye’’ (KJ 3.1.79), a ‘‘sovereign eye’’ (Sonnets
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33.2); ‘‘The sun with one eye vieweth all the world’’ (1H6 1.4.84). If to be alive is
to see the sun, it is also to be seen by it, as in Bryant’s ‘‘Thanatopsis’’: ‘‘Yet a
few days, and thee / The all-beholding sun shall see no more / In all his
course’’ (17--19).
Rather than have an eye, the sun may be an eye itself. It is the ‘‘eye of day’’
in Sophocles’ Antigone 104. The Hebrew phrase translated in the Authorized
Version as ‘‘the dawning of the day’’ (Job 3.9) probably means ‘‘the eyelids of
the morning’’ (as in the NEB). Ovid calls the sun the mundi oculus or ‘‘eye of
the world’’ (Met. 4.228), Ronsard ‘‘the eye of the gods’’ and ‘‘the eye of God’’
(Odes 3.10.60, Stances 4.137), Spenser ‘‘the great eye of heaven’’ (FQ 1.3.4),
Shakespeare ‘‘the eye of heaven’’ (Sonnets 18.5), Byron ‘‘the bright eye of the
universe’’ (Manfred 1.2.10). Cicero, Pliny, and other Latin writers call the sun
the mind or soul of the world. Milton combines these metaphors: ‘‘Thou sun,
of this great world both eye and soul’’ (PL 5.171); Shelley in his Hymn of Apollo
has Apollo call himself ‘‘the eye with which the universe / Beholds itself and
knows itself divine.’’
The conventional attributes of Helios or Sol are well known. Brother of the
Moon and Dawn, he drives his chariot of four (or seven) horses up from the
eastern sea, across the sky, and down into the western sea, whereupon he
somehow travels under or around the world, usually in a golden boat or cup
on the river Ocean, back to the east. The Homeric Hymn to Helios and second
Hymn to Athena mention the horses and chariot; Euripides describes sunset
thus: ‘‘Helios drove his horses / Toward his final flame’’ (Ion 1148--49); it is these
that Phaethon borrows in the disastrous tale told by Ovid in Metamorphoses 2.
Homer sometimes calls the sun Hyperion, while Hesiod makes Hyperion his
father; his mother is Theia. Later Apollo became associated with the sun, or
with its brightness or clarity.
The sun’s celestial team became a commonplace in Medieval and
Renaissance poetry. Spenser, for example, has ‘‘Phoebus fiery carre’’ (FQ 1.2.1);
Shakespeare speaks of ‘‘The hour before the heavenly-harness’d team / Begins
his golden progress in the east’’ (1H4 3.1.214--15); and Milton describes the
same hour as ‘‘Now while the Heav’n by the Sun’s team untrod, / Hath took no
print of the approaching light’’ (‘‘Nativity’’ 19--20).
It became a persistent image that the sun’s horses breathed fire. Pindar
sings of ‘‘the lord [sun] of fire-breathing horses’’ (Olymp. 7.71. Virgil, in Dryden’s
expansive translation, has ‘‘Th’ethereal coursers, bounding from the sea, /
From out their flaming nostrils breath’d the day’’ (Aeneid 12.115; see Georgics
1.250). Marlowe writes, ‘‘The horse that guide the golden eye of heaven, / And
blow the morning from their nostrils’’ (2 Tamburlaine 4.4.7--8). In discussing
Phaethon Spenser twice mentions the ‘‘flaming mouthes of steedes’’ (FQ 1.4.9)
or ‘‘the firie-mouthed steedes’’ (5.8.40). Horses need not be divine to breathe
fire, according to Lucretius, who refers to ‘‘the fire-snorting horses of
Thracian Diomedes’’ (5.30 trans. Esolen); Virgil describes a thoroughbred
whose ‘‘nostrils churn the pent-up fire within’’ (Georgics 3.85, trans.
Wilkinson). In Blake’s Book of Thel, the lily’s perfume ‘‘tames the fire-breathing
steed’’ (2.10).
Milton alludes to the myth that the sun is ‘‘the lusty Paramour’’ or lover of
the Earth (‘‘Nativity’’ 36). It goes back at least to Lucretius, who explains the
fertility of Mother Earth as due to the casting of rain in her lap by Father Sky
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Sun
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(1.250--51); Virgil writes of the sexual intercourse between her and Father
Aether (= Heaven) (Georgics 2.325--27). Sidney’s New Arcadia begins: ‘‘It was in
the time that the earth begins to put on her new apparel against the
approach of her lover.’’ (See Rain.)
Sun worship in Hellenistic and Roman times left its mark on Christianity.
Christ was crucified on the 14th day of Nisan (on the full moon of the first
month) in the Jewish lunar calendar, on the eve of the Sabbath, and rose from
the dead two days later, which happened to be dies Solis or ‘‘Sunday’’ in the
Greco-Roman solar calendar. At Jesus’ death, according to Luke 23.45, ‘‘the sun
was darkened.’’ The last chapter of the Hebrew Bible seemed to prophesy a
‘‘Sun of righteousness’’ (Malachi 4.2). All this and the doctrine of the Logos as
light in the Gospel of John made the equation inevitable: Christ is the new
and greater sun. ‘‘As the sun returns from the west to the east,’’ Athanasius
wrote, ‘‘so the Lord arose out of the depths of Hades to the Heaven of
Heavens’’ (Expositio in Psalmen 67.34).
After much debate, the church in the west adopted the Roman calendar
and set Easter as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal
equinox: the time of ascendancy of both sunlight and moonlight. Christmas
was eventually set at the winter solstice, the ‘‘birth’’ of the sun out of
darkness. To quote Milton’s ‘‘Nativity’’ ode once more, on the morning of
Christ’s nativity ‘‘The Sun himself withheld his wonted speed, / And hid his
head for shame, / As his inferior flame, / The new-enlight’n’d world no more
should need; / He saw a greater Sun appear / Than his bright Throne, or
burning Axletree could bear’’ (79--84).
The sun rises in the east -- due east on the two equinoxes, north of east
during spring and summer, south of east during fall and winter -- moves
upward and southward until noon, and moves downward and northward
until it sets in the west. In Europe and all areas north of the Tropic of Cancer
its highest point or meridian is south of the zenith. The south was often
considered the quarter of the sun; the word ‘‘south,’’ in fact, is derived from
‘‘sun.’’
The day and the year are natural units of time determined by the sun, as
the month is determined originally by the moon. Seasons are more arbitrary
divisions, and not all cultures have four.
The annual movement north and south of the sun’s daily track, which
causes the changing seasons, is due to the tilt of the earth’s axis, but from an
earthly viewpoint it appears that the annual path of the sun against the sky
(the ecliptic) is tilted at an angle of 23◦ to the path of the midpoint between
the celestial poles (the celestial equator). The moon and planets also follow
paths along the ecliptic, which Dante calls ‘‘the oblique circle that carries the
planets’’ (Paradiso 10.14), though two planets, Mercury and Venus, are never
very far from the sun.
A belt along this path, called the zodiac, contains a great many
constellations, twelve of which were singled out in ancient times to mark
twelve ‘‘houses’’ or stations in the yearly migration of the sun through them.
This migration we know is due to the annual revolution of the earth around
the sun, the sun appearing against a constantly changing backdrop of fixed
stars, but it looks as if the sun is wandering through them. Hence the sun
was considered in the Ptolemaic system (and earlier) as a planet (from Greek
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Sunflower
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planetes, ‘‘wanderer’’), the fourth in distance from the earth; it is in Dante’s
words ‘‘the planet / which leads men straight through all paths’’ (Inferno
1.17--18), and the ‘‘fayrest Planet,’’ according to Spenser (Epithalamion 282). The
twelve constellations form the basis for astrology and the daily horoscope in
newspapers today. (See Planet, Star.)
The sun is no longer in Aries (the Ram) during the first month of spring,
however, as it was when the Babylonians established the system about four
thousand years ago. When Chaucer says in the opening of his Canterbury Tales
that ‘‘the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne’’ he is
specifying April but he using the conventional and badly out-of-date sign for
it. Because of the precession of the equinoxes or backward slippage of the
ecliptic--equator intersection points (precession is a phenomenon of rotating
bodies), spring began in Pisces (the Fish) around the time of Christ and is now
entering Aquarius. In one lifetime the slippage is about one degree, and the
entire cycle takes about 26,000 years to return to the starting point, an
interval known to the ancients as the magnus annus or ‘‘great year’’ (or
‘‘Platonic Year’’). It may underlie the symbolism of Virgil’s ‘‘Fourth Eclogue,’’
an enormously influential poem because it seemed to prophesy the coming of
Christ; a phrase from this eclogue has been altered to novus ordo seclorum
(‘‘new order of the ages’’) and adopted for the great seal of the United States
(found on the back of the one-dollar bill). See also the first of Yeats’s ‘‘Two
Songs from a Play’’: ‘‘And then did all the Muses sing / Of Magnus Annus at
the spring, / As though God’s death were but a play.’’
Another cycle that the Greeks understood is the nineteen-year Metonic
cycle, the period when the phases of the moon begin on the same date of the
year. This cycle may be the basis for the pervasive solar symbolism of the
Odyssey, the hero of which returns home after nineteen years.
See Black sun, East and west, Gold, Moon.
Sunflower
212
Ovid tells the tale of a nymph, Clytie, who pined away for the love of Helios,
the Sun, until she was transformed into a flower whose face always turns to
follow her love through the sky (Met. 4.256--70). This heliotrope was probably
not what we call the sunflower, which is named for its appearance rather
than its behavior, but the sunflower has long been linked to the unrequited
devotion of a lover, or to the longing of the earthbound soul for its heavenly
home.
A sonnet attributed to Dante laments the disdain of his mistress: ‘‘Nor did
she who turns to see the sun / and changed, preserves her unchanged love, /
ever have as bitter fate as I’’ (‘‘Nulla mi parve,’’ trans. Galassi). Blake’s evocative
little poem ‘‘Ah! Sun-flower’’ takes the flower, ‘‘weary of time, / Who countest
the steps of the Sun,’’ as an emblem of ‘‘the Youth pined away with desire’’
and ‘‘the pale Virgin shrouded with snow,’’ who arise from their graves. Blake
may have been prompted by an account of the neo-Platonic philosopher
Proclus, who cites the heliotrope as a symbol of souls who long for spiritual
illumination. The same source seems to have led Bronson Alcott to choose the
name The Dial (i.e., sundial) for the journal of the Transcendentalists.
Byron’s Julia, confined to a nunnery after her affair with the young Don
Juan, writes her lover one last letter on gilt-edged paper, ‘‘The seal a
sunflower; Elle vous suit partout [‘‘She follows you everywhere’’], / The motto’’
Swallow
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(Don Juan 1.198). Robert Browning’s Rudel tells his lady that he will ‘‘choose for
my device / A sunflower outspread like a sacrifice / Before its idol’’ (‘‘Rudel to
the Lady of Tripoli’’ 24--26). Carolina Coronado addresses a sunflower as a
kindred spirit who has suffered the neglect of ‘‘the beautiful sun you adored,’’
whose ‘‘eyes won’t even stop to see / that you were consumed by the love of
his fire’’ (‘‘Sunflower 48--52,’’ trans. Myles). Montale demands, ‘‘Bring me the
sunflower crazed with light’’ in an early poem (‘‘Portami il girasole’’), and the
flower remains a symbol throughout his poetry, sometimes associated with a
woman named Clizia (Clytie).
Swallow
In ancient Greece as in modern times the return of the swallow was a sign
that spring has returned as well. The Greeks held ceremonies at the beginning
of the season in which children would dress as swallows and go from house to
house begging for treats. A song from Rhodes sung on such occasions, the
Chelidonismos (from Greek chelidon, ‘‘swallow’’), begins, ‘‘The swallow has come,
bringing lovely seasons and lovely years.’’ In Works and Days Hesiod tells us that
sixty days after the winter solstice ‘‘the swallow appears to men when spring
is just beginning’’ (564--69). This is the common understanding behind the
cautionary proverb quoted by Aristotle, ‘‘A single swallow doesn’t make a
spring.’’
The bird is often linked in poetry to the spring zephyr, the west wind
(Virgil, Georgics 4.304--07; Horace, Epistles, 1.7.13). The Greeks sometimes called
the spring west wind chelidonias because it brought the swallows.
It is also associated with the sun, whose warmth and light revive with the
spring. In ‘‘The Spring,’’ Carew writes, the warm sun ‘‘gives a sacred birth / To
the dead Swallow.’’ That passage may allude to the belief that swallows do not
migrate but nest throughout the winter; in March, according to Spenser, ‘‘The
Swallow peepes out of her nest’’ (SC ‘‘March’’ 11).
It was considered a good omen if a swallow nested under the eaves of one’s
house. In the midst of Odysseus’ slaughter of the suitors in the Odyssey
(22.240), his protectress Athena turns into a swallow and perches on a beam.
(In Macbeth 1.6.3--10, the ‘‘temple-haunting martlet’’ seems to be the martin, a
kind of swallow.)
The final line of Keats’s ‘‘To Autumn’’ -- ‘‘And gathering swallows twitter in
the skies’’ -- poignantly evokes their association with a spring that now seems
long past. At the end of The Waste Land T. S. Eliot invokes the swallow in two
quotations as a possible harbinger of spring and redemption from the ‘‘arid
plain.’’ The first is from a late Latin poem, The Vigil of Venus: ‘‘When is my
spring coming? When shall I be as the swallow, that I may cease to be
voiceless?’’ The second is from a love song about a migrating swallow in
Tennyson’s The Princess (4.75--98).
The tuneless, chattering sound of the swallow, also noted in the Bible (Isa.
38.14), may have prompted the tale of Philomela and Procne (told in full by
Ovid in the Metamorphoses but without naming the birds), where Philomela,
with her tongue cut out, is transformed into a swallow. So Dante has a
swallow (rondinella) singing sad songs near dawn (Purgatorio 9.14). (In other
versions of the myth Procne becomes the swallow and Philomela the
nightingale.) Swinburne’s ‘‘Itylus’’ is a song sung by the nightingale to her
sister the swallow. (See Nightingale.)
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Swallows are proverbially swift in flight. In Spenser a speedy ship glides
‘‘More swift then swallow sheres the liquid skye’’ (FQ 2.6.5). ‘‘True hope is swift
and flies with swallow’s wings’’ (Shakespeare, R3 5.2.23). Perhaps for this
reason they were sometimes identified with swifts in ancient times. Blake has
a rather awkward simile, ‘‘swift as the swallow or swift’’ (Milton 15.48).
Swan
214
The swan (Greek kyknos, Latin cycnus or cygnus, or olor) has long been one of
the most popular birds in poetry, not least because of the association of swans
with poets themselves. The trumpet-like call of some swans apparently
sounded beautiful to ancient ears; Virgil in Eclogues 9.29 refers to the famous
singing swans of his city, Mantua, and Lucretius compares the song of the
swan with the art of the lyre (2.503). We learn in Aristophanes’ Birds that the
swan is the bird of Apollo, god of poetry (869); see Martial 13.77. In Latin
poetry it is also sometimes the bird of Venus, who is borne by a chariot of
swans in Ovid (Met. 10.717) and Horace (3.28.13--15).
It became a commonplace of modesty to contrast one’s own song (or poem)
to another poet’s as a goose’s (or swallow’s) song beside a swan’s: see Eclogues
8.55, 9.36, Lucretius 3.6--7; Shelley playfully repeats the gesture by comparing
his poem to an ephemeral fly that cannot climb to the heights where the
swan sings (Witch of Atlas 9--12). Theocritus, in Idyll 5.136, has a goatherd boast
of his singing prowess by using the comparison in reverse. Horace elaborates a
conceit in which he is transmogrified into a swan and flies over many nations,
that is, he shall gain great fame as a poet (Odes 2.20). Pope, in ‘‘On the
Candidates for the Laurel,’’ deploys the comparison with his usual wit. Unable
to endorse any of the candidates for the office of poet laureate, he seizes on
Stephen Duck, a poet of very minor talent: ‘‘Let’s rather wait one year for
better luck; / One year may make a singing swan of Duck.’’
In describing Pindar as the ‘‘swan of Dirce’’ (one of the rivers of Thebes),
Horace (4.2.25--27) began a tradition that continued into modern times, e.g.,
Homer is the Swan of Meander, Shakespeare is the ‘‘Sweet Swan of Avon’’
(from Jonson’s memorial poem), Vaughan is the Swan of Usk, and so on. This
convention depends, of course, on the fact that, as Ovid puts it, ‘‘swans love
the streams’’ (Metamorphoses 2.539). (See River.) Or the poet’s city is named, as
when Cowper calls Virgil ‘‘the Mantuan swan’’ (Table Talk 557), or the nation,
as when Garnier addresses Ronsard ‘‘O Swan of the French’’ (‘‘Elegy on the
Death of Ronsard’’ 50).
As swans are migratory, and are frequently seen alone, they can be
imagined as exiles from their homelands. So Shelley, referring to Byron’s
emigration to Italy, writes, ‘‘a tempest-cleaving Swan / Of the songs of Albion, /
Driven from his ancestral streams / By the might of evil dreams, / Found a
nest in thee [Venice]’’ (‘‘Euganean Hills’’ 174--78). Baudelaire in ‘‘Le Cygne’’
describes a swan escaped from a menagerie, crying for water and dreaming of
his native lake. Mallarmé’s best-known sonnet, Le vierge, le vivace et le bel
aujourd’hui, likens the new ‘‘today’’ to a swan caught in the ice of a lake of past
failures to fly: it might tear itself free but it remains fast in useless exile. See
also Edmund Gosse’s ‘‘The Swan.’’ Yeats in ‘‘1919’’ writes, ‘‘Some moralist or
mythological poet / Compares the solitary soul to a swan’’; he is probably
alluding to Shelley’s Alastor 275--90, where the wandering poet contrasts his
own homelessness with the flight of a swan to his nest and mate.
Swine
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
It was also thought that swans sang at their deaths. Clytemnestra in
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon 1444--45 gloats that Cassandra cried out at her death
like a swan. Plato has Socrates disparage this belief as a human projection
(Phaedo 85a), but Socrates’ opinion did not much affect the poets. It was so
commonplace a belief that Seneca can allude to the sweetness of a swan’s last
song (Phaedra 301). Chaucer names ‘‘The jelous swan, ayens his deth that
syngeth’’ (PF 342). When Ronsard declares he is weary of life, he sings his passing ‘‘the way a swan does, / Who sings its death on the banks of the Meander’’
(sonnet: ‘‘Il faut laisser maisons’’). Shakespeare has: ‘‘And now this pale swan
in her wat’ry nest / Begins the sad dirge of her certain ending’’ (Lucrece
1611--12). The phrase ‘‘swan song’’ often refers to the last work of a poet or
musician. Ovid declares the final book of his Tristia to be the sorrowful song
of a swan (5.1.11--14), probably the passage Darı́o invokes when he writes, ‘‘I
salute you [swans] now as in Latin verses / Publius Ovidius Naso once saluted
you’’ (‘‘Los Cisnes’’ 5--6). Yeats in ‘‘The Tower’’ beautifully describes ‘‘the hour /
When the swan must fix his eye / Upon a fading gleam, / Float out upon a
long / Last reach of glittering stream / And there sing his last song.’’ The image
is implicit in Tennyson’s ‘‘The Lady of Shalott,” where the Lady, whose magic
web and mirror are destroyed when she looks down to Camelot, lies down,
‘‘robed in snowy white” (136), in a boat and sings her last song as she floats
downstream.
An ancient myth tells how Zeus in the form of a swan raped Leda, who
then gave birth to Helen and Clytemnestra from one egg and Castor and
Pollux from another. It was a popular subject in ancient art, and several of
the Renaissance masters painted it (e.g., Michaelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael).
See also Darı́o’s ‘‘Leda’’ and Yeats’s ‘‘Leda and the Swan.’’
Tennyson knew some of the legends about swan-maidens and swan-princes
that were common in the Middle Ages; the best-known of these is the tale of
Lohengrin. After Wagner’s opera Lohengrin mysterious swans swim through
Symbolist poems, notably in many by Darı́o, who celebrates a new ‘‘Wagnerian
swan,” which will grasp beauty (Leda) and/or conceive a greater ideal beauty
(Helen) (‘‘The Swan”); it is ‘‘the poet of perfect verses” (‘‘Blazon”).
Swine
see Pig
Sword
see Armor
T
Tempest
see Wind
Tercel
see Hawk
Theatre
‘‘The world hath been often compared to the theatre,’’ writes Fielding, ‘‘and
many grave writers as well as the poets have considered human life as a great
drama, resembling in almost every particular those scenical representations
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which Thespis is first reported to have invented’’ (Tom Jones 7.1). The
comparison most often quoted is Shakespeare’s: ‘‘All the world’s a stage, / And
all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their
entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts’’ (AYLI 2.7.139--42). It is
an old metaphor, going back at least to Plato, not long after the rise of Greek
drama. He speculates: ‘‘We may imagine that each of us living creatures is a
puppet made by the gods, possibly as a plaything, possibly with some more
serious purpose’’ (Laws 644d--e, trans. Taylor); in another dialogue Socrates
considers ‘‘the whole tragedy and comedy of life’’ (Philebus 50b). Indeed Plato’s
influential Cave is a kind of shadow-theatre with people as spectators rather
than actors (see Cave). Like Plato, Horace thinks of man as a puppet (Satires
2.7.82), and other Latin writers, pagan and Christian, followed suit.
By and large the image of puppet or actor implies that people are under the
control of puppeteers or playwrights, that is, the gods, or God, or fate. Its
germ may be found in the Iliad, where the gods watch the war, comment
on it (as the nobles do during the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream), and sometimes intervene in it, though fate seems in overall control.
From the spectator’s viewpoint, which is really that of an actor stepping back
from his or her role, the metaphor tends to bring out a sense of life’s
unreality, as when Prospero likens the globe to the ‘‘insubstantial pageant’’ he
has just put on (Tempest 4.1.155), or life’s brevity and meaninglessness, as when
Macbeth sums up: ‘‘Life’s but a walking shadow; a poor player, / That struts
and frets his hour upon the stage, / And then is heard no more’’ (5.5.24--26).
Spenser complains that his beloved is like a spectator who remains unmoved
while ‘‘beholding me that all the pageants play, / disguysing diversly my
troubled wits’’ (Amoretti 54). Cervantes’ Don Quixote stresses the superficiality
of dramatic roles as he explains to Sancho that ‘‘some play emperors, others
popes, and in short, all the parts that can be brought into a play; but when it
is over, that is to say, when life ends, death strips them all of the robes that
distinguished one from the other, and all are equal in the grave’’ (2.12, trans.
Starkie). Several of Caldéron’s plays depend on the notion of ‘‘the theatre of
the world,’’ with God as director or playwright. While Wilhelm Meister is
expatiating on the ignorance, vanity, and selfishness of actors, a friend breaks
in: ‘‘don’t you realize that you have been describing the whole world, not just
the theatre?’’ (Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship 7.3). Poe restates Don
Quixote’s lesson in lurid terms in ‘‘The Conqueror Worm’’: angels watch a
‘‘motley drama’’ put on by ‘‘mere puppets’’ with ‘‘horror the soul of the plot’’
until death puts out the lights on the tragedy called ‘‘Man,’’ of which the hero
is ‘‘the Conqueror Worm.’’ Yeats developed a complex theory of masks to
account for human character, and in many of his own plays he returned to
ancient Greek or Japanese styles of masked acting to bring out the essential
role of artifice in life. ‘‘It was the mask engaged your mind,’’ one lover says to
another, ‘‘And after set your heart to beat, / Not what’s behind’’ (‘‘The Mask’’);
in a late poem Yeats admits, ‘‘Players and painted stage took all my love / And
not those things that they were emblems of’’ (‘‘Circus Animals’ Desertion’’
31--32). Literary critics often use ‘‘persona’’ (Latin for ‘‘mask’’) to refer to the
speaker or narrator of a work (as opposed to the author); the ‘‘dramatic
monologue,’’ perfected by R. Browning, is spoken in character, not in propria
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Thread
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
persona, ‘‘in the author’s own voice.’’ Ezra Pound, speaking ventriloquistically
through many voices and styles, titled an early collection Personae.
Thread
Three
Thyme
see Weaving and spinning
see Number
see Bee
Tiger
Not found in the Mediterranean area, tigers go unmentioned in the Bible and
in Greek poetry and drama. In Latin literature it is sometimes the beast of
Bacchus: in Virgil’s Aeneid the god drives his tigers down the slopes of Nysa
(6.805; see also Eclogues 5.29), while Horace (3.3.14--15) and Martial (8.26.8) have
him drawn by a pair of tigers. Dionysus wears a tiger skin in Claudian (Rape of
Proserpine 1.17--18). The point here is surely that Bacchus/Dionysus represents
the power to tame what is wild or fierce. For even more than the lion, with
which it is often paired, the tiger represents cruelty or ferocity. Dido accuses
Aeneas of being suckled by a tigress (4.367); if she fails to help Jason, Medea
tells herself, ‘‘I’ll surely own / I am a child of a tigress’’ (Ovid, Met. 7.32). Over a
pathetic scene in Chaucer ‘‘ther nys tigre, ne noon so crueel beest,’’ that
would not weep (Squire’s Tale 419); ‘‘cruel’’ occurs as the epithet several times
in Chaucer and Spenser. In The Faerie Queene the wicked Maleger rides on one
(2.11.20). When Shakespeare’s Albany turns on Goneril for her cruel treatment
of her father, he says, ‘‘What have you done? / Tigers, not daughters’’ (Lear
4.2.39--40).
In his Ars Poetica Horace gives as an example of artistic incongruity the
linking of wild with tame, ‘‘of pairing snakes with birds or lambs with tigers’’
(13). Byron’s version of this is ‘‘Birds breed not vipers, tigers nurse not lambs’’
(‘‘Hints from Horace’’ 20).
The most famous tiger in literature is the mysterious creature in Blake’s
‘‘The Tyger.’’ The poem is a series of unanswered and unanswerable questions
addressed to the beast and his creator, climaxing in ‘‘Did he who made the
Lamb make thee?’’
During the joyous cosmic celebration that concludes Shelley’s Prometheus
Unbound, the moon likens herself to a Maenad, worshipper of Dionysus, in her
rapture, while the earth responds that the moon’s rays charm ‘‘the tyger joy’’
that fills her (4.501). An even more striking image is T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘Christ the
tiger’’ in ‘‘Gerontion.’’ If ‘‘April is the cruelest month’’ (The Waste Land) to a
man in spiritual despair, then he would also think ‘‘In the juvescence of the
year / Came Christ the tiger’’ (19--20); ‘‘The tiger springs in the new year. Us he
devours’’ (48).
Note: Tigers in classical literature generally come from Hyrcania, on the
southeast shore of the Caspian (Virgil, Aeneid 4.367; Claudian, Rape of Proserpine
3.263), or from Armenia (Propertius 1.9.19; Virgil, Eclogues 5.29). Macbeth
names ‘‘th’Hyrcan tiger’’ (3.4.100).
See Lion.
Time
Seldom a symbol of something else, time is itself often symbolized, like dawn,
death, and the seasons, in images no less interesting for being conventional.
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Time
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‘‘Time’s scythe,’’ or his ‘‘bending sickle,’’ is his most salient prop
(Shakespeare, Sonnets 12 and 116); with it ‘‘wicked Tyme . . . / Does mow the
flowring herbes and goodly things / And all their glory to the ground downe
flings’’ (Spenser, FQ 3.6.39). Resembling the harvest, and death the Grim
Reaper, time’s scything or mowing would seem an obvious trope, but it
probably owes something to the Greek god Kronos, an agricultural god who
was imagined as carrying a sickle, and whose name was confused with
khronos, ‘‘time’’ (Latinized as chronus, whence ‘‘chronic,’’ ‘‘chronology,’’ etc.);
Plutarch mentions that some Greeks identify the two (De Iside et Osiride 363d)
(and see Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.25).
Ovid calls time edax rerum, ‘‘gluttonous of things’’ (Met. 15.234); Shakespeare
addresses him as ‘‘Devouring Time’’ (Sonnets 19), ‘‘eater of youth’’ (Lucrece 927),
and ‘‘cormorant devouring Time’’ (LLL 1.1.4). Ronsard says, ‘‘Time the glutton
(Le temps mangeard) consumes all things, / Cities, Castles, Empires: indeed man’’
(Discours de l’altération et change des choses humaines 49--50). Milton defies him to
‘‘glut thyself with what thy womb devours’’ (‘‘On Time’’). That metaphor too
may go back to Kronos, who swallowed his children as they were born: so
time consumes what it creates. ‘‘Thou nursest all, and murder’st all that are’’
(Lucrece 929).
In variants of these images Shakespeare and many other poets call time a
thief, a ‘‘bloody tyrant’’ (Sonnets 16), a waster; envious, injurious, inexorable,
fatal. Sometimes he drives a chariot or coach. Marvell hears ‘‘Time’s winged
chariot hurrying near’’ and it threatens to turn him and his coy mistress to
dust (‘‘Coy Mistress’’ 22). Goethe’s ‘‘An Schwager Kronos’’ (‘‘To Coachman
Chronus’’) imagines the coach rolling briskly downhill into life, then laboriously uphill to a splendid view, pausing for a drink with a maiden, and then
careering toward a sinking sun through the gate of hell.
As opposed to eternity, one seldom finds a favorable account of time, but he
has his virtues. He heals wounds, and Truth is his daughter -- he can ‘‘unmask
falsehood and bring truth to light’’ -- and he has the power to redress wrongs
and reward diligence (Lucrece 936--59). This latter idea goes back at least to
Pindar, who wrote ‘‘for just men Time is the best savior’’ (frag. 159). Sophocles’
Ajax learns that ‘‘Vast and measureless time makes all / hidden things grow
and hides what appears’’ (Ajax 646--47). Jesus said, ‘‘there is nothing covered,
that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known’’ (Matt. 10.26). In a
sinister context Racine writes, ‘‘There are no secrets that times does not
reveal’’ (Britannicus 4.4.1404). Time may also be disparaged as a ‘‘ceaseless
lackey to eternity’’ (Lucrece 967), for he will consume himself in the end and
‘‘long Eternity’’ will prevail (Milton, ‘‘On Time’’); but Blake says ‘‘time is the
mercy of Eternity’’ (Milton 24.72) and ‘‘Eternity is in love with the productions
of time’’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 7).
Marvell’s chariot and Goethe’s coach remind us that time is unidirectional
and fast. By contrast the motion of eternity is circular, stately, and dancelike.
During the eternal spring of unfallen Eden, according to Milton, the Hours
danced (PL 4.267). Shelley’s fateful Hour rose in a chariot to dethrone
Demogorgon, but after the death of Time there are no more chariots; ‘‘Once
the hungry Hours were hounds / Which chased the Day’’ but now they dance
in ‘‘mystic measure’’ (PU 4.73--78). At the ‘‘still point’’ of eternity, according to
Eliot, ‘‘there is only the dance’’ (‘‘Burnt Norton’’ sec. 2).
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Times of day
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Times of day
Toad
Tortoise
see Day, Dawn, East and west, Sun
see Frog and toad
see Harp
Tower
As its most striking feature at a distance, a tower often stands as a synecdoche
for a great city, as in Marlowe’s ‘‘topless towers of Ilium’’ (Doctor Faustus B
5.1.94). As a human structure striving towards heaven, and as a dwelling for
noble lords, a tower might mean pride or hubris, marked for destruction, like
the Tower of Babel; see also Milton’s phrase ‘‘proud towers’’ (PL 5.907). It can
symbolize a woman besieged, as in The Romance of the Rose (8566), or a woman
sequestered, as in the tale of Rapunzel or Tennyson’s ‘‘The Lady of Shalott.’’
(see Siege.)
A tower may also be a refuge of solitude for sage or poet. ‘‘Or let my lamp
at midnight hour / Be seen in some high lonely tower,’’ Milton writes in ‘‘Il
Penseroso’’ (85--86). Having moved into a house with an ‘‘ancient tower,’’ Yeats
saw the chamber at the top of a winding stair as like that of Milton’s contemplative, and where he could meditate on history and rise above it (‘‘My
House’’).
Though ‘‘tower of ivory’’ is a simile for the neck of the beloved in the Song
of Solomon (7.4), the common phrase ‘‘ivory tower,’’ referring to a retreat or
shelter from the real world, such as a university, seems to derive from a poem
by Sainte-Beuve (‘‘Pensées d’Août’’) where he contrasts the embattled Victor
Hugo with the aloof Alfred de Vigny, who withdraws to his tour d’ivoire. Why
ivory? Perhaps Sainte-Beuve alludes to Vigny’s own cor d’ivoire, the ivory horn
in ‘‘Le Cor’’ sounded by the dying knight at Roncevaux -- surely an emblem of
the poet -- and perhaps to the gate of ivory in Homer and Virgil, the gate of
false dreams, dreams or revery being the Romantic refuge from this sordid
world. Flaubert wrote to Turgenev, ‘‘I have always tried to live in an ivory
tower, but a sea of shit is beating against its walls’’ (13 November 1872). The
Ivory Tower is the title of Henry James’s last, unfinished, novel.
Tree
Most symbolic trees are specified, for the symbolism of individual trees is
usually highly specific. But anything that can grow, ‘‘flourish,’’ bear ‘‘fruit,’’
and die might be likened to a tree: a person, a family, a nation, a cultural
tradition. In the Bible a tree often stands for a person, usually to distinguish
the godly from the ungodly. Thus in Psalm 1 the godly man ‘‘shall be like a
tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season;
his leaf shall not wither’’ (1.3; cf. Jer. 17.8), whereas Jude warns against false
Christians, who are ‘‘trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead,
plucked up by the roots’’ (1.12). Job contrasts a man to a tree, which might
grow again after being cut down (14.7--10). Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s
dream of a tree that grew to heaven only to be ordered cut down by an angel
as really about Nebuchadnezzar himself (Dan. 4.8--27). Paul calls a new
member of the church a ‘‘neophyte’’ (Authorized Version ‘‘novice’’), i.e., ‘‘newly
planted’’ (1 Tim. 3.6). Isaiah extends the image: ‘‘as the days of a tree are the
days of my people’’ (65.22; cf. 56.3); Ezekiel’s riddling parable in chapter 17
establishes Jerusalem as a tree. The now common notion of a ‘‘family tree’’ is
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Trumpet
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found in the tree of Jesse: ‘‘And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem
of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots’’ (Isa. 11.1, quoted by Paul in
Rom. 15.12). It is implicit in Homer’s Iliad, where the generations of men are
likened to leaves on a tree (6.145--50; see Leaf).
The two most important trees in the Bible, of course, are ‘‘the tree of life’’
and ‘‘the tree of knowledge of good and evil’’ (Gen. 2.9). Though what they
symbolize is more or less expressed in their names, why the book’s author
chose trees as the vehicle is less clear: perhaps to make the link between
knowing and tasting, of the sort that Milton makes as he exploits the original
sense of ‘‘sapience’’ (from the root of Latin sapere, ‘‘to taste of’’) (PL 9.797, 1018),
and perhaps to establish the first of a series of dietary taboos that define the
Hebrew people. The notion of two trees, variously named, has entered into
western religious traditions, such as the Kabbalah, and literature. Byron’s
Manfred has learned that ‘‘Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most /
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth, / The Tree of Knowledge is not
that of Life’’ (Manfred 1.1.10--12). Yeats’s ‘‘Two Trees’’ are an inner one that
grows in one’s heart with ‘‘great ignorant leafy ways’’ (16) and an outer one
reflected in a glass where ‘‘ravens of unresting thought’’ fly through broken
branches (34). In the pageant that Dante sees atop Mt. Purgatory, one tree, the
tree Adam ate from, loses all its leaves and fruit, but after the chariot of the
church is tied to it the tree is renewed, as if to say that Christ reconciles our
fallen nature to God (Purgatorio 32.37--60). Mephistopheles tells a student, ‘‘All
theory is gray, dear friend, / And green is the golden tree of life’’ (Faust
2038--39).
The bleeding tree is an interesting topos or motif traceable from Virgil’s
Aeneid 3.22--68, where Aeneas, after breaking a branch off a bush, sees blood
dripping from it, and learns that it is his friend Polydorus. Dante (at Virgil’s
urging) breaks a branch of a tree in the wood of suicides and hears the
sinner’s story (Inferno 13.28--108). Ariosto in book 6 of Orlando Furioso and Tasso
in Jerusalem Liberated 13.41 have similar tales; Spenser imitates these in his
story of Fradubio, enchanted by Duessa (FQ 1.2.30ff.).
Ovid’s tale of Orpheus includes a tree-list or small catalogue of trees (and
other plants) that came crowding around him when he sat down to sing:
poplar, oak, beech, maple, fir, willow, pine, and so on (Met. 10.90--105). Other
tree-lists after Ovid are found in Seneca’s Oedipus 566--75, Statius’ Thebaid
6.98--106, the Roman de la Rose 1338--68, Boccaccio’s Teseide 11.22--24, Chaucer’s
Parliament of Fowls 176--82, and both Spenser’s Faerie Queene 1.1.8--9 and his
Virgil’s Gnat 190--224. Sidney gives a catalogue with symbolic meanings
attached in First Eclogues 13.113--54. See also Shelley, ‘‘Orpheus’’ 105--14.
Tree entries in this dictionary: Almond, Apple, Ash, Beech, Cedar,
Cypress, Elm, Holly, Laurel, Linden, Oak, Olive, Palm, Poplar, Willow, Yew.
See also Forest, Leaf, Seed.
Trumpet
220
‘‘Trumpet’’ in English translates several types of ancient horns, whether the
curved ram’s horn of the Hebrews (usually shopar) or the straight bronze horn
of the Greeks (salpinx) and Romans (tuba). In the Bible and classical literature
its main uses are similar -- to send signals, to summon an assembly, and
especially to prepare for battle -- but its extended senses are interestingly
different.
Trumpet
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
The Book of Numbers explains that trumpets are to be used to call
assemblies, announce a war, and sound over sacrifices (10.1--10). Already
Jehovah had summoned the Israelites to go up to Mt. Sinai with a long loud
trumpet sound (Exod. 19.13,16,19). Leviticus ordains a ‘‘trumpet of jubile’’ after
forty-nine years (25.9). In Joshua seven priests blow seven trumpets for seven
days as part of the campaign to destroy Jericho (6.4--20).
The prophets serve as trumpets of the Lord. ‘‘Cry aloud, spare not,’’ Isaiah is
told, ‘‘lift up thy voice like a trumpet’’ (58.1). ‘‘Blow ye the trumpet . . . for the
day of the Lord cometh’’ (Joel 2.1). That day, according to Zephaniah, is a ‘‘day
of the trumpet’’ (1.16), while according to Zechariah ‘‘the Lord God shall blow
the trumpet’’ (9.14). Shelley evokes these prophets when he asks the west wind
to be through his lips ‘‘The trumpet of a prophecy’’ (‘‘West Wind’’ 69).
The Christian meaning of the ‘‘last trump’’ (1 Cor. 15.52) subsumes the
Jewish uses -- gathering the exiled Israelites, preparing for the Messiah’s war -and adds the resurrection of the dead. To John of Patmos the voice of Christ is
as great as a trumpet’s (1.10); then John sees seven angels, each with a
trumpet that produces a revelation of the last days (8.1ff.).
In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ enjoins his followers to give alms in
secret: ‘‘do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the
synagogues and in the streets, that they may have the glory of men’’ (Matt.
6.2). We still speak of ‘‘trumpeting’’ one’s virtues or doing something ‘‘with a
flourish of trumpets.’’
Homer’s warriors do not use trumpets, but a trumpet appears once in a
simile for Achilles’ piercing cry (Iliad 18.219). Though it had other uses in
Greece, it became almost synonymous with war and war’s alarms. Bacchylides’
trumpet ‘‘shrieks out the song of war’’ (18.3). Greeks attack boldly, says
Aeschylus, inspired by blaring trumpets (Persians 395). When peace is
established, a trumpet-maker has a useless and expensive trumpet on his
hands (Aristophanes, Peace 1240).
Quite a few trumpets appear in the Aeneid and other Roman epics, though
it is not always the tuba; sometimes it is the curved horn called the bucina, or
just a ‘‘horn’’ (cornu) that summons men to arms (e.g., Aeneid 6.165). In the
Golden Age, according to Ovid, one heard ‘‘no trumpet straight, no horn of
bent brass’’ (Met. 1.98). In literature ever since, trumps or trumpets, with such
epithets as ‘‘thundering’’ (Chaucer), ‘‘dreadful,’’ ‘‘doleful’’ (Spenser), ‘‘braying,’’
‘‘angry,’’ ‘‘hideous’’ (Shakespeare), and ‘‘warlike’’ (Milton), have sounded
whenever battles are described. Even Milton’s angels form ranks when ‘‘to
arms / The matin trumpet sung’’ (PL 6.525--26).
Antipater of Sidon called Pindar ‘‘the Pierian trumpet’’ (Greek Anthology 7.34).
Traditional (Renaissance) portraits of Clio, the muse of history, give her a
trumpet. Spenser has Clio say ‘‘I, that doo all noble feates professe / To
register, and sound in trump of gold’’ (Tears of the Muses 97--98). Fame, a poor
cousin of Clio, also has a ‘‘trompe of gold’’ in Chaucer (House of Fame 3) and
Spenser (FQ 3.3.3). Since history is mainly a tale of wars and famous deeds of
warriors, the trumpet became a synecdoche for epic poetry. When Alexander
came to Achilles’ tomb, according to Petrarch, he called him fortunate to have
found ‘‘so clear a trumpet,’’ i.e., Homer (Rime 187). Spenser, improving on the
supposed preamble to the Aeneid, announces he is forced ‘‘For trumpets sterne
to change mine Oaten reeds,’’ that is, to give up pastoral poetry and take up
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Turtle-dove
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‘‘Fierce warres and faithful loves’’ (FQ 1 Pro. 1; see 1.11.6). Alfieri notes that
Tasso made the ancient trumpet sound in modern tones (‘‘On Tasso’s Tomb’’).
Wordsworth, however, claims that it was the sonnet that, in Milton’s hands,
‘‘became a trumpet; whence he blew / Soul-animating strains’’ (‘‘Scorn not the
sonnet’’).
Turtle-dove
see Dove
U
Urn
222
In classical literature literal urns have three functions: to hold liquids (the
Greek word for ‘‘urn’’ is hydria, from hydor, ‘‘water’’), to hold ballots or lots,
and to hold the ashes of the dead. From the first use comes the image of the
urn as the source of a river. Virgil pictures Father Inachus pouring his stream
from an urn (Aeneid 7.792), while Statius has Ismenus drop his urn in despair
(Thebaid 9.410). Imitating these river-gods, Dryden writes, of the great fire of
London, ‘‘Old Father Thames raised up his reverend head, / But feared the fate
of Simois would return’’ -- the Trojan river that fought the fire of Hephaestus;
‘‘Deep in his ooze he sought his sedgy bed, / And shrunk his waters back into
his urn’’ (Annus Mirabilis 925--28). Thomson’s eye roves ‘‘To where the Nile from
Ethiopian clouds, / His never drained ethereal urn, descends’’ (Liberty 3.252--53).
Schiller laments the time when ‘‘Out of urns the lovely Naiads carried / Leapt
the rivers’ silver foam’’ (‘‘Gods of Greece’’ (1800) 23--24), while Shelley imagines
a northern clime where Liberty teaches ‘‘every Naiad’s ice-cold urn’’ to speak
of her (‘‘Ode to Liberty’’ 111).
The urn’s occasional use as the source of fate derives from another passage
of the Aeneid that names the urn full of lots for choosing which seven young
Athenian men must be sacrificed to the Minotaur (6.22). In Seneca’s Troades we
learn that the captive Trojan women have been assigned to their captors by
lots from a spinning urn (974). Behind this tradition lies the two jars (pithoi) of
Zeus, one containing griefs, the other good things, to be distributed to
mortals below (Iliad 24.527ff.).
Propertius warns his friend Postumus that he may be sent back from the
wars in an urn (3.12.13). ‘‘Urn’’ became a general term for tomb or grave in
poetry. Donne’s lovers will forgo a long chronicle for a sonnet or two, for
‘‘As well a well wrought urn becomes / The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs’’
(‘‘The Canonization’’ 33--34). Admonishing us to remember the vanity of
fame, Gray asks, ‘‘Can storied urn or animated bust / Back to its mansion
call the fleeting breath?’’ (‘‘Elegy’’ 41--42). Byron describes Athens under the
Ottomans as ‘‘a nation’s sepulchre’’ and a ‘‘defenceless urn’’ (Childe Harold
2.20--21).
Keats does not tell us what he thinks was the original function of his
Grecian urn, but since it is ‘‘storied’’ like Gray’s, it is plausible to think of it as
a cinerary urn, once holding the ashes of the dead. That use may give it
another means to ‘‘tease us out of thought / As doth eternity’’ (44--45).
Valley
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V
Valley
Valleys are low places, where villagers dwell, as opposed to mountains, where
the lordly might have their fortresses or castles; thus the social ranks of high
and low often correspond to the terrain. But when the Lord comes, according
to Isaiah, the ranks will be reversed: ‘‘Every valley shall be exalted, and every
mountain and hill shall be made low’’ (40.4). This revolutionary prophecy lent
its imagery to militant Christians for millennia, as we see in a sermon of John
Bunyan: ‘‘If you would understand the Scriptures, you shall read it calleth rich
men wicked Mountains, and poor believing men Valleys’’ (‘‘The Right Devil
Discovered’’). See Mountain.
In a less militant mode, many poets acepted the valley as the right place for
a humble Christian. Young wishes to ‘‘steal / Along the vale / Of humble life,
secure from foes’’ (Ocean st. 61). Of his unchronicled villagers Gray writes,
‘‘Along the cool sequestered vale of life / They kept the noiseless tenor of their
way’’ (‘‘Elegy’’ 75--76).
The Latin hymn Salve, Regina (11--12C) entreats the Virgin to pity those in
hac lacrimarum valle, ‘‘in this valley of tears.’’ ‘‘Vale of tears’’ is the Bishops’
Bible version (1568) of Psalm 84.6, rendered by the AV as ‘‘valley of Baca’’ (an
unknown name); recent versions give it as ‘‘valley of thirst.’’ ‘‘Vale of tears’’ has
become a commonplace for this life; Shelley names ‘‘our state’’ as ‘‘This dim
vast vale of tears’’ (‘‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’’ 16--17). A verse of the most
famous Psalm gives a similar image: ‘‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death, I will fear no evil’’ (23.4). With or without tears, then,
many writers have taken this life to mean a difficult and often frightening
passage through a valley. Dante has been walking through a valley ‘‘that had
harassed my heart with so much fear’’ when he reaches the foot of a sunlit
hill (Inferno 1.15, trans. Mandelbaum). ‘‘Yet whilest I,’’ Spenser writes, ‘‘in
this wretched vale doo stay, / My wearie feete shall ever wandring be’’
(‘‘Daphnaida’’ 456--57). Blake imagines the ‘‘just man’’ following his path
along the ‘‘vale of death’’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell 2.3--5).
Almost as an echo of ‘‘vale of tears,’’ Shakespeare has Othello say ‘‘I am
declin’d / Into the vale of years’’ (3.3.269--70), into old age (see also Gray,
‘‘Eton’’ 81).
Veil
In the ancient world veils were worn by brides (e.g., Gen. 24.65), sometimes by
prostitutes (Gen. 38.14--19), and by women in mourning (Iliad 24.93). Since
medieval times most orders of nuns have worn veils; ‘‘to take the veil’’ is to
become a nun.
The most important biblical veil is the cloth in the Tabernacle, and later
the Temple, that separates the inner sanctuary or Holy of Holies from the
outer room. ‘‘The holy place within the vail’’ was to be entered only on the
annual Day of Atonement by the high priest (Lev. 16). When Jesus died,
‘‘behold, the vail of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom’’
(Matt. 27.51), an event that the Epistle to the Hebrews interprets as Jesus’
becoming the new high priest (6.19--20) who lets us all enter the holy place
‘‘By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil,
that is to say, his flesh’’ (10.20).
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Vintage
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This allegorical use of the veil leads us to the veil as a symbol of allegory
itself. When Moses came down from Mt. Sinai with the tablets, his face shone
with the glory of the Lord, frightening the Israelites, so ‘‘he put a vail on his
face’’ while he spoke with them (Exod. 34.33). Paul interprets the veil as veiled
speech, concealing the transience of his law, in contrast to the plain speech of
Christians, and adds an allegory about reading allegorically: the children of
Israel are blinded, ‘‘for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away
in the reading of the old testament; which vail is done away in Christ,’’ but
when their heart turns to Christ ‘‘the vail shall be taken away’’ and we shall
behold ‘‘with open face’’ the glory of the Lord (2 Cor. 3.12--18). Spenser invokes
this passage in his allegorical Faerie Queene: he asks the Queen to ‘‘pardon me
thus to enfold / In covert vele, and wrap in shadowes light, / That feeble eyes
your glory may behold’’ (2 Pro. 5; see also Dedicatory Sonnet 3).
The Book of Revelation or Apocalypse means literally ‘‘unveiling’’ or ‘‘lifting
up the veil’’ (there is nothing in the word apocalypsis itself that implies the
end of the world). Writers committed to revealing the truth often resort to
veil imagery. Blake’s writings are filled with veils, symbolizing not only our
lack of vision but the entire fallen world; he has a female character named
Vala (with a veil) who among other things stands for nature. The veil is a
favorite image of Shelley’s: he has a ‘‘veil of life and death’’ (‘‘Mont Blanc’’ 54),
a ‘‘veil of space and time’’ (‘‘Ode to Liberty’’ 86), and ‘‘Time’s eternal veil’’
(Queen Mab 8.12). These will all be rent when we behold the truth in this life
or the next, but sometimes he cautions, ‘‘Lift not the painted veil which those
who live / Call Life’’ (sonnet: ‘‘Lift not . . . ’’).
Another influential ancient veil is the one that covered the statue of Isis at
Sais (Egypt). According to Plutarch, an inscription on the statue read: ‘‘I am
all, past, present, and future, and my robe no mortal has unveiled’’ (De Iside et
Osiride 354c). Schiller’s poem ‘‘The Veiled Image at Sais’’ tells of an over-eager
novice who unveils the statue to learn the ‘‘Truth’’ and is smitten by sorrow,
while Novalis’s unfinished story tells that he who lifts the veil sees only
himself (The Novices of Sais). Tennyson’s despairing lines -- ‘‘What hope of
answer, or redress? / Behind the veil, behind the veil’’ (In Memoriam 56.27--28) -may derive from the Isis legend as well as from Shelley’s cosmic veils.
Elsewhere Tennyson writes, ‘‘For the drift of the Maker is dark, an Isis hid by
the veil’’ (Maud 1.144).
Vintage
Violet
224
see Wine
In classical literature the ‘‘violet’’ (Greek ion, Latin viola) referred to several
kinds of flowers, such as the pansy (viola tricolor), so it is not always clear
whether to translate it as ‘‘violet’’ or not. Its earliest appearance, a unique
usage in Homer (Odyssey 5.72), was questioned in ancient times as a scribal
error, but Homer also uses the compound word ioeides, ‘‘violet-colored,’’ as an
epithet of the sea, and that usage suggests that Homer thought of the ion as
the purple flower we call the violet, the viola odorata or purpurea, the ‘‘sweet
violet.’’ (It was used, like the murex, to make dye. See Purple.) Our violet, in
any case, is the usual and most distinctive reference of both ancient words.
The flower had various associations in classical culture. Along with several
other flowers it belonged to Persephone (Latin Proserpina): see the first
Violet
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Homeric Hymn to Demeter 2.6, Bacchylides’ Epinician 3.2, and Ovid, Metamorphoses 5.392. It also belonged to Attis the dying god: Ovid tells how it sprang
from his blood in Fasti 4.283ff. and 5.226. It thus had strong associations with
the dead. Again in Fasti Ovid recommends that we honor our dead ancestors
with such simple things as grain, salt, bread, and loose violets (2.539); Martial
(10.32.1) states that violets and roses may be placed by a portrait of the dead;
and Juvenal (12.90) has ‘‘violets of every color’’ (here perhaps pansies) offered
to the paternal Lares or gods of the hearth. On 22 March, at the beginning of
spring, the Romans celebrated the dies violaris, the day on which violets were
put on graves, probably to betoken the renewal of life here or hereafter. The
violet’s appearance in early spring, its brief life, and its dark blood-like color
lent it naturally to the cult of the dead.
The violet also belonged to Aphrodite (Venus), along with the rose. Homer
calls her ‘‘violet-crowned’’ in his second Hymn to Aphrodite 6.18 and Solon
repeats the epithet in one of his elegies (19.4). At the spring Dionysia in
Athens, violet garlands were worn by celebrants. Thus the two gods of eros
and ecstasy both blessed the violet, giving the flower associations with love
that long remained in western poetry. Along with its flourishing in early
spring, the natural basis for this symbolism probably lay in its rich, sweet
odor. At least three Greek poets, Theognis (250), Simonides (frag. 150), and
Bacchylides (Epinician 5.34), called the Muses ‘‘violet-crowned,’’ and a famous
fragment by Pindar (frag. 76) attached the epithet to the city of Athens,
perhaps because of the spring Dionysia, one of the most important civic rites
(Aristophanes quotes Pindar at Knights 1323, 1329, and Acharnians 637).
The violet’s association with both love and death may account for the
striking use of it in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Laertes warns Ophelia not to trust
Hamlet’s professions of love but to consider it ‘‘A violet in the youth of primy
nature, / Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, / The perfume and
suppliance of minute, / No more’’ (1.3.7--10). (The violet is also ‘‘forward’’ or
early-blooming in Sonnets 99.) In her mad scene, Ophelia hands out several
kinds of flowers, and ends by saying (perhaps to the King), ‘‘I would give you
some violets, but they withered all when my father died’’ (4.5.184--85), thus
linking the loss of her love for Hamlet with her father’s death at his hands. At
her funeral, Laertes tells the priest, ‘‘Lay her i’th’ earth, / And from her fair
and unpolluted flesh / May violets spring’’ (5.1.238--40). This last passage echoes
Persius’ lines, ‘‘Will not violets now spring up from the tomb and its blessed
ashes?’’ (Satires 1.39--40); both passages underlie Tennyson’s wish, ‘‘From his
ashes may be made / The violet of his native land’’ (In Memoriam 18.3--4).
The mourner at Keats’s funeral in Shelley’s Adonais had his head ‘‘bound
with pansies overblown, / And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue’’
(289--90), evoking not only the decorum of the dead but the transience or
brevity of Keats’s life, as well as the fact that he died in late February, when
violets (in Italy) might begin blooming, and that Shelley wrote the elegy in
April and May, when the violets will have faded. Keats himself wrote of ‘‘fast
fading violets cover’d up in leaves’’ in his Ode to a Nightingale 47. A ‘‘violet past
prime’’ is one of Shakespeare’s examples of beauty wasted by Time (Sonnets 12).
Laertes’ use of ‘‘unpolluted’’ reminds us of another association of the violet,
that of faithfulness in love, not particularly what we might expect from
Aphrodite or Dionysus. Perhaps because of its ‘‘retiring’’ nature, its preference
225
Viper
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for out-of-the-way shady places, the violet acquired a reputation for modesty
and ‘‘perfect chastity’’ (see Lydgate, Troy Book 3.4380). Meredith combines the
sweet perfume of the violet with virginity: ‘‘She breathed the violet breath of
maidenhood’’ (Modern Love 40).
In post-classical European poetry, the timidity, humility, and neglect of the
violet came to the forefront of its symbolic meanings. Goethe, thinking of
young maidens, writes of a Veilchen (violet) ‘‘bowed in itself and unknown’’ and
of another that he treasures because ‘‘it is so shy.’’ Humble and timide are
frequent epithets of the violet in French poetry. In English, Thomson calls it
‘‘lowly’’ (Spring 448), and Wordsworth several times refers to its secrecy, most
notably in his simile for Lucy, in ‘‘She dwelt among th’untrodden ways’’: ‘‘A
Violet by a mossy stone / Half-hidden from the Eye!’’ It is probably the violet
Wordsworth means in the final line of Miscellaneous Sonnets 2.9: ‘‘The flower of
sweetest smell is shy and lowly.’’ Keats writes of ‘‘that Queen / Of secrecy, the
violet’’ (‘‘Blue!’’ 11--12), and Hood calls them ‘‘Those veiled nuns, meek violets’’
(‘‘Plea of the Midsummer Fairies’’ 318). We still use the phrase ‘‘shrinking
violets’’ of shy girls, but Moore seems to be evoking the fragility and
transience of the shade-loving plant in his simile, ‘‘Shrinking as violets do in
summer’s ray’’ (Lalla Rookh 2.294).
A common epithet of ‘‘violet’’ is ‘‘sweet’’ (twice, for example, in Spenser’s
Shepherd’s Calendar); common also are other terms evoking its rich odor
(‘‘fragrant,’’ for example, in FQ 3.1.36). Perhaps because of its similarly strong
aroma or its common association with Aphrodite, the rose is frequently
coupled with the violet; the ancients twined the two flowers together into
spring garlands. The Romans had a festival in early summer much like the
one in March, called the Rosalia or Rosaria, when one placed roses on the
graves. Our trite Valentine’s Day jingle ‘‘Roses are red, violets are blue,’’ goes
back centuries; Spenser names ‘‘roses red, and violets blew,’’ as among the
‘‘sweetest flowres’’ (FQ 3.6.6). Milton’s Zephyr mates with Aurora ‘‘on Beds of
Violets blue, / And fresh-blown Roses washt in dew’’ (L’Allegro 21--22). At the
erotic climax of Keats’s Eve of St. Agnes the lover melts into his beloved’s
dream, ‘‘as the rose / Blendeth its odour with the violet, -- / Solution sweet’’
(320--22).
See Pansy, Purple flower.
Viper
Volcano
226
see Serpent
The Greeks did not have a word for volcanoes, nor did the Romans (‘‘volcano’’
is Italian, from Latin Vulcanus the god), but they were both very familiar with
them. In Greek myth volcanoes and earthquakes are caused by the belching of
a subterranean giant or by his efforts to turn over or rise up. Hesiod tells how
the enormous, hundred-headed, fire-flashing monster Typhoeus (elsewhere
Typhon) challenged Zeus after his defeat of the Titans; after a vast struggle
Zeus hurled Typhoeus, still flaming, into the gulf of Tartarus (Theogony 820--68).
Pindar says that the monster is buried under Mt. Etna (Greek Aitna) in Sicily,
and ‘‘Thence erupt pure founts of unapproachable fire / from the secret places
within . . . . / The monster hurls aloft such spouts / of weird flame; a portent
and a wonder to behold’’ (Pyth. 1.15--28, trans. Lattimore). Ovid imagines him
supine: ‘‘Etna weighs down his head, / Where, face upturned, his fierce throat
Volcano
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
vomits forth / Cinder and flames’’ (Met. 5.351--53). Virgil memorably describes
an eruption of Etna and then refers to the legend that the giant Enceladus is
buried under it: ‘‘ponderous Etna piled upon him / breathes forth flame from
its bursting furnaces’’ (Aeneid 3.579--80; see also Statius, Thebaid 3.594--96). Virgil
also says that the Cyclopes have their workshop in a cave under Etna (Georgics
4.169--73) or near it on an island off Sicily called Vulcania (still called Vulcano
today) (Aeneid 8.416--23); they work for Vulcan the smith god. The Cyclopes may
be ‘‘the sons of Vulcan’’ who ‘‘vomit smoke’’ in Milton’s Comus 655.
New theories of volcanic action in the eighteenth century and new eruptions of Etna, Vesuvius, and Hecla brought new literary interest in volcanoes;
by late in the century the volcano came to symbolize three explosive processes
central to Romantic concerns, revolution, passion, and poetry. The first is
really implicit in the classical stories; indeed some have argued that they were
originally allegories, the hundred-headed monster standing for the mob or
masses and Zeus/Jupiter for monarchy. Spenser’s simile for Arthur’s surge of
strength uses the figure of an emprisoned nobleman: ‘‘Like as a fire, the
which in hollow cave / Hath long bene underkept and down supprest, / With
murmurous disdayne doth inly rave, / And grudge in such streight prison to
be prest, / At last breakes forth with furious unrest, / And strives to mount
unto his native seat’’ (FQ 2.11.32). Blake’s character Orc, who represents revolutionary energy, is figured as a volcano: ‘‘The Cave of Orc stood to the South a
furnace of dire flames / Quenchless unceasing’’ (Four Zoas 74.14--15); his other
name is Luvah, which is possibly a pun on ‘‘lava.’’ The narrator of Shelley’s
Revolt of Islam vows, ‘‘I will arise and waken / The multitude, and like a sulphurous hill, / Which on a sudden from its snows has shaken / The swoon of ages,
it shall burst and fill / The world with cleansing fire’’ (784--88). In Italy Shelley
wrote, ‘‘We are surrounded here in Pisa by revolutionary volcanos . . . the lava
has not yet reached Tuscany’’ (letter to Peacock, 21 March 1821). His character
Demogorgon, who overthrows the tyrant Jupiter, resembles the hot magma
under a volcano (PU, Act 2). A remark by the Count de Salvandy just before the
Naples revolution of 1830 is often quoted by German and French writers: ‘‘We
are dancing on a volcano.’’ Concerning the build-up to the July Revolution in
France (also 1830), Hugo writes, ‘‘Thinkers were meditating . . . turning over
social questions, peacefully, but profoundly: impassive miners, who were
quietly digging their galleries into the depths of a volcano, scarcely disturbed
by the muffled commotions and the half-seen glow of lava’’ (Les Misérables
4.1.4).
A passionate personality is tempestuous, fiery, volcanic. So Dryden’s Antony
is described by Dolabella: ‘‘He heaved for vent, and burst like bellowing Aetna’’
(All for Love 4.1.162). Chateaubriand’s René would sometimes blush suddenly
and feel ‘‘streams of burning lava (lave ardente)’’ roll in his heart (René,
Prologue). Gazing into the depths of the active crater of Vesuvius, de Staël’s
Lord Nelvil reveals to Corinne the depths of his soul, and wonders if he is
looking at hell (Corinne 11.4, 13.1). Byron’s Byronic character Christian ‘‘stood /
Like an extinct volcano in his mood; / Silent, and sad, and savage, -- with the
trace / Of passion reeking from his clouded face’’ (The Island 3.139--42).
Elsewhere Byron treats the volcano image itself as extinct: ‘‘But Adeline was
not indifferent: for / (Now for a common-place!) beneath the snow, / As a
volcano holds the lava more / Within -- et caetera. Shall I go on? -- No / I hate to
227
Wasp
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
hunt down a tired metaphor, / So let the often-used volcano go. / Poor thing!’’
(Don Juan 13.281--87). Yet it lived on, for example in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre,
where both Jane and Rochester are described in volcanic terms; e.g., ‘‘To live,
for me, Jane, is to stand on a crater crust which may crack and spue fire any
day’’ (chap. 20).
The active Mexican volcano Popocatepetl, with its snow-capped peak and
plumes of smoke, is the major symbol of Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano. As he
dies of gunshot wounds the Consul, the protagonist, whose life has been one
of passionate self-destruction, imagines he is climbing it and then falling into
its erupting abyss. At the same time it represents the world, poised, in 1938,
on the brink of World War II.
If poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, as Wordsworth
famously says, then it is only a step from eruptions of passion to explosions of
verse. Perhaps the earliest instance of the volcanic poet is found in Cazotte’s Le
Diable amoureux (1772): ‘‘my imagination is a volcano’’ (p. 355). Lamartine
writes, ‘‘the lava of my genius / overflows in torrents of harmony, / And
consumes me as it escapes’’ (‘‘L’Enthousiasme’’ 28--30). Byron defines poetry as
‘‘the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earth-quake’’ (letter
to Annabella Millbanke, 29 November 1813). E. B. Browning’s poet-heroine
Aurora Leigh speaks of the ‘‘burning lava of a song’’ (5.214). Emily Dickinson
might be speaking of emotion or of poetry when she writes, ‘‘On my volcano
grows the Grass / A meditative spot -- / . . . / How red the Fire rocks below -- /
How insecure the sod / Did I disclose / Would populate with awe my solitude’’
(no. 1677). Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles, on the edge of Etna’s crater that still
brims with life, feels dead to hope and joy: ‘‘Oh, that I could glow like this
mountain!’’ he cries; then with a last glowing of his soul he leaps into the
crater (Empedocles on Etna 2.323, 412).
See Cave, Fire.
W
Wasp
228
Wasps in literature are mainly what they are in life, unpleasant stinging
insects that swarm and attack as bees do but, unlike bees, produce nothing
useful.
‘‘The Myrmidons came streaming out like wasps at the wayside,’’ says
Homer, ‘‘when little boys have got into the habit of making them angry / by
always teasing them as they live in their house by the roadside’’ (Iliad 16.259-61, trans. Lattimore). The waspish behavior of the Athenian jurors who make
up the chorus of Aristophanes’ Wasps shows itself in their furious punishment of those who anger them; a character remarks, ‘‘What stings they have!’’
(420).
A character in Sidney’s Third Eclogues compares a wife to a wasp. He would
choose one if it had no sting; ‘‘The Waspe seemes gay, but is a combrous
[troublesome] thing’’ (67.21). Spenser’s ‘‘Displeasure’’ and ‘‘Pleasance’’ are
symbolized by an ‘‘angry Waspe’’ and a ‘‘hony-laden Bee’’ (FQ 3.12.18). In a
Watery star (moon)
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
similar contrast, Tennyson’s Ida dismisses barbarian invaders as ‘‘wasps in our
good hive’’ (Princess 4.514).
See Bee.
Watery star (moon)
see Moon, Star
Wave
see Sea
Wax
see Bee
Weather
Weaving and
spinning
see Cloud, Comet, Dew, Rain, Rainbow, Seasons, Wind
In classical literature, weaving and spinning are the chief female occupations,
as they no doubt were in life. The most prominent women in Homer, both
mortal and divine, are engaged in one or the other. Helen weaves a great
purple web with scenes of the war fought for her sake (Iliad 3.125--28),
Andromache is weaving when she learns of Hector’s death (22.440--47), the
goddesses Calypso and Circe weave (Odyssey 5.61--62 and 10.220--23), and, most
famously, Penelope weaves (and unweaves) her shroud for Odysseus’ father as a
ruse to fend off the suitors (2.93--110, 19.137--56, 24.128--46). That trick has a
folk-tale quality like so many of Odysseus’ adventures and may be very old; the
name Penelope may be derived from pene ‘‘thread’’ and the root of lope ‘‘robe.’’
When Helen is back home in Sparta with Menelaus, she is seen spinning,
not weaving (Odyssey 4.121--35); Queen Arete of ideal Phaeacia spins (6.52--53);
and Penelope takes up spinning when Telemachus returns ready to take
matters in hand and when Odysseus comes to the palace in disguise (17.96--97,
18.315--16). Homer may be suggesting that weaving expresses insecurity,
particularly the absence of a husband or fear for him, or fear of losing a
mortal consort in the case of the goddesses, while spinning expresses security
and the renewal of the thread or continuity of life.
A more clearly metaphorical use of weaving is the use of the Greek verb
hyphainein (‘‘to weave’’) to govern ‘‘words,’’ ‘‘counsel,’’ ‘‘stratagem,’’ or ‘‘wile.’’
Menelaus and Odysseus weave their speech and counsels (Iliad 3.212), Odysseus
wonders which of the mortals is weaving deception against him (Odyssey
5.356), and so on. It is almost as if Penelope’s wile with real weaving is a
literal embodiment of the common metaphor. Most modern European
languages use ‘‘weave’’ or ‘‘spin’’ to govern ‘‘plot’’ or ‘‘deception.’’ Old English
webbian could mean ‘‘contrive.’’ Two lines of Scott’s Marmion are often quoted:
‘‘O what a tangled web we weave, / When first we practise to deceive!’’ (6.17).
When Penelope tells the disguised stranger that she ‘‘carries out wiles’’
(19.137), the verb she uses (tolupeuo) is everywhere else in Homer used to
govern ‘‘war,’’ as if to say she is conducting her own domestic war on behalf of
her husband, but an older sense of the verb may be ‘‘spin carded wool into a
ball of thread’’; hence when the men fight they ‘‘spin out the thread of war.’’
Consonant with this usage is the Old Norse kenning (riddling formula) vef
darrathar, ‘‘web of the dart,’’ which means ‘‘battle,’’ and perhaps the Old
English phrase wig-speda gewiofu, ‘‘webs of battle-speed’’ (Beowulf 697).
Circe and Calypso each sing while weaving, and the connection between
singing and weaving, though not made explicit by Homer, was noted by later
229
Weaving and spinning
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poets, perhaps first by Sappho, who calls Eros mythoplokos, ‘‘weaver of stories’’
(frag. 188) (she also calls Aphrodite doloploke, ‘‘weaver of wiles,’’ in the ‘‘Ode to
Aphrodite’’), and then by Pindar, who tells his lyre to ‘‘weave out (exuphaine)
this song’’ (Nem. 4.44) and who ‘‘weaves a many-colored song for fighting men’’
(Olymp. 6.86--87). A description of a statue of Sappho, from the Greek Anthology,
imagines her ‘‘weaving a lovely melody’’ (2.70). Greek looms even looked like
lyres, and the shuttles looked like the spoon-shaped plectra or picks. The root
of hyphainein was felt to be related to hymnos, ‘‘hymn’’ or ‘‘song,’’ as Bacchylides
suggests when he refers to his work as a ‘‘woven hymn’’ (hyphanas hymnon)
(Victory Odes 5.8--14).
The Old English poet Cynewulf ends his poem Elene on a proud personal
note: ‘‘Thus I, wise and willing, . . . / Wordcraft wove (wordcraeft waef) and
wondrously gathered’’ (1236--37). There are a number of examples of weaving
song in the modern languages. Spenser asks one of his patrons to accept his
‘‘Rude rymes, the which a rustick Muse did weave / In savadge soyle, far from
Parnasso Mount, / And roughly wrought in an unlearned Loome’’ (Dedicatory
Sonnets to Faerie Queene). Shelley’s ‘‘To Wordsworth’’ is a well-known case: ‘‘In
honoured poverty thy voice did weave / Songs consecrate to truth and liberty’’
(11--12); and in Laon and Cythna Shelley has ‘‘Hymns which my soul had woven
to Freedom’’ (915) (weaving imagery pervades this epic poem). Campbell has
‘‘Then weave in rapid verse the deeds they tell’’ (The Pleasures of Hope 1.165).
Heine writes: ‘‘the poet / sat on the weaving stool of thought, / day and night,
and busily wove / the giant tapestry of his song’’ (‘‘The Poet Firdusi’’ 1.21--24).
Edna St. Vincent Millay imagines a harp on which a mother weaves clothing
for her child in ‘‘The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver.’’ Close in meaning is the
metaphor of weaving or spinning a story. Shakespeare’s Holofernes remarks of
Nathaniel, ‘‘He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple
[fibre] of his argument’’ (LLL 5.1.16--17). Cowper complains that ‘‘sedentary
weavers of long tales / Give me the fidgets, and my patience fails’’ (Conversation
207--08). We speak of losing the thread of a story or strand of an argument, or
spinning a tale out at too great length. ‘‘To spin a yarn’’ is nautical slang, first
recorded about 1800.
In his Poetics, which set terms for drama criticism still in use, Aristotle uses
desis for the ‘‘complication’’ of a plot; desis might be translated as a ‘‘tying’’ or
‘‘knotting,’’ and once he uses ploke (‘‘weaving’’ or ‘‘web’’) as a synonym. For his
word lusis, the ‘‘solution’’ or ‘‘untying’’ of the plot, we use ‘‘dénouement’’
today, borrowed from French, from nouer, ‘‘to tie a knot.’’
Two Latin word-families for weaving have developed in interesting ways,
somewhat parallel to what we have already seen. The verb texere meant
‘‘weave’’ or ‘‘form by plaiting,’’ and then ‘‘construct with elaborate care’’ or
‘‘compose.’’ Thus Cicero claims that his familiar letters are ‘‘woven/composed
in everyday words’’ (quotidianis verbis texere) (Epistulae ad Familiares 9.21.1). From
the past participle comes textum, ‘‘cloth’’ or ‘‘fabric,’’ whence English ‘‘textile’’
and ‘‘texture’’; and also textus, a ‘‘weave’’ or ‘‘pattern of weaving’’ or ‘‘method
of constructing,’’ and hence occasionally the ‘‘body’’ of a passage of words
joined together (Quintilian, Institutio 9.4.13). From the latter sense we get our
word ‘‘text’’: a text is originally something woven. Milton, a good Latinist,
writes ‘‘A book was writ . . . / And wov’n close, both matter, form and style’’
230
Weaving and spinning
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
(Sonnet 11). It may also be relevant that papyrus was described by Pliny the
Elder as woven out of strips (Natural History 13.23.77).
The oldest sense of Latin ordo is ‘‘thread on a loom,’’ hence ‘‘line of things,’’
‘‘row,’’ ‘‘rank,’’ ‘‘sequence’’ or ‘‘order of succession or priority,’’ ‘‘pattern,’’ and
‘‘regularity’’; it is of course the source of English ‘‘order.’’ The verb ordior
means ‘‘to lay the warp of a web’’ and then ‘‘to begin,’’ especially ‘‘to begin
speaking’’; it is the source of French ourdir, ‘‘to weave.’’ More common was
exordior, with virtually the same meanings, from which comes the noun
exordium, ‘‘warp set on a loom before weaving begins,’’ and hence any
‘‘beginning’’ or ‘‘introduction.’’ The English word ‘‘exordium’’ preserves this
latter sense as the entrance or prologue of a speech or essay. To a friend who
has begun a philosophical discourse, Cicero says, Pertexe . . . quod exorsus es,
‘‘Weave out the warp you have begun’’ (De Oratore 2.145). As Virgil begins the
second half of the Aeneid he promises ‘‘I will recall the prelude (exordia) of the
first strife’’ (7.40). The phrase exordia fati, perhaps ‘‘the undertakings of fate,’’
appears twice in Statius’ Thebaid (1.503, 3.636).
As for fate, the greatest spinners in classical literature, of course, are the
Fates. Alcinous says of Odysseus, ‘‘there in the future / he shall endure all that
his destiny and the heavy Spinners / spun for him with the thread at his
birth, when his mother bore him’’ (Odyssey 7.196--98; trans. Lattimore). The
word for ‘‘Spinners’’ is Klothes (klotho is one of the Homeric verbs for ‘‘spin’’)
but they are not named individually in Homer. Once in the Iliad the Fates
(Moirai) appear in the plural (24.49); sometimes it is ‘‘the gods’’ who spin an
event (e.g., Odyssey 1.17) and sometimes a single Fate: ‘‘Let us weep for Hector,
and the way at the first strong Destiny (Moira) spun with his life line when he
was born’’ (Iliad 24.209--10). Moira is from a root meaning ‘‘lot, portion,
division.’’ It is Hesiod who first names them in the Theogony (218, 905): Klotho
(spinner), Lachesis (disposer of lots), and Atropos (one who cannot be averted).
They have been variously imagined, sometimes all three as spinners,
sometimes with a division of labor: Klotho at the spinning wheel or distaff,
Lachesis measuring out the ‘‘span’’ (related to ‘‘spin’’) of one’s life, and Atropos
with the shears cutting off the thread or lifeline -- in Milton’s lines, ‘‘Comes
the blind Fury with th’abhorred shears, / And slits the thin-spun life’’
(‘‘Lycidas’’ 75--76). See Plato, Republic 10.617c. Byron writes of ‘‘life’s thin thread’’
(Don Juan 13.319). The English word ‘‘stamina’’ reflects this concept: it is the
plural of Latin stamen, ‘‘thread of a warp.’’
In Latin they are called the Parcae, perhaps from the root in pario, ‘‘bring
forth, bear’’; before they were assimilated into the Greek Moirai they may have
been goddesses of childbirth; their names, obscure in meaning, are Nona,
Decuma, and Morta (the last certainly sounds like ‘‘Death’’). Virgil’s lines in
the ‘‘Fourth Eclogue’’, ‘‘‘Speed on those centuries,’ said the Parcae to their
spindles, / ‘Concordant with the steadfast nod of Destiny’’’ (46--47, trans. Lee),
suggests that the Fates bow to a higher Fate, but elsewhere the Fates seem to
be Fate, which even the gods must obey. Horace calls them ‘‘the three sisters’’
(2.3.15), Ovid ‘‘the ancient sisters’’ (Met. 15.781). Chaucer calls them the ‘‘fatal
sisters’’: ‘‘O fatal sustren, which, er any cloth / Me shapen was, my destine me
sponne,’’ alluding to the idea that a child’s fate is spun before any clothing is
made for it (Troilus 3.733--34), an idea that combines metaphorical spinning
231
Wellspring
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with literal weaving. A visitor to ‘‘the three fatall sisters’’ in Spenser’s Faerie
Queene finds them ‘‘all sitting round about, / The direfull distaffe standing in
the mid, / And with unwearied fingers drawing out / The lines of life, from
living knowledge hid. / Sad Clotho held the rocke [distaff], the whiles the
thrid / By griesly Lachesis was spun with paine, / That cruel Atropos eftsoones
undid, / With cursed knife cutting the twist in twaine’’ (4.2.48). Herrick
imagines a more cheering possibility: ‘‘Let bounteous Fate your spindles full /
Fill, and wind up with whitest wool’’ (‘‘Epithalamie’’). But usually fate is grim,
‘‘fateful’’ and ‘‘fatal’’ are near synonyms, and their web is a net. ‘‘For in the
time we know not of,’’ Swinburne writes, ‘‘Did fate begin / Weaving the web of
days that wove / Your doom, Faustine’’ (‘‘Faustine’’ 93--96). For Hardy, Fate is
‘‘the Spinner of the Years’’ (‘‘Convergence of the Twain’’ 31).
The thirteenth-century Icelandic Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson describes
three sister Fates called Norns; their names are Urthr, Verthandi, and Skuld,
which seem to mean ‘‘past,’’ ‘‘present,’’ and ‘‘future.’’ Classical influence is
possible here, but it seems less likely in a few phrases of Old English poetry.
Guthlac, who lived around 700, uses the phrase wefen wyrdstafun, ‘‘weave the
decree of fate’’ (Guthlac B 1351 in The Exeter Book); wyrd is related to Icelandic
Urthr and is the source of our word ‘‘weird’’: the three witches in Macbeth, who
play a role much like the Fates (though they are not spinners), are called ‘‘the
Weird Sisters.’’ The ‘‘Riming Poem’’ in The Exeter Book has Me thaet wyrd gewaef,
‘‘that fate wove (for) me’’ (70). The Old Norse kenning quoted above is elaborated in a battle scene in the thirteenth-century Njals Saga, which Thomas
Gray rendered in ‘‘The Fatal Sisters.’’ Twelve gigantic women are gathered
around a loom, singing as they work: ‘‘Glittering lances are the loom, /
Where the dusky warp we strain, / Weaving many a soldier’s doom, / Orkney’s
woe, and Randver’s bane. / See the grisly texture grow, / (’Tis of human entrails
made,) / And the weights that play below, / Each a gasping warrier’s head’’
(5--12).
See Sewing and quilting, Spider.
Wellspring
West
West wind
232
see Fountain
see East and west
In literature the west wind is usually the wind of springtime, Zephyrus or
Favonius. In spring, says Virgil, ‘‘warmed by breezes / Of Zephyrus the fields
unloose their bosoms’’ (Georgics 2.330--31); the plants do not fear a southern
gale or northern rainstorm; and in the springtime of the world there were no
wintry blasts from the east (2.334--39). ‘‘Sharp winter thaws for spring and
Favonius,’’ writes Horace (1.4.1); ‘‘frosts melt for Zephyrus’’ (4.7.9). Wind and
breath were more than metaphorically linked, as the words pneuema, psyche,
and spiritus all suggest (see Wind), and the west wind in particular was
personified and given lungs. Virgil refers to the sound of Zephyrus breathing
(spirare) (Aeneid 4.562). In Chaucer’s famous description of April, ‘‘Zephirus eek
with his sweete breeth / Inspired hath in every holt and heeth / The tendre
croppes’’ (CT Gen. Pro. 5--7), ‘‘inspired’’ probably meaning ‘‘breathed in/on.’’
Spenser has ‘‘sweete breathing Zephyrus’’ (Prothalamion 2); Milton considers
ways to pass the winter ‘‘till Favonius re-inspire / The frozen earth’’ (Sonnet
Whale
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
20), and describes Zephyr as ‘‘The frolic Wind that breathes the Spring’’
(‘‘L’Allegro’’ 18). This breath seems to echo the ‘‘breath of life’’ that God
breathed into the nostrils of Adam (Gen. 2.7).
The Greek word zephyros is related to zophos, ‘‘gloom’’ or ‘‘darkness,’’ hence
the ‘‘dark region’’ or west. Latin favonius may be kin to faveo, ‘‘favor’’ or ‘‘be
favorable to.’’ ‘‘Zephyr’’ in English is often in the plural: Pope has ‘‘the tepid
Zephyrs of the spring’’ (Dunciad 4.422), in Shelley ‘‘vernal zephyrs breathe in
evening’s ear’’ (Queen Mab 4.2).
The evocative Middle English lyric ‘‘Westron wind, when will thou blow?’’
may be pleading for spring to come, when his love will be in his arms, but the
speaker might be out at sea with no favorable wind toward land.
The west wind also blows in the fall. ‘‘And nowe the Westerne wind bloweth
sore,’’ Hobbinol tells us in ‘‘September’’ of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (49),
while elsewhere Spenser calls the wind ‘‘wroth’’ (FQ 2.11.19). Shelley’s ‘‘Ode to
the West Wind’’ addresses the ‘‘breath of Autumn’s being,’’ a wild and powerful
spirit, as opposed to ‘‘Thine azure sister of the Spring’’ (1, 9); he asks it to lift
him from his fallen state and give his words the power usually attributed to
the spring wind, ‘‘to quicken a new birth’’ in ‘‘unawakened earth’’ (64, 68).
Whale
A convenient list of literary references to whales may be found at the opening
of Melville’s Moby-Dick, or The Whale. The first five extracts on the list, all from
the Old Testament, illustrate the difficulty of establishing the whale’s ancient
symbolic associations. ‘‘And God created great whales’’ (Gen. 1.21 AV) is a
mistranslation, or at best too narrow a translation, for the Hebrew word
(tannin) can mean ‘‘sea-monster.’’ That is more or less the meaning of
‘‘leviathan’’ in three of Melville’s passages (Job 41.32, Ps. 104.26, Isa. 27.1). The
third is plausibly a whale -- ‘‘Now the Lord had prepared a great fish to
swallow up Jonah’’ (Jonah 1.17) -- but is not called a whale. The word in Greek
(ketos) and Latin (cetus) that came to mean ‘‘whale,’’ and is used in modern
scientific nomenclature, originally was vague: in Homer’s Odyssey it means
‘‘sea-monster’’ and in one context (4.443ff.) it refers to the seal.
‘‘Leviathan’’ has come to mean ‘‘whale’’ in modern languages, including
modern Hebrew, but in the Old Testament it is serpentine and connected with
rivers; it symbolizes the enemies of Israel. ‘‘In that day the Lord with his sore
and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even
leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea’’
(Isa. 27.1); it may refer to Babylon (land of two rivers, one of them crooked) or
Egypt (land of the Nile with its crocodiles). Ezekiel calls the Pharaoh ‘‘the
great dragon [leviathan] that lieth in the midst of his rivers’’ (29.3); but, saith
the Lord, ‘‘I will put hooks in thy jaws, . . . and I will bring thee up out of the
midst of thy rivers . . . / And I will leave thee thrown into the wilderness’’ (4--5).
Until that day, however, the Israelites will have lived mainly in Egyptian or
Babylonian captivity, as if inside the monster. That idea is seconded by the
tale of Jonah, who spends three days and nights in the great fish before his
redemption.
According to Jesus, Jonah is a type of Jesus himself: ‘‘For as Jonas was three
days and three nights in the whale’s belly [Greek ketos]; so shall the Son of
man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’’ (Matt. 12.40).
‘‘In the belly of the whale’’ has come to mean ‘‘inside the land of oppression’’:
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Orwell warns in Inside the Whale that ‘‘The autonomous individual is going to
be stamped out of existence’’ and literature ‘‘must suffer at least a temporary
death.’’
Milton names the Leviathan twice. At the creation ‘‘leviathan / Hugest of
creatures, on the deep / Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims, / And
seems a moving land’’ (PL 7.412--15); Satan, afloat on the fiery sea of hell,
resembles ‘‘that sea-beast / Leviathan’’ (1.200--01) which sailors mistake for an
island. This simile has older Christian sources: the whale stands for Satan in
his deceptiveness; do not cast your anchor near him. As the swallower of Jonah
(and, typologically, Jesus) the whale is hell (which Christ harrows during his
time in the tomb); the ‘‘jaws of hell’’ are sometimes thought of as a whale’s.
As for Moby-Dick, Melville lists the many things whiteness may represent
(see White) and concludes, ‘‘Of all these things the Albino whale was the
symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?’’ (chap. 42). But that may make the
whale too vague to be a symbol at all. Lawrence writes, ‘‘Of course he is a
symbol. Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That’s the best of it’’
(Studies in Classic American Literature chap. 11); but he cannot resist offering his
own theory: ‘‘He is the deepest blood-being of the white race’’ -- no worse than
many other claims, such as God, Satan, innocence, nature, death, the id, the
super-ego, America, the ideal, or nothingness.
White
234
One could hardly do better than read the tenth chapter of book 1 of Rabelais’s
Gargantua, called ‘‘Concerning the significance of the colors white and blue.’’
There he asserts that white stands for joy, solace, and gladness, because its
opposite, black, stands for grief, and because white dazzles the sight as
exceeding joy dazzles the heart. Rabelais points out that the ancients used
white stones to mark fortunate days and that when the Romans celebrated a
triumph the victor rode in a chariot drawn by white horses; sunlight and the
light of Christian revelations are also white.
To these examples we may add Plato’s claim that in picturing the gods
white is the most appropriate color (Laws 956a), and that Roman ‘‘candidates’’
for office wore white -- as a sign, presumably, of ‘‘candor’’ or sincerity. (Latin
candidus meant ‘‘bright white,’’ in contrast to albus, ‘‘pale white’’; it also meant
meant ‘‘sincere’’ and even ‘‘spotless’’ or ‘‘faithful,’’ as in Ovid’s candida Penelope
in Amores 2.18.29.)
The best literary source after Rabelais is chapter 42 of Melville’s Moby-Dick,
‘‘The Whiteness of the Whale.’’ There Ishmael tells us ‘‘It was the whiteness of
the whale that above all thing appalled me,’’ nicely bringing out the buried
meaning of ‘‘appalled’’ as ‘‘made pale.’’ He concedes, however, that ‘‘various
nations have in some way recognized a certain royal pre-eminence in this
hue’’; that it is the emblem of ‘‘the innocence of brides, the benignity of age’’;
that priests wear a tunic called an alb (from alba); and that in ‘‘the Romish
faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our
Lord.’’ But he goes on to mention ghastlier associations, as in the polar bear,
the white shark, albino men, the pallor of death, or leprosy, and then
speculates that ‘‘by its indefiniteness [white] shadows forth the heartless
voids and immensities of the universe’’ or it is ‘‘the visible absence of
color’’ -- ‘‘a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink.’’ Something
of this heartlessness appears in Frost’s ‘‘Design,’’ where the white spider
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holding a white moth on a white flower seems the ‘‘design of darkness to
appall.’’
See Black, Light.
Willow
The willow tree, commonly found near rivers, as Virgil reminds us in Georgics
2.110--111, seems by its very shape to suggest mournfulness. Its appearance in
the well-known Psalm 137 may be due simply to its presence by rivers, but the
theme of the psalm lent it mournful associations: ‘‘By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our
harps upon the willows in the midst thereof’’ (1--2).
The willow has long had a more specific connotation, however, in the
classical tradition. Homer describes a grove that includes ‘‘fruit-destroying
willows’’ (itea olesikarpoi) at the entrance to Hades (Odyssey 10.510). This
mysterious epithet may be based on the fact that willows cast their blossoms
early, before the fruit grows; the blossoms were mistaken for the fruit itself,
and the idea arose that willows were sterile. They came to symbolize chastity
and the fate of a maiden dying without a lover or children. Goethe repeats
the Homeric phrase (‘‘unfruchtbaren Weiden’’) in Faust II 9977. Spenser names
‘‘The Willow, worne of forlorne Paramours’’ (FQ 1.1.9). So the report of
Ophelia’s drowning in Shakespeare’s Hamlet 4.7.165--82 begins with a willow,
and Desdemona sings of a willow before she is murdered by Othello
(4.3.40--56); see also MV 5.1.10, 12N 2.1.268, and 3H6 3.3.227--28. Robert Herrick’s
‘‘To the Willow-Tree’’ describes its role as a crown for ‘‘young men and maids
distressed’’: ‘‘When once the lover’s rose is dead, / Or laid aside forlorn; / Then
willow-garlands, ’bout the head, / Bedewed with tears, are worn.’’ A traditional
Irish ballad, ‘‘The Willow Tree,’’ has these lines: ‘‘She hears me not, she cares
not, nor will she list to me, / While here I lie, alone to die, beneath the willow
tree.’’
A phrase recorded in 1825, ‘‘she is in her willows,’’ means ‘‘she is mourning
her husband (or betrothed).’’ The Gilbert and Sullivan song ‘‘Willow, Titwillow’’ is about ‘‘blighted affection.’’ In eighteenth-century British literature,
however, the association with forlorn lovers begins to yield to the idea of
mourning for anyone dead. It may not be a coincidence that the ‘‘weeping’’
willow was imported from China in the eighteenth century, and its more
dramatically mournful shape may have replaced the casting of blossoms as its
most distinctive feature.
The osier and the sallow are both kinds of willow. The long willow twig is
called a withe or withy, and is noted for its strength: Virgil speaks of the
‘‘tough willow’’ (Eclogues 3.83, 5.16).
Wind
The phrase ‘‘four winds’’ occurs in both testaments of the Bible (e.g., Ezek.
37.9, Matt. 24.31) to refer to every quarter of the sky or earth, but they are not
named or described. Only the east wind is distinguished; it is generally a
baleful force sent by God to ‘‘blast’’ the corn (Gen. 41.6) or bring locusts (Exod.
10.13) or wither the vine (Ezek. 17.10).
Homer names the four winds as Poseidon sets them loose upon Odysseus:
‘‘Eurus and Notus clashed together, and Zephyrus the hard-blown / and Boreas
the begetter of clear sky’’ (Odyssey 5.295--96). Hesiod names three of them as
the offspring of Astraeus and Eos (Dawn): ‘‘bright Zephyrus, Boreas swift in its
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path, / and Notus’’ (Theogony 379--80); he names them again (870) as godsent
blessings, as opposed to ‘‘other’’ unnamed winds, dangerous ones sent by
Typhoeus.
Eurus (also Eurus in Latin) is the east wind, Notos (Latin Auster) the south
wind, Zephyrus (Favonius) the west wind, usually seen as gentle or favorable,
and Boreas (Aquilo) the north wind, also called ‘‘bright’’ (clarus) by Virgil
(Georgics 1.460) but usually seen as bringing storms and winter. In Ovid’s tale
of Boreas and Orithyia the wind boasts, ‘‘By force I drive / The weeping clouds,
by force I whip the sea, / Send gnarled oaks crashing, pack the drifts of snow, /
And hurl the hailstones down upon the lands’’ (Met. 6.680--83, trans. Melville),
while Lucan mentions ‘‘ships wrecked by Aquilo’’ (4.457). Zephyrus/Favonius is
most often the spring wind that revives the land. (See West wind.) Virgil says,
however, that Boreas, Zephyrus, and Eurus can all bring thunderstorms
(Georgics 1.370--71).
Milton gives a more elaborate catalog, mixing classical names with English
and Italian: Boreas, Caecias, Argestes, Thrascias, Notus, Afer, Levant, Eurus,
Zephir, Sirocco, and Libecchio (PL 10.699--706).
The similarity between wind and breath is inscribed deep in both the
symbolism and the common vocabulary of Hebrew and western literature. The
first wind of the Bible, in the second verse of Genesis, is the ‘‘Spirit of God’’
that ‘‘moved upon the face of the waters.’’ The Hebrew word is ruach, which
can mean ‘‘breath’’ and ‘‘wind’’ as well as, more abstractly, ‘‘spirit.’’ ‘‘Spirit,’’ in
fact, comes from Latin spiritus, which means ‘‘breath’’ and ‘‘breeze’’ as well as
what we mean by ‘‘spirit’’; spiro, ‘‘I breathe,’’ is the basis of ‘‘respiration,’’
‘‘expire,’’ ‘‘conspire,’’ ‘‘inspire,’’ and so on: when a poet is inspired he breathes
in the spirit. Latin anima had a similar range, from ‘‘wind’’ (like the cognate
Greek anemos) and ‘‘breath’’ to ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘soul’’; animus meant ‘‘soul,’’ ‘‘heart,’’
and ‘‘mind.’’ Greek psyche is from a root meaning ‘‘breath’’; pneuma meant
‘‘breath,’’ ‘‘wind,’’ and ‘‘spirit,’’ including the ‘‘Holy Spirit’’ of the New
Testament.
This interconnection of meanings underlies the association of winds,
whirlwinds, and storms with the highest gods or God: Zeus the Cloudgatherer,
who throws a thunderbolt, Jupiter Pluvius, and Jehovah who sends winds,
breathes life, speaks to Job out of the whirlwind (38.1), and is seen ‘‘upon the
wings of the wind’’ (2 Sam. 22.11, Ps. 18.10). So the ‘‘ungodly’’ are ‘‘like the
chaff which the wind driveth away’’ (Ps. 1.4), ‘‘as stubble before the wind, and
as chaff that the storm carrieth away’’ (Job 21.18).
On the other hand, wind is empty and evanescent. Words and speeches are
wind (Job 6.26), and one’s life is wind (7.7); Isaiah says, ‘‘Behold, they are all
vanity; their works are nothing: their molten images are wind and confusion’’
(41.29). ‘‘For he their words as wind esteemed light,’’ Spenser says (FQ 4.5.27).
Preachers who display idle learning to the faithful leave them empty, says
Dante, ‘‘so that the wretched sheep, in ignorance, / return from pasture,
having fed on wind’’ (Paradiso 29.106--07, trans. Mandelbaum). Milton uses the
same image for the false shepherds who sing their ‘‘lean and flashy songs’’:
‘‘The hungry Sheep look up, and are not fed, / But swoln with wind, and the
rank mist they draw, / Rot inwardly’’ (‘‘Lycidas’’ 123--27).
Winds are fickle, they snatch things away, they clear the air or darken it,
they change the weather. Homer’s Euryalus makes amends to Odysseus for his
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insult and asks that any improper word be carried off by the stormwinds
(Odyssey 8.408--09). When Turnus chases a phantom Aeneas, he does not see
that ‘‘the winds carry away his victory’’ (Virgil, Aeneid 10.652). Catullus has the
abandoned Ariadne complain to Theseus that all his promises and all her
expectations ‘‘the airy winds have tattered into nothing’’ (64.142, trans. Lee).
This commonplace might be said to culminate in the title of Margaret
Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind.
Strong winds or storms have long been a metaphor for passionate or
tumultuous emotion. ‘‘For love is yet the mooste stormy life,’’ Chaucer
writes (Troilus 2.778). When Spenser’s cruel mistress summons him, heaven
sends superfluous tempests: ‘‘Enough it is for one man to sustaine / the
stormes, which she alone on me doth raine’’ (Amoretti 46). Racine’s Hermione
laments, ‘‘He thinks he’ll see this storm dissolve in tears’’ (Andromaque
5.1.1410).
Though it is first a plot device, it is tempting to take the fateful storm that
drives Aeneas and Dido into the same cave as also symbolic of the passion
they yield to (4.160--68); that lightnings and Sky ‘‘witness the wedlock’’
certainly gives it cosmic significance. The storm over Lear on the heath (3.2)
seems matched by Lear’s ventings of his fury at his daughters. The literature
of sensibility and romanticism often assumes a sympathetic connection
between nature and subjective feelings, so that all weather may be symbolic.
The storm in Chateaubriand’s Atala accompanies the stormy emotions of the
lovers; storms propel the plot in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and are
especially connected with Heathcliff; and it is a storm that finally brings
Dorothea and Will to embrace in Eliot’s Middlemarch (chap. 83).
Poets in the Romantic era have a particular affinity for winds, for the
inspiration of the spirit of nature. In Goethe’s ‘‘Wanderer’s Storm-Song’’ the
poet defies Jupiter Pluvius because his ‘‘Genius’’ is with him; he defies Apollo
the sun god, too, with his inner, creative warmth. Wordsworth’s epic
autobiography The Prelude opens with a ‘‘gentle breeze’’ that brings joy -- ‘‘I
breathe again’’ -- ‘‘For I, methought, while the sweet breath of heaven / Was
blowing on my body, felt within / A corresponding mild creative breeze’’ (1805
version, 1.1.19, 41--43). Coleridge wishes ‘‘that even now the gust were
swelling, / And the slant night-shower driving loud and fast! / Those sounds
which oft have raised me, whilst they awed, / And sent my soul abroad’’
(‘‘Dejection’’ 15--18). Byron’s Childe Harold finds an Alpine storm an expression
of night’s ‘‘delight’’ and the hills’ ‘‘glee,’’ but it also brings ‘‘desolation’’; he
asks the tempests, ‘‘Are ye like those within the human breast?’’ (3.871, 875,
903). The most passionate Romantic identification with a wind is Shelley’s
‘‘Ode to the West Wind.’’
See Aeolian harp, West wind.
Wine
Wine is ‘‘heart-gladdening,’’ according to Homer (Iliad 3.246), and the Book of
Proverbs tells us to ‘‘Give . . . wine unto those that be of heavy hearts’’ (31.6).
‘‘Now drive away cares with wine,’’ advises Horace (Odes 1.7.31); ‘‘Bacchus
dissipates gnawing cares’’ (2.11.17). Too much wine, of course, is a danger and
a curse, as the Cyclops found out in the Odyssey, and the Centaurs at Pirithous’
wedding (Ovid, Met. 12.189--535); Horace, though a wine-drinker, devotes an
ode to moderation (1.18).
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It is one of the two gifts of God: He gives ‘‘plenty of corn and wine’’ (Gen.
27.28). ‘‘Bread and wine’’ is the standard biblical fare (e.g., Judges 19.19, Neh.
5.15), no doubt often literally as well as metonymically. Tiresias lectures
Pentheus on the two blessings of humankind, that of Demeter (grain) and
that of Dionysus (wine); the latter brings sleep, oblivion, and medicine for
grief (Euripides, Bacchae 274--85).
In the same play we are told that wine brings love: ‘‘without wine there is
no Cypris [Aphrodite]’’ (773). Ovid puns, ‘‘Venus in wine [Venus in vinis] was fire
in fire!’’ (Art of Love 1.244). Chaucer’s much-married Wife of Bath confesses,
‘‘after wyn on Venus most I thynke’’ (‘‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’’ 464).
The famous saying, In vino veritas, ‘‘In wine is truth,’’ has two senses,
depending on whether one is drinking it or watching someone else do so. For
Theognis, ‘‘Wine is the test to show the mind of man; / Even a wise man,
clever up to now, / When he gets drunk, brings shame upon himself’’ (500--02,
trans. Wender). Plato quotes the proverb ‘‘Drunkards and children tell the
truth’’ (Symposium 217e). Theocritus begins a frank poem by quoting the saying
‘‘Truth in our cups’’ (29.1). Rabelais’s Panurge is made to sing an old Greek
drinking song: ‘‘Bacchus . . . / Holds all truth, for truth’s in wine. / And in wine
no deceit or wrong / Can live, no fraud and no prevarication’’ (5.45, trans.
Cohen). Dickens sums up: ‘‘Wine in truth out’’ (Nicholas Nickleby chap. 27).
Addressing his glass of wine, Baratynsky says, ‘‘fertile, noble, spring eternal, /
you have power to bring to birth / visions straight from realms infernal, / or
send dreams from heav’n to earth’’ (‘‘The Wineglass’’ 37--40, trans. Myers).
Emerson imagines a higher wine, a ‘‘wine of wine,’’ drinking which he will
know what birds and roses say; ‘‘I thank the joyful juice / For all I know’’
(‘‘Bacchus’’).
Emerson’s transcendent wine culminates a long association of poets with
wine, at least as old as Horace’s frequent praise of it. ‘‘For Bacchus fruite is
frend to Phoebus wise [Apollo, god of poetry], / And when with Wine the
braine begins to sweate, / The nombers flowe as fast as spring doth ryse’’
(Spenser, Shepheardes Calendar, ‘‘October’’ 106--08). Poets, says Hölderlin, are
‘‘like the holy priests of the wine god, / who went from country to country in
holy night’’ (‘‘Bread and Wine’’ sec. 7).
Wine may represent the blood of Dionysus/Bacchus, and it was poured in
honor of many other gods as well. In Genesis wine is called ‘‘the blood of
grapes’’ (49.11), and in Christian symbolism it stands for the blood of Christ. At
the Last Supper Jesus takes bread and says, ‘‘this is my body,’’ and takes the
cup of wine and says, ‘‘this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed
for many for the remission of sins’’ (Matt. 26.26--28). Bread and wine are served
at the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist or Communion; they are sometimes called the Eucharist themselves. Hölderlin conjures a new testament
himself in his poem ‘‘Bread and Wine,’’ as does Silone in his novel with the
same title; both ponder the roots of the Christian symbols.
Wine in a cup is sometimes a symbol of God’s wrath. So the Lord tells
Jeremiah: ‘‘Take the wine cup of this fury at my hand, and cause all the
nations, to whom I send thee, to drink it’’ (25.15). (See Cup.) In one of Isaiah’s
parables Israel is a vineyard that brings forth wild grapes [the unrighteous],
unsuitable for wine, so the Lord promises to lay it waste (5.1--7). Later Isaiah
prophesies a conqueror from Edom, red from the wine vat, who announces,
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‘‘I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with
me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury’’
(63.1--3). These passages underlie the vintage imagery of Revelation, where the
angel harvests grapes (people) and casts them into ‘‘the great winepress of the
wrath of God. / And the winepress was trodden without the city, and blood
came out of the winepress’’ (14.19--20). As blood was flowing in the American
civil war, Howe wrote ‘‘He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of
wrath are stored’’ (‘‘Battle-Hymn of the Republic’’). Blake’s ‘‘Wine-press of Los’’
is ‘‘War on Earth’’ where the ‘‘Human grapes’’ suffer, but it is also spiritual
war, conducted by the ‘‘Printing-Press / of Los’’ (Milton 27.1--30).
See Bread.
Winter
In classical as in Old English poetry there were conventions for describing
winter: winter, ice, or snow binds or locks the earth, ice makes bridges across
rivers, darkness prevails, the north wind blows, and so on. The earliest description is Hesiod’s, where he dwells on the effects of cruel Boreas (Works and Days
504--63). There are brief descriptions in Virgil: don’t try to plant ‘‘when Boreas
is blowing; / then winter (hiems) locks the land with frost’’ (Georgics 2.316--17);
he has a fuller account of a Scythian winter where rivers now bear heavy
wagons (3.356--71). Old English poetry is poor in descriptions of spring or
summer but has several grimly vivid pictures of winter, e.g., ‘‘The Wanderer’’
and ‘‘The Seafarer.’’ In Beowulf, ‘‘the sea boiled with storms, / warred against
the wind, winter locked up the wave / with ice-bond’’ (1132--33). Descriptions
of the seasons were popular in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and
reached a kind of culmination in Thomson’s The Seasons, the ‘‘Winter’’ section
of which gives hundreds of lines to describing winter’s gloom, rain, winds,
snow, ice, and their deadly consequences.
When Winter is personified he is often an old man. Tasso describes him as
‘‘cold and white-haired, / His face wrinkled, his hair filled with snow’’ (La
mutabilità del tempo 12--13). ‘‘Lastly, came Winter cloathed all in frize [rough
cloth],’’ writes Spenser, ‘‘Chattering his teeth for cold that did him chill; / . . . /
For he was faint with cold, and weak with eld [age]’’ (FQ 7.7.31); Shakespeare
calls him ‘‘limping’’ (Romeo 1.2.28); Milton calls him ‘‘decrepit’’ (PL 10.655). But
he is also strong, even violent. Chaucer refers to ‘‘the swerd of wynter, keene
and coold’’ (Squire’s Tale 57); Blake thinks of him as a king in a chariot, as well
as a ‘‘direful monster’’ who ‘‘withers all in silence, and his hand / Unclothes
the earth, and freezes up frail life’’ (‘‘To Winter’’). Wordsworth notes that
‘‘Humanity, delighting to behold / A fond reflection of her own decay, / Hath
painted Winter like a traveller old, / Propped on a staff,’’ but it was ‘‘mighty
Winter,’’ ‘‘dread Winter!’’ who destroyed Napoleon’s grand army (‘‘French Army
in Russia’’). Standard epithets for winter in Spenser and Shakespeare are
‘‘stern,’’ ‘‘sad,’’ ‘‘breme’’ (‘‘cold’’ or ‘‘harsh’’ in Spenser), ‘‘angry,’’ ‘‘churlish,’’
‘‘furious,’’ and ‘‘barren.’’
‘‘Winter’’ is occasionally used in Latin poetry for ‘‘year’’ (cf. Horace 1.11.4,
1.15.35), but it is quite frequent in Old English poetry; it is as if it is only
winters that age one. In the translation of Genesis, Methuselah lives 969
winters. The dragon of Beowulf held his hoard variously three hundred or a
thousand winters (2278, 3050). And so in later English literature: ‘‘I trowe a
thritty wynter he was oold’’ (Chaucer, Shipman’s Tale 26); ‘‘I have followed thee
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in faith this five and forty winters’’ (Langland, Piers Plowman b 12.3; spelling
modernized); ‘‘When forty winters shall besiege thy brow’’ (Shakespeare,
Sonnets 2); ‘‘I number three-score winters past’’ (Cowper, ‘‘Yardley Oak’’ 3); ‘‘that
shape / With sixty or more winters on its head’’ (Yeats, ‘‘Among School
Children’’ 37--38).
If winter is portrayed as old, old age is described as wintry; it is the last of
the four seasons of human life. (See Seasons.) ‘‘Age and Winter accord full
nie,’’ according to Spenser (Shepheardes Calendar, ‘‘February’’ 27); ‘‘wintry age’’ is
found in Spenser, Cowper, Wordsworth, and other poets. Old Egeon’s face is
‘‘hid / In sap-consuming winter’s drizzled snow’’ (CE 5.1.312--13). ‘‘Life’s autumn
past, I stand on winter’s verge’’ (Wordsworth, Excursion 4.611). Sir Bedivere is
‘‘no more than a voice / In the white winter of his age’’ (Tennyson, ‘‘Passing of
Arthur’’ 3--4).
Thomson thinks the clouds and storms of winter ‘‘exalt the soul to solemn
thought / And heavenly musing,’’ when one sees through the ‘‘lying vanities of
life’’ while sitting by a fire to ‘‘hold high converse with the mighty dead’’
(‘‘Winter’’ 3--4, 209, 432). Pushkin celebrates the short days, the long nights by
the fire when ‘‘I forget the world’’ and ‘‘poetry wakes in me’’ (‘‘Autumn’’ 73--75).
Mallarmé on the other hand thinks ‘‘Winter belongs to prose. With the burst
of autumn verse ceases’’ (Crayonné au Théâtre, ‘‘Notes’’ 4). Stevens seems to agree
with Mallarmé when he describes ‘‘the antipodes of poetry, dark winter,’’ but
he goes on to say that in winter ‘‘The first word’’ might arrive, ‘‘The immaculate disclosure of the secret no more obscured’’ (‘‘A Discovery of Thought’’);
winter sweeps away romantic clutter and returns us to ‘‘The vivid thing in the
air’’: ‘‘Only this evening I saw it again, / At the beginning of winter’’ (‘‘Martial
Cadenza’’).
See Autumn, Spring, Summer.
Wolf
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The wolf seems to be the most feared and despised mammal in literature; a
good wolf is extremely rare until recent times. As early as Homer wolves are
ferocious and warlike: the Myrmidons, for example, swarm ‘‘as wolves / who
tear flesh raw, in whose hearts the battle fury is tireless, / who have brought
down a great horned stag in the mountains, and then feed / on him, till the
jowls of every wolf run blood’’ (Iliad 16.156--59, trans. Lattimore). In fact one of
Homer’s terms for ‘‘battle fury’’ (lussa) is derived from the root of ‘‘wolf’’ (lukos);
it is a rabid, wolfish rage, like that of the Norse berserkr; it later came to mean
‘‘madness’’ and then ‘‘rabies.’’
Aeschylus calls wolves ‘‘hollow-bellied’’ (Seven 1036--37), and they have been
hungry ever since. Spenser and Shakespeare, for instance, routinely give them
the epithets ‘‘greedy’’ and ‘‘ravenous’’; Shakespeare also calls them ‘‘hungerstarved’’ (3H6 1.4.5). In Ulysses’ great ‘‘degree’’ speech, ‘‘appetite’’ is called ‘‘an
universal wolf’’ (TC 1.3.121). As an emblem of famine it lingers in our phrase
‘‘to keep the wolf from the door,’’ and when we devour our food we ‘‘wolf it
down.’’
Aesop has thirty-seven fables in which the wolf is the chief actor, such as
‘‘The Shepherd and the Wolf,’’ where a naı̈ve shepherd trusts a wolf, which
then devours the flock. Not surprisingly indeed in the literature of pastoral
societies, the characteristic prey of wolves are sheep, especially lambs. In the
Iliad wolves attack sheep when they are not attacking stags (16.352--55). ‘‘As
Wood
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
wolf to lamb’’ was a proverb when Plato used it (Phaedrus 241d), as was ‘‘To
trust the wolf with the sheep’’ when Terence used it (The Eunuch 832).
Shakespeare’s Menenius asks, ‘‘who does the wolf love?’’ Sicinius replies,
‘‘The lamb.’’ Menenius: ‘‘Ay, to devour him’’ (Cor 2.1.8--10).
It was inevitable that Jewish and especially Christian writers, for whom the
symbolism of sheep, shepherds, and sacrificial lambs was central, would
extend it to wolves. As the Christian faithful are the ‘‘flock,’’ Paul warns that
‘‘after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the
flock’’ (Acts 20.29). These seem to be the same surreptitious wolves as those in
the more famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount: ‘‘Beware of false
prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are
ravening wolves’’ (Matt. 7.15). Dante changes ‘‘sheep’’ to ‘‘shepherd’’ in order to
denounce the false leaders of the church. Florence’s money perverts the sheep
and the lamb, ‘‘and turns the shepherd into a wolf’’; through all the pastures
‘‘rapacious wolves are seen in shepherds’ clothing’’ (Paradiso 9.132, 27.55).
Milton decries those who ‘‘for their bellies’ sake, / Creep and intrude and
climb into the fold’’ (Lycidas 114--15); Michael foretells that after the Apostles
‘‘Wolves shall succeed for teachers, grievous wolves’’ (PL 12.508). (See Sheep.)
The wolf is one of three beasts of battle that frequently appear together in
Old English poetry (see Raven); it is the companion of the Germanic battle-god
Odin/Wotan as it is of Roman Mars. The giant wolf Fenrir looms large in Norse
myth.
The she-wolf (Latin lupa) is a symbol of Rome because of the legend that
she suckled Romulus and Remus. But lupa also came to mean ‘‘prostitute’’
(Plautus, Epidicus 403, Martial 1.34.8). (Chaucer makes a she-wolf an exemplar
of lust in Manciple’s Tale 183--86.) Both these associations may lie behind
Dante’s choice of the lupa as the third and most dismaying of the beasts he
encounters at the opening of the Inferno (1.49--60). As the emblem of voracity
it may stand for the category of ‘‘incontinent’’ sins (such as lust, greed, and
wrath), those that Dante may have committed. (See Leopard, Lion.)
As an emblem of noble suffering, Byron asserts that ‘‘the wolf dies in
silence’’ (Childe Harold 4.185). That line inspired Alfred de Vigny’s poem ‘‘The
Death of the Wolf.’’
Wood
Woodpecker
Worm
see Forest
Though some of its Greek names are as descriptive as its name in English
(drykolaptes, ‘‘oak-chisel’’; pelekas, ‘‘ax’’), the woodpecker has little symbolic
meaning in Greek literature. In Latin, however, the picus is the bird of Mars
and an actor in the founding of Rome: Ovid tells that the Martia picus helped
defend the infants Romulus and Remus and brought food to them (Fasti 3.37,
3.54). Ovid also tells at length the story of King Picus, son of Saturn; happily
married to Canens (‘‘Singing’’), he refuses Circe’s amorous advances and is
transformed into a woodpecker who furiously attacks oaks (Met. 14.320--96).
Virgil alludes to the story in the Aeneid (7.189--91).
From the Bible onward the worm is the lowest of creatures, as far removed as
possible from God. Compared to God, however, man is also a worm. If even
the stars are not pure in God’s sight, Bildad tells Job, ‘‘How much less man,
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Worm
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that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?’’ (25.6). The Psalm
that begins, ‘‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’’ which Christ
repeats on the cross, goes on, ‘‘But I am a worm, and no man’’ (22.6). Sidney’s
version of Psalm 6 begins ‘‘Lord, let not me a worme by thee be shent
[disgraced].’’ ‘‘Worm’’ has long been a term of abuse among humans, of
course; Shakespeare’s Pistol tells Falstaff, ‘‘Vile worm, thou wast o’erlooked
[bewitched] even in thy birth’’ (MWW 5.5.83). Coleridge calls man ‘‘Vain sister
of the worm’’ who should ‘‘Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!’’ (‘‘SelfKnowledge’’). The Earth Spirit, whom Goethe’s Faust conjures up, disdainfully
asks him, ‘‘Is this you? . . . / A fearful shrinking worm?’’ (496--98). A similar
spirit calls Byron’s Manfred ‘‘Thou worm! whom I obey and scorn’’ (1.125). In
a mood like Coleridge’s, a character of Tennyson’s calls God ‘‘The guess of a
worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire -- / Of a worm as it writhes in a
world of the weak trodden down by the strong, / Of a dying worm in a world,
all massacre, murder, and wrong’’ (‘‘Despair’’ 30--32).
Yet God cares for worms, even real worms. Blake’s Thel expresses wonder at
this discovery: ‘‘That God would love a Worm I knew, and punish the evil
foot / That wilful, bruis’d its helpless form: but that he cherish’d it / With
milk and oil. I never knew’’ (Book of Thel 5.9--11). After all, Blake says elsewhere,
God ‘‘is become a worm that he may nourish the weak’’ (Annotations to
Lavater), and man may become either one, depending on his mental power:
‘‘Let the Human Organs be kept in their perfect Integrity / At will Contracting
into Worms, or Expanding into Gods’’ (Jerusalem 55.36--37). In much the same
spirit Shelley writes, ‘‘I know / That Love makes all things equal: I have heard /
By mine own heart this joyous truth averred: / The spirit of the worm beneath
the sod / In love and worship, blends itself with God’’ (Epipsychidion 125--29).
Wondering if God has anything at all to do with the world, Tennyson tries to
believe that ‘‘somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill’’ and ‘‘That not a
worm is cloven in vain’’ (In Memoriam 54.1--2, 9).
Humble though it may be, the worm may resent an injury and strike back:
as the proverb puts it, ‘‘the worm will turn.’’ Greene, in A Groatsworth of Wit,
has ‘‘Tread on a worm and it will turne’’ (sec 12); Shakespeare: ‘‘The smallest
worm will turn, being trodden upon’’ (3H6 2.2.17). The madman in Shelley’s
Julian and Maddalo claims, ‘‘Even the instinctive worm on which we tread /
Turns, though it wound not’’ (412--13).
If mortals are like worms in their mortality, worms are symbols of
mortality itself. Homer’s only mention of an earthworm (Greek skolex) comes
in a simile for a fallen warrior extended on the ground (Iliad 13.654). Mainly,
however, worms devour the dead. Shakespeare’s Rosalind recites the commonplace, ‘‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them,’’
though she adds, ‘‘but not for love’’ (AYLI 4.1.106--08). We go to a ‘‘wormy
grave’’ (Shelley, Laon and Cythna 3751) where we meet the ‘‘coffin-worm’’ (Keats,
Eve of St. Agnes 374). Blake makes the most of this inevitable fate. Thel
complains that she will only have lived ‘‘to be at death the food of worms,’’
but one of her comforters replies, ‘‘Then if thou art the food of worms . . . /
How great thy use. how great thy blessing; every thing that lives / Lives not
alone, nor for itself’’ (3.23--27). A more frequent way to cope is through gallows
humor. So Hamlet tells the king that Polonius is at supper, ‘‘Not where he
eats, but where a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at
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Worm
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him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat
us, and we fat ourselves for maggots’’ (4.3.19--23). This is in a way Blake’s point,
though it stresses that the worm occupies the top link of the food chain. So in
the graveyard Hamlet says that a dead courtier is ‘‘now my Lady Worm’s’’
(5.1.87). Byron’s Sardanapalus dismisses the notion that some men are gods:
‘‘the worms are gods; / At least they banqueted upon your gods, / And died for
lack of further nutriment’’ (1.2.269--71). As death is the great leveller (see
Death), worms are revolutionaries; Byron says every monarch is called Your
Highness ‘‘till they are consign’d / To those sad hungry Jacobins the worms, /
Who on the very loftiest kings have dined’’ (Don Juan 6.99--101). Stevens
imagines ‘‘The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,’’ who sing ‘‘Out of the tomb, we bring
Badroulbadour, / Within our bellies,’’ piece by piece.
Sometimes ‘‘worm’’ is used for ‘‘caterpillar.’’ Jonson can exploit two senses
of ‘‘worm’’ in his ‘‘Epigram 15: On Court-Worm’’: ‘‘All men are worms: but this
no man. In silk / ’Twas brought to court first wrapped, and white as milk; /
Where, afterwards, it grew a butterfly; / Which was a caterpillar. So ’twill die.’’
(See Butterfly, Caterpillar.)
‘‘Worm’’ can also mean ‘‘canker-worm,’’ the worm that kills the rose (Milton,
Lycidas 45). Blake’s ‘‘Sick Rose’’ is destroyed by ‘‘The invisible worm, / That flies
in the night / In the howling storm.’’
In Beowulf a ‘‘worm’’ (Old English wyrm) is a dragon (886, 891, etc.): ‘‘Then
the worm woke; cause of strife was renewed: for then he moved over the
stones, hard-hearted beheld his foe’s footprints -- with secret stealth he had
stepped forth too near the dragon’s head’’ (2287--90, trans. Donaldson). In
biblical translations it was used for the serpent, or Satan, and it survived into
modern poetry. Adam laments, ‘‘O Eve, in evil hour thou didst give ear / To
that false worm’’ (Milton, PL 9.1067--68). Pope refers to ‘‘That ancient Worm,
the Devil’’ (‘‘To Moore’’ 12). Something of this sense lingers in Blake’s ‘‘invisible
worm’’ that destroys the virgin rose.
The book of Isaiah ends with God’s foretelling the grim end of ‘‘the men
that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall
their fire be quenched’’ (66.24). Christ echoes the phrase three times in his
description of hell (Mark 9.44--48). Milton’s Messiah promises to drive the rebel
angels down ‘‘To chains of darkness, and the undying worm’’ (6.739).
Another important worm is the worm of conscience. No one knows,
Chaucer writes, how ‘‘The worm of conscience may agryse [shudder] / Of
wikked lyf’’ (Physician’s Tale 280--81). Shakespeare’s Queen Margaret cries at
Richard, ‘‘The worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul!’’ (R3 1.3.221). More
cheerfully, Benedick announces ‘‘it is most expedient for the wise, if Don
Worm (his conscience) find no impediment to the contrary, to be the
trumpet of his own virtues’’ (MAAN 5.2.83--86). Some writers combine this
worm with the undying worm of the Bible; so Byron: ‘‘The worm that will not
sleep -- and never dies’’ torments one’s mind with remorse (Abydos 2.646).
Indeed our word ‘‘remorse’’ comes from Latin remordere, from mordere, ‘‘bite’’;
we say our conscience gnaws or eats away at our life or peace of mind. It is a
frequent image in Baudelaire: ‘‘How can we kill the old, the long Remorse, /
Who lives, wriggles, and twists itself / And feeds off us as the worm off the
dead’’ (‘‘L’Irréparable’’); see ‘‘Remords posthume’’ and ‘‘Spleen (II).’’ (See
Serpent.)
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Wormwood
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Akin to a worm in the mind is a maggot in the brain, but its meaning is
closer to a bee in the bonnet. In seventeenth- to eighteenth-century British
usage such a maggot usually meant a mad or perverse desire or ‘‘craze.’’ ‘‘Are
you not mad, my friend? . . . Have you not maggots in your braines?’’ (Fletcher,
Women Pleased 3.4). The latest fashion might be called a maggot. Pope, with an
implicit pun on the ‘‘grub’’ of Grub Street, where hack writers lived, notes
how ‘‘Maggots half-form’d in rhyme exactly meet, / And learned to crawl upon
poetic feet’’ (Dunciad 1.61--62). Samuel Wesley chose a self-disparaging title for a
volume of his verse: Maggots; or Poems on Several Subjects.
Wormwood
Wormwood, or absinthe, is a plant of the Artemisia family, known for its bitter
taste, especially Artemisia Absinthium.
In the Old Testament, wormwood (Hebrew laana) is only used metaphorically as a source of bitterness, often paired with the term (rosh) that the
Authorized Version renders ‘‘gall’’ (Deut. 29.18). God will feed those who follow
the false Baalim ‘‘with wormwood, and give them water of gall to drink’’ (Jer.
9.15; cf. 23.15, Deut. 29.18). In the New Testament it appears once, as the name
of the star (Greek apsinthos) that falls when the third angel blows his trumpet;
it turns a third of the water to wormwood and many men die of poisoning
(Rev. 8.11).
A soul in Dante’s Purgatorio says he has been guided ‘‘to drink the sweet
wormwood [assenzo] of the torments’’ (23.86). After a particularly apt line in the
play he demanded, Hamlet comments, ‘‘That’s wormwood’’ (3.2.176). Jonson
fears that a book called Epigrams will be taken to be ‘‘bold, licentious, full of
gall, / Wormwood, and sulphur, sharp, and toothed withal’’ (2.3--4). Byron’s
Childe Harold quaffed life’s enchanted cup too quickly, ‘‘and he found / The
dregs were wormwood’’ (Childe Harold 3.73--74). Hugo enjoins his daughter to
pray for her mother, who ‘‘always drank the wormwood [l’absinthe] and left you
the honey’’ (‘‘La prière pour tous,’’ part 2).
Hugo is not referring here to the alcoholic drink called absinthe, which
indeed became popular in his day. The word ‘‘vermouth’’ is also derived from
the source of ‘‘wormwood.’’
Y
Yellow
244
Various terms for yellowish hues in Greek and Latin literature are applied to
hair, grain, sand, dawn, the sun, and gold. In modern literature it is
frequently the distinctive color of autumn or the harvest. Spenser’s personification of Autumn is ‘‘all in yellow clad’’ (FQ 7.7.30). Shakespeare has ‘‘yellow
autumn’’ (Sonnets 104), Thomson ‘‘Autumn’s yellow lustre’’ (‘‘Autumn’’ 1322);
the grove is yellow in Pope’s ‘‘Autumn’’ (75). Related to this use is ‘‘the yellow
leaf’’ of age that Macbeth has fallen into (5.3.23); time will also affect ‘‘my
papers, yellowed with their age’’ (Sonnets 17).
Yellow may be a sign of disease as well as age, particularly jaundice (from
French jaune, ‘‘yellow’’), a disease affecting the yellow bile. Metaphorically
when one is jaundiced one is jealous, envious, or bilious (irascible) (see
Yew
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Humor); speaking of fault-finding critics, Pope declares, ‘‘all looks yellow to
the Jaundic’d Eye’’ (Essay on Criticism 559). At the climax of the Romance of the
Rose Jean plucks the rose despite ‘‘Jealousy with all its garland of marigolds’’
(21741--42); Chaucer imitates this with ‘‘Jalousye, / That wered of yelewe
gooldes a garland’’ (Knight’s Tale 1928--29). In his comic version of Oedipus,
Shelley has the usually saffron-robed Hymen ‘‘clothed in yellow jealousy’’
(1.283). Browning speaks of ‘‘making Envy yellow’’ (‘‘At the ‘Mermaid’’’ 143).
In some countries during the Middle Ages traitors and heretics were made
to wear yellow; Jews wore a yellow star, a practice reimposed by the Nazi
regime. Paintings of Judas often had him in yellow clothing.
See Gold, Marigold.
Yew
A ‘‘Cheerless, unsocial plant’’ (Blair, The Grave 22), the ‘‘dismal yew’’
(Shakespeare, Titus 2.3.107) is frequently found, like the cypress, in graveyards.
Gray puts one in his famous churchyard (Elegy 13); Verlaine sees ‘‘The little
yews of the cemetary / Tremble in the winter wind’’ (‘‘Sub Urbe’’); while Eliot’s
meditation on the grave in Part IV of ‘‘Burnt Norton’’ wonders if ‘‘Chill /
Fingers of yew be curled / Down on us?’’
It is presumably because yew berries and leaves are poisonous that the tree
acquired its deathly associations, and perhaps also because of its dark foliage.
It is not mentioned in the Bible, and it is not prominent in Greek literature;
words for it (milax, smilax, milos, etc.) often refer to other plants as well, such
as bryony. It was Latin writers who gave the yew (taxus) its distinctive meanings and locations. A path sloping down to the underworld, according to Ovid,
is shaded by deadly yew trees (Metamorphoses 4.432); Seneca puts one by
Cocytus (Hercules 694); Lucan’s Erichtho in the underworld passes through a
wood shaded by ‘‘yews impervious to Phoebus’’ (6.654). Virgil calls the yew
‘‘harmful’’ (taxique nocentes, Georgics 2.257), Seneca ‘‘death-dealing’’ (mortifera . . .
taxus, Oedipus 555).
Another reason for its deadliness is its sturdy and flexible branches: as
Virgil notes, they make good bows (Georgics 2.448). In Chaucer’s catalog of trees
his epithet for the yew is ‘‘shetere’’ (shooter) (PF 180), while in Spenser’s similar
catalog he lists ‘‘The Eugh, obedient to the benders will’’ (FQ 1.1.9). Hence the
conceit in the report to King Richard that ‘‘Thy very beadsmen learn to bend
their bows / Of double-fatal yew against thy state’’ (R2 3.2.116--17).
Yoke
A yoke is a burden or a bond or both. The burdensome aspect of being under
a yoke is the more frequently found, especially in the Old Testament, where
‘‘yoke’’ (Hebrew ’ol) usually refers to social or political subservience, though it
might sometimes refer to any law or government. Isaac tells Esau,
‘‘thou . . . shalt serve thy brother [Jacob]; and it shall come to pass when thou
shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck’’
(Gen. 27.40). ‘‘Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God,’’ Moses warns his
people, ‘‘Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies,’’ and the Lord ‘‘shall put a
yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee’’ (Deut. 28.47--48). The
Lord tells Ezekiel, I shall break there the yokes of Egypt’’ (Ezek. 30.18). The
phrase ‘‘to break the yoke’’ occurs over a dozen times.
In the New Testament, Jesus says that to follow him is to assume a new and
lighter yoke. ‘‘Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me: for I am meek and
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Yoke
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lowly of heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. / For my yoke is easy,
and my burden is light’’ (Matt. 11.29--30).
A ‘‘yoke’’ of oxen or other beasts meant a pair, as in 1 Samuel 11.7 and Luke
14.19; Job had ‘‘five hundred yoke of oxen’’ (1.3). Hence it meant (once in the
New Testament) a bond between two people or groups. Paul addresses his
friend or friends as ‘‘true yokefellow’’ (suzuge) among his ‘‘fellowlabourers’’ at
Philippi (Phil. 4.3). The original Greek of Jesus’ famous saying ‘‘What therefore
God hath joined together, let not man put asunder’’ (Matt. 19.6) uses
sunezeuxen, ‘‘yoked together’’; in fact English ‘‘join’’ derives through French
from Latin iungere, ‘‘to yoke.’’
Classical Greek often uses ‘‘yoke’’ (zeugos) as a pair of anything. So Aeschylus
has the ‘‘yoke of the Atridae’’ in Agamemnon 44, the pair of brothers
Agamemnon and Menelaus. ‘‘To pull the same yoke’’ is the Greek equivalent of
‘‘to be in the same boat.’’ Odysseus, says Agamemnon, was my ‘‘zealous
yoke-fellow’’ at Troy (842).
To be ‘‘yoked in marriage’’ is commonplace, particularly in Sophocles and
Euripides, e.g., Oedipus Tyrannus 826, Bacchae 468. It is common in Latin, too, as
we read in Virgil’s Aeneid 4.28, where Dido still feels ‘‘joined’’ (iunxit) to her
dead husband. Horace reminds an impatient husband of a young girl that she
is not yet ready to submit to the yoke (Odes 2.5.1); here, surely, the sense of
‘‘burden’’ is also present, the duties of marriage. But ‘‘yoke’’ could mean
simply ‘‘mate’’ or ‘‘unite in sex,’’ as in Lucretius 5.962 and Ovid, Met. 14.762.
Sappho uses ‘‘yokemate’’ (syndugos) to mean ‘‘spouse’’ (frag. 213). Euripides
often uses ‘‘unyoked’’ (azux) to mean ‘‘unmarried’’ or ‘‘virgin,’’ as in Bacchae
694, ‘‘maidens still unyoked.’’ The chorus of the Hippolytus speaks of the ‘‘foal
[daughter] of Oechalia formerly unyoked (azuga) to a marriage bed’’ now
‘‘yoked’’ (zeuxas’) to Heracles by Aphrodite (545--48). Venus likes to place
incompatible bodies and minds, Horace writes, under her ‘‘yoke of bronze’’
(1.33.10--11). In Latin, coniunx is common for ‘‘spouse’’ (or ‘‘concubine’’).
Catullus’ wedding hymn, for example, concludes by blessing the ‘‘good wedded
couple’’ (boni coniuges) (61.225--26). The verb coniugo meant ‘‘unite in marriage’’;
from the adjective coniugalis comes English ‘‘conjugal,’’ meaning ‘‘marital.’’
Among the epithets of Juno, goddess of marriage, are Iuga and Iugalis.
The Greeks were fond of the ‘‘yoke of necessity’’ image. Prometheus feels
such a yoke on the rock in Aeschylus, Prometheus 108, where it is almost literal;
Hermes later calls him a colt newly yoked (1009); Io asks Zeus why she too is
yoked in her sufferings (578). Sometimes ‘‘yoke’’ might be translated ‘‘harness,’’
as in the passage about the colt; in the Choephorae the colt (Orestes) is yoked or
harnessed to a chariot of distress (if the text is correct at 795). Sometimes
‘‘harness’’ or ‘‘strap’’ serves the same meaning, as when Agamemnon ‘‘donned
the harness of necessity’’ (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 218). In that play Cassandra
has taken on the ‘‘yoke of slavery’’ (953) and then is told again by the chorus
to yield to necessity and ‘‘take on this new yoke’’ (1071). Men are ‘‘yoked to
fate’’ in Pindar, Nem. 7.6.
The ‘‘yoke of slavery’’ is found in Sophocles, Ajax 944, and several other
places in Greek and Latin. The herald in the Agamemnon reports that his king
has ‘‘cast a yoke on the neck of Troy’’ (529). ‘‘To send under the yoke’’ (sub
iugum mittere) was a standard phrase in Latin for formally defeating an enemy,
and indeed there was a ceremony, described in Livy 9.6.1ff., in which an army
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Zephyr
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was made to pass under a yoke, which may have been an arrangement of
three spears. Latin subiungo (or subiugo) is the origin of English ‘‘subjugate’’;
see Virgil, Aeneid 8.502.
In deploying the ‘‘yoke of marriage’’ image Chaucer explicitly wards off the
suggestion of subservience, where he has one of the subjects of a lord advise
him: ‘‘Boweth your nekke under that blisful yok / Of soveraynetee, noght of
servyse, / Which that men clepe spousaille or wedlok’’ (Clerk’s Tale 113--15).
Spenser, on the other hand, gives a brief catalog of ‘‘Proud wemen, vaine,
forgetfull of their yoke’’ (FQ 1.5.50); he also has ‘‘Cupids yoke’’ (Colin Clout 566).
When Shakespeare’s Hermia refuses to wed the man her father chooses, she
says she would rather live as a nun than ‘‘yield my virgin patent up / Unto his
lordship whose unwished yoke / My soul consents not to give sovereignty’’
(MND 1.1.80--82). Though it is not yet a question of marriage, Racine’s Aricie
says her pride ‘‘has never bent under the amorous yoke’’ until now (Phèdre
2.1.444).
The yoke of political subjugation is often used by Shakespeare in his
historical plays. Northumberland is ready to ‘‘shake off our slavish yoke’’ under
Richard II (R2 2.1.291), Richmond rallies his friends ‘‘Bruised underneath the
yoke of tyranny’’ of Richard III (R3 5.2.2), and Malcolm tells Macduff, ‘‘I think
our country sinks beneath the yoke’’ of Macbeth (Macbeth 4.3.39).
To Milton’s Satan God’s government is a yoke to be cast off (PL 4.975, 5.786);
and Mammon unwittingly evokes the yoke of Christ when he declares he
prefers ‘‘Hard liberty before the easy yoke / Of servile pomp’’ (2.256--57). But
after the fall Adam acknowledges the sin of rebellion ‘‘against God and his
just yoke / Laid on our necks’’ (10.1045--46).
Part of the ideology of English political reformers in the seventeenth
century and afterward was the notion of the ‘‘Norman Yoke’’ forced upon
England by William the Conqueror in 1066. Similar phrases turn up in the
literature of many countries with a history of foreign subjugation. As the
Swiss contemplate revolting against Austrian rule, one of them, according to
Schiller, draws a parallel: ‘‘The docile and domesticated ox, / That friend of
man, who bends his burdened neck / So patiently beneath the yoke, will leap /
When he is angered, whet his mighty horns, / And throw his enemy up
toward the clouds’’ (Wilhelm Tell 1.651--55, trans. Jordan).
Z
Zephyr
see West wind
Zodiac
see Star, Sun
247
Authors cited
Name
Dates
Language or nation
Achilles Tatius
Aelian (Claudius
Aelianus)
Aeschylus
Aesop
Akenside, Mark
Alanus de Insulis (Alain
de Lille)
Alcaeus
Alcman
Alcott, Bronson
Alfieri, Vittorio
Ambrose
Amos
Anacreon
Antipater of Sidon
ap Gwilym, Dafydd
Apollonius of Rhodes
Apuleius, Lucius(?)
Archilochus
Argentarius, Marcus
Arion
Ariosto, Ludovico
Aristophanes
Aristotle
Arnim, Achim von
Arnold, Matthew
Athanasius
Athenaeus
Atta, Titus Quintus
Augustine (Aurelius
Augustinus)
Ausonius (Decimus
Magnus Ausonius)
Austen, Jane
fl. ad c. 150
ad c. 170--235
Greek
Greek
525--456 bc
6C bc
1721--70
c. 1128--1202
Greek
Greek
English
Latin
7C bc
7C bc
1799--1888
1749--1803
d. ad 397
8C bc
6C bc
1C bc
14C ad
c. 295--215 bc
ad c. 125--160+
7C bc
1C ad?
p7C bc
1474--1533
c. 445--c. 385 bc
384--322 bc
1781--1831
1822--88
ad 293?--373
fl. ad c. 200
d. 77 bc
354--430
Greek
Greek
American
Italian
Latin
Hebrew
Greek
Greek
Welsh
Greek
Latin
Greek
Greek
Greek
Italian
Greek
Greek
German
English
Greek
Greek
Latin
Latin
c. 310--c. 393
Latin
1775--1817
English
5C bc
1561--1626
1532--89
1800--44
Greek
English
French
Russian
Bacchylides
Bacon, Francis
Baı̈f, Jean Antoine de
Baratynsky, Evgeny
248
List of authors cited
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Barbauld, Anna Laetitia
Barlow, Joel
Bates, Katharine Lee
Baudelaire, Charles
Beattie, James
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell
Berkeley, George
Bernard Silvestris
Bion (of Smyrna)
Blair, Robert
Blake, William
Blok, Alexander
Boccaccio, Giovanni
Boethius, Anicius
Manlius Severinus
Borges, Jorge Luis
Boswell, James
Bowles, William Lisle
Bradstreet, Anne
Brentano, Clemens
Bridges, Robert
Brontë, Charlotte
Brontë, Emily
Brooks, Gwendolyn
Browne, Thomas
Browning, Elizabeth
Barrett
Browning, Robert
Brun, Friederike
Bryant, William Cullen
Bunyan, John
Burnett, Frances
Hodgson
Burns, Robert
Burton, Robert
Byron, George Gordon,
Lord
Calderón de la Barca,
Pedro
Callimachus
Camoens, Luis Vaz de
Campbell, Thomas
Carew, Thomas
Carroll, Lewis (Charles
Dodgson)
Castro, Rosalia de
Catullus, Gaius Valerius
1743--1825
1754--1812
1859--1929
1821--67
1735--1803
1803--49
1685--1753
fl. c. 1150
2C bc
1699--1746
1757--1827
1880--1921
1313--75
ad c. 476--c. 524
English
American
American
French
English
English
English (Irish)
Latin
Greek
English (Scottish)
English
Russian
Italian
Latin
1899--1986
1740--95
1762--1850
c. 1610--72
1778--1842
1844--1930
1816--55
1818--48
1917-1605--82
1806--61
Spanish (Argentine)
English (Scottish)
English
English/American
German
English
English
English
American
English
English
1812--89
1765--1835
1794--1878
1628--88
1849--1924
English
German
American
English
English/American
1759--96
1577--1640
1788--1824
English (Scottish)
English
English
1600--1681
Spanish
c. 310--c. 240 bc
c. 1524--80
1777--1844
1595--1640
1832--98
Greek
Portuguese
English
English
English
1837--85
c. 84--c. 54 bc
Spanish/Galician
Latin
249
List of authors cited
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Cazotte, Jacques
Celan, Paul
Cervantes Saavedra,
Miguel de
Césaire, Aimé
Chapman, George
Chateaubriand,
François-René de
Chaucer, Geoffrey
Chekhov, Anton
Pavlovich
Chénier, André
Choerilus
Cicero (Marcus Tullius
Cicero)
Clanvowe, Thomas
Clare, John
Claudian (Claudius
Claudianus) late
Clement of Alexandria
Coleridge, Samuel
Taylor
Collins, William
Conrad, Joseph
Corneille, Pierre
Coronado, Carolina
Cowley, Abraham
Cowper, William
Crabbe, George
Daniel
Dante Alighieri
Darı́o, Rubén
Darwin, Erasmus
Davies, John
Denham, John
Deschamps, Eustache
Desportes, Philippe
Dickens, Charles
Dickinson, Emily
Diderot, Denis
Donne, John
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Drayton, Michael
Dryden, John
Du Bellay, Joachim
Dunbar, Paul Laurence
Dwight, Timothy
250
1719--92
1920--70
1547--1616
French
German (Romanian)
Spanish
1913-1559?--1634
1768--1848
French (Martinican)
English
French
c. 1343--1400
1860--1904
English
Russian
1762--1794
6C bc
106--43 bc
French
Greek
Latin
fl. 1390
1793--1864
4C ad
English
English
Latin
ad c. 200
1772--1834
Greek
English
1721--59
1857--1924
1606--84
1823--1911
1618--67
1731--1800
1754--1832
English
English (b. Polish)
French
Spanish
English
English
English
2C bc
1265--1321
1867--1916
1731--1802
1569--1626
1615--69
c. 1345--1406
1546--1606
1812--70
1830--86
1713--84
1572--1631
1821--81
1563--1631
1631--1700
1522--60
1872--1906
1752--1817
Hebrew
Italian
Spanish (Nicaraguan)
English
English
English
French
French
English
American
French
English
Russian
English
English
French
American
American
List of authors cited
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Eco, Umberto
Eichendorff, Joseph von
Eliot, T. S.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Ennius, Quintus
Erasmus, Desiderius
Euripides
Ezekiel
1932-1788--1857
1888--1965
1803--82
239--169 bc
c. 1469--1536
c. 485--406 bc
6C bc
Italian
German
American
American
Latin
Dutch
Greek
Hebrew
Faulkner, William
Fielding, Henry
Finch, Anne (Lady
Winchelsea)
Fisher, Dorothy Canfield
Fitzgerald, Edward
Flaubert, Gustave
Fletcher, John
Forster, E. M.
Foscolo, Ugo
France, Anatole
Froissart, Jean
Frost, Robert
1897--1961
1707--54
d. 1720
American
English
English
1879--1958
1809--83
1821--80
1579--1625
1879--1970
1778--1827
1844--1924
1337--post-1414
1875--1963
American
English
French
English
English
Italian (Greek)
French
French
American
Galen (Galenus)
Garcia Lorca, Federico
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel
Garcilaso de la Vega
Garnier, Robert
Gascoigne, George
Gay, John
Gellius, Aulus
Gibbon, Edward
Goethe, Johann
Wolfgang von
Golding, William
Góngora, Luis de
Gosse, Edmund
Gottfried von Strassburg
Gower, John
Gray, Thomas
Green, Matthew
Greene, Robert
Grimm, Jakob
Grimm, Wilhelm
Guthlac
ad 129--99
1898--1936
1928-1503--36
c. 1544--90
1539?--77
1685--1732
ad c. 130--c. 180
1737--94
1749--1832
Greek
Spanish
Spanish (Colombian)
Spanish
French
English
English
Latin
English
German
1911--93
1561--1625
1849--1928
13C
1330?--1408
1716--71
1696--1737
1558--92
1785--1863
1786--1859
c. 700
English
Spanish
English
Old High German
English
English
English
English
German
German
Old English
Hardy, Thomas
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
1840--1928
1804--64
English
American
251
List of authors cited
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Hazlitt, William
Heine, Heinrich
Hellman, Lillian
Hemingway, Ernest
Henley, William Ernest
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Heraclitus of
Halicarnassus
Herbert, George
Herder, Johann
Gottfried von
Herodotus
Herrera, Fernando de
Herrick, Robert
Hesiod
Hippocrates
Hoffmann, E. T. A.
Hölderlin, Friedrich
Homer
Hood, Thomas
Horace (Quintus
Horatius Flaccus)
Hosea
Howe, Julia Ward
Hunt, Leigh
252
1778--1830
1797--1856
1906--84
1899--1961
1849--1903
c. 540--c. 480 bc
3C bc
English
German
American
American
English
Greek
Greek
1593--1633
1744--1803
English
German
c. 490--c. 425 bc
1534--97
1591--1674
c. 700 bc
c. 460--c. 370 bc
1776--1822
1770--1843
8C bc
1799--1845
65--68 bc
Greek
Spanish
English
Greek
Greek
German
German
Greek
English
Latin
8C bc
1819--1910
1784--1859
Hebrew
American
English
Ibsen, Henrik
Ibycus
Irving, Washington
Isaiah
Isidore of Seville
1828--1906
6C bc
1783--1859
8C bc
fl. ad 602--36
Norwegian
Greek
American
Hebrew
Latin
James the Apostle
James, Henry
Jammes, Francis
Jeffers, Robinson
Jeremiah
Jewett, Sarah Orne
Joel
John the Evangelist
John of Patmos
Jonson, Ben
Joyce, James
Juvenal (Decimus Iunius
Iuvenalis)
1C ad
1843--1916
1868--1938
1887--1962
6C bc
1849--1909
5C bc?
1C ad
1C ad
1572--1637
1882--1941
2C ad
Greek
American
French
American
Hebrew
American
Hebrew
Greek
Greek
English
English (Irish)
Latin
Kafka, Franz
Keats, John
Kerouac, Jack
1883--1924
1795--1821
1922--69
German (Czech)
English
Canadian/American
List of authors cited
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Khayam, Omar
King, Henry
King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Kipling, Rudyard
1050?--1123?
1592--1669
1929--68
1865--1936
Persian
English
American
English
La Cruz, Sor Juana Inés
de
Lactantius
Lamartine, Alphonse de
Landon, Letitia
Elizabeth
Landor, Walter Savage
Langland, William
Lawrence, D. H. (David
Herbert)
Lebrun-Pindare, Ponce
D. E.
Leopardi, Giacomo
Lessing, Gotthold
Ephraim
London, Jack
Longfellow, Henry
Wadsworth
Lorca, Federico García
Lorris, Guillaume de
Lovelace, Richard
Lowry, Malcolm
Lucan (Marcus Annaeus
Lucanus)
Lucian
Lucretius (Titus
Lucretius Carus)
Luke the Evangelist
Lyly, John
1651--95
Spanish
ad c. 240--c. 320
1790--1869
1802--38
Latin
French
English
1775--1864
c. 1332--?
1885--1930
English
English
English
1729--1807
French
1798--1837
1729--81
Italian
German
1876--1916
1807--82
American
American
1898--1936
?--c. 1235
1618--57
1909--57
ad 39--65
Spanish
French
English
English
Latin
ad 115--c. 180
98--c. 55 bc
Greek
Latin
1C ad
1554--1606
Greek
English
c. 1300--77
1469--1527
5C bc
1842--98
1891--1938
1803--49
1875--1955
1569--1625
1C ad
1564--93
ad 40--103
French
Italian
Hebrew
French
Russian
English (Irish)
German
Italian
Greek
English
Latin
1621--78
1878--1967
English
English
Machaut, Guillaume de
Machiavelli, Niccolo
Malachi
Mallarmé, Stéphane
Mandelstam, Osip
Mangan, James Clarence
Mann, Thomas
Marino, Giovan Battista
Mark the Evangelist
Marlowe, Christopher
Martial (Marcus
Valerius Martialis)
Marvell, Andrew
Masefield, John
253
List of authors cited
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Matthew the Evangelist
McCrae, John
Meleager
Melville, Herman
Meredith, George
Meun, Jean de
Micah
Middleton, Thomas
Milton, John
Mimnermus
Mitchell, Margaret
Montagu, Mary Wortley
Montale, Eugenio
Moore, Thomas
Mörike, Eduard
Morrison, Toni
Morton, Thomas
Moschus
Müller, Wilhelm
Musset, Alfred de
1C ad
1872--1918
c. 140--70 bc
1819--91
1828--1909
?--c. 1305
6C bc?
1580--1627
1608--74
7C bc
1900--49
1689--1762
1896--1981
1779--1852
1804--75
1931-1575--1646
c. 150 bc
1794--1827
1810--57
Greek
Canadian
Greek
American
English
French
Hebrew
English
English
Greek
American
English
Italian
English
German
American
American
Greek
German
French
Nabokov, Vladimir
Nashe, Thomas
Nietzsche, Friedrich
Nonnus
Novalis (Friedrich von
Hardenberg)
1899--1977
1567--1601
1844--1900
5C ad
1772--1801
Russian/American
English
German
Greek
German
O’Casey, Sean
Opie, Amelia
Orwell, George (Eric
Blair)
Ovid (Publius Ovidius
Naso)
1880--1964
1769--1853
1903--50
English (Irish)
English
English
43 bc -- ad 17
Latin
1737--1809
c. 515--c. 450 bc
1855--1912
d. ad 64
1785--1666
ad 34--62
English/American
Greek
Italian
Greek
English
Latin
1C ad
1304--74
Greek
Italian
fl. ad c. 200
fl. c. 510--475 bc
518--438 bc
Greek
Greek
Greek
Paine, Thomas
Parmenides
Pascoli, Giovanni
Paul the Apostle
Peacock, Thomas Love
Persius (Aulus Persius
Flaccus)
Peter the Apostle
Petrarch (Petrarca),
Francesco
Philostratus
Phrynichus
Pindar
254
List of authors cited
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Platen-Hallermünde,
August, Graf von
Plato
Plautus (Titus Maccius
Plautus)
Pliny the Elder
(G. Plinius Secundus)
Plutarch
Poe, Edgar Allan
Polidori, John William
Pope, Alexander
Pound, Ezra
Propertius, Sextus
Pushkin, Alexander
Sergeyevich
1796--1835
German
427--347 bc
c. 250--184 bc
Greek
Latin
ad 23/4--79
Latin
ad 46--c. 120
1809--49
1795--1821
1688--1744
1885--1972
c. 48--c. 16 bc
1799--1837
Greek
American
English
English
American
Latin
Russian
Quevedo y Villegas,
Francisco de
Quintilian (Marcus
Fabius
Quintilianus)
Quintus Smyrnaeus
1580--1645
Spanish
ad c. 35--c. 95
Latin
4C ad
Greek
Rabelais, François
Racine, Jean
Radcliffe, Ann
Ralegh, Sir Walter
Randolph, Thomas
Richard of St. Victor
Richardson, Samuel
Rilke, Rainer Maria
Rimbaud, Arthur
Robinson, Mary
Ronsard, Pierre de
Rosenberg, Isaac
Rossetti, Christina
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
1494?--1553
1639--99
1764--1823
1552--1618
1605--35
d. 1173
1689--1761
1875--1926
1854--91
1758--1800
1524--85
1890--1917
1830--94
1828--82
French
French
English
English
English
Latin (b. Scotland)
English
German
French
English
French
English
English
English
Saint-Amant,
Antoine-Girard de
Sainte-Beuve,
Charles-Augustin
Saint-Pierre, Bernardin
de
Sappho
Sartre, Jean-Paul
Scève, Maurice
Schelling, Friedrich
W. J. von
1594--1661
French
1804--69
French
1737--1814
French
7C bc
1905--80
1501?--63?
1775--1854
Greek
French
French
German
255
List of authors cited
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Schiller, J. C. Friedrich
von
Schlegel, Friedrich
Scott, Walter
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus
(the Younger)
Sepheris, George
Servius (Marius Servius
Honoratus)
Sewell, Anna
Shakespeare, William
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
Shenstone, William
Shirley, James
Sidney, Phillip
Silone, Ignazio
Simonides
Skelton, John
Socrates
Solomon
Solon
Sophocles
Southey, Robert
Spenser, Edmund
Sponde, Jean de
Staël, Germaine de
Statius (Publius
Papinius Statius)
Steinbeck, John
Stendhal (Marie Henri
Beyle)
Stevens, Wallace
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Stoker, Bram
Strindberg, August
Sturluson, Snorri
Sue, Eugène
Suetonius (Gaius
Suetonius
Tranquillus)
Swift, Jonathan
Swinburne, Algernon
Charles
Tacitus, Publius
Cornelius
Tasso, Torquato
Tennyson, Alfred,
Lord
256
1759--1805
German
1772--1829
1771--1832
c. 4 bc--ad 65
German
English (Scottish)
Latin
1900--71
5C ad
Greek
Latin
1820--78
1564--1616
1792--1822
1714--63
1596--1666
1554--1586
1900--78
556--468 bc
c. 1460--1529
469--399 bc
10C bc
c. 640--c. 560 bc
c. 496--406/5 bc
1774--1843
1552--99
1557--95
1766--1817
ad 45--c. 96
English
English
English
English
English
English
Italian
Greek
English
Greek
Hebrew
Greek
Greek
English
English
French
French (Swiss)
Latin
1902--68
1783--1842
American
French
1879--1955
1850--94
1847--1912
1849--1912
c. 1220
1804--57
ad c. 70--?
American
English (Scottish)
English
Swedish
Icelandic
French
Latin
1667--1745
1837--1909
English (Irish)
English
ad 56/57--c. 117
Latin
1544--95
1809--92
Italian
English
List of authors cited
.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
Terence (Publius
Terentius Afer)
Tertullian
Theocritus
Theognis
Thomas, Dylan
Thompson, Francis
Thomson, James
Tieck, Ludwig
Tolkien, J. R. R.
Tolstoy, Leo
Turgenev, Ivan S.
Twain, Mark (Samuel
Clemens)
Tyrtaeus
Tyutchev, Fyodor I.
Valerius Flaccus, Gaius
Valéry, Paul
Varro, Marcus Terentius
Vaughan, Henry
Vega Carpio, Lope de
Verlaine, Paul
Verne, Jules
Vigny, Alfred de
Villiers de l’Isle-Adam,
Philippe
Villon, François
Virgil (Publius Virgilius
Maro)
193/183--159 bc
Latin
ad c. 160--c. 225
3C bc
6C bc
1914--53
1859--1907
1700--48
1773--1853
1892--1973
1828--1910
1818--83
1835--1910
Latin
Greek
Greek
English (Welsh)
English
English (Scottish)
German
English
Russian
Russian
American
7C bc
1803--73
Greek
Russian
ad c. 40--c. 90
1871--1945
116--27 bc
1621--95
1562--1613
1844--96
1828--1905
1797--1863
1838--89
Latin
French
Latin
English
Spanish
French
French
French
French
1431--?
70--19 bc
French
Latin
Wagner, Richard
Walker, Alice
Waller, Edmund
Walther von der
Vogelweide
Wesley, Samuel
West, Nathanael
Wheatley, Phillis
Whitman, Walt
Wilde, Oscar
Wilson, Harriet E.
Wollstonecraft, Mary
Wordsworth, William
Wroth, Lady Mary
1813--83
1944-1606--87
c. 1170--1230
German
American
English
Old High German
1662--1735
1903--40
c. 1753--84
1819--92
1854--1900
1808--c. 1870
1759--97
1770--1850
1587?--1651?
English
American
American
American
English (Irish)
American
English
English
English
Xenophon
c. 428--c. 354 bc
Greek
Yeats, William Butler
Young, Edward
1865--1939
1683--1765
English (Irish)
English
257
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Roberts, Helene E., ed. Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography. Chicago and
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Animals
Allen, Mary. Animals in American Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
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258
Bibliography
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Edinger, Harry G. ‘‘Episodes in the History of the Literary Bear.’’ Mosaic 4:1
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