As Spring approaches (oh, please say that Spring approaches!), my mind is turning more and more to garden planning. I keep turning over in my mind the different things I would like to plant this year, and it turns out that a lot of these have their inspiration in literature. I want to plant blackberry bushes because they appear in The Wind in the Willows. I want to plant feverfew because it appears in Dealing with Dragons. I want to plant lavender because Harriet Vane's potpurri smells of lavender in Busman's Honeymoon. Almost every plant imaginable has some significance in some work of literature, and is therefore tinged with meaning.
On the one hand, this meaning seems as if it must come from the work of literature, right? I mean, my response to feverfew very clearly comes from Dealing with Dragons. That's undeniable.
At the same time, however, does our response to roses come from the way they are used in literature, or does literature merely reflect the way we feel about roses? Would Beauty and the Beast speak to us in the same way if Beauty's father had picked a buttercup or a daisy? There is something serious and complex about a rose that makes the Beast's rage somehow comprehensible, even if we do not understand it.
In Hamlet, when Ophelia drowns under the willow tree, somehow this seems to make sense (and not just because willows grow near water). There is something melancholy about willows, beautiful as they are. Even The Wind in the Willows has something of this sadness in its nostalgic tone, as bright and playful a story as it is.
The role played by flora in literature illustrates a give and take between nature and art. The natural world and the artistic one each lend themselves to one another in such a way that a person can never be absolutely certain whether meaning is bestowed by art or whether it belonged, somehow, to nature in the first place.
Spring will be here in less than a month--the Vernal equinox occurs on March 20th . . . then the days will begin getting longer and warmer. I'm as excited about that as you are. And a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, so I think our reaction to roses is less influenced by literature than the work of the ultimate author of existence.
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I think this issue is pretty tangled up with folklore, which is endlessly intriguing to me and always leaves me in a muddle by the end.
ReplyDeleteExample: part of why Ophelia's drowning under the willow seems very appropriate is because the willow is very, very old symbol of sorrow, way older than Shakespeare. There are plenty of folk songs, for example, about dead lovers invoking the willow. It's similar to the continual invocation of "the wind and the rain" as a symbol of the chaos or cruelty of life.
The rose is a very old one, too...I'm thinking for instance of the "rose of Sharon" reference in (possibly?) the Song of Songs...somewhere in the Bible, anyway.
These images make their way into literature, certainly, but it seems to me that they rise up out of a more primordial soup of early story-telling. Jung and the collective unconscious are kind of out of fashion, I think; and attempts by turn of the century scholars to trace certain images to early fertility rites (Charles Frazer's The Golden Bough; Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance) tend to be largely discredited now as unscholarly or sloppy, but sometimes you do wonder if it all goes back to some Druid somewhere.
But then, where did the Druid get it? And why did (s)he get so lucky as to choose the symbols that would dominate the western imagination?
Perhaps Eric's answer is the best, and that some things resonate with us because of God...though I have trouble being any more specific than that. They resonate for reasons just as mysterious as our own souls. Perhaps in the end the best thing to do is just be THANKFUL that we have this whole treasure trove of images, so many of them related to plants, to draw on. And enjoy them, revel in them, use them and play with them.
On a slightly different note, one thing I really enjoy is the way stories are encoded on the world around us by the way we've named them. This happens in the names of some plants --- like jack-in-the-pulpit --- and also in constellations.
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