>From: "M G MCQUILLAN" <[log in to unmask]>
>
>Douglas, while you have the book in your hand, or anyone else with a
>good classical education - is there a passage in Metamorphoses where
>a girl/nymph gets turned to a willow tree? Or is the association
>between willows and death/mourning ONLY to do with the pendent
>boughs looking like long hair on a bowed head? This would be the
>origin of the Ovidian association
I don't recollect anyone in the Metamorphoses getting turned into a
willow. In fact, I think it's about the only thing someone doesn't get
turned into.
The association of the willow with death must be very ancient,
since Homer mentions the grove of Persephone at the entrance to the
Underworld to which Circe directs Odysseus as consisting of poplars
and willows. This cannot be idle: Homer, like God, does nothing in
vain. The reason for this association is not the appearance of the
willow tree -- after all, all sorts of trees and bushes are droopy -
but because the willow is, as Homer says "olesikarpos", "a destroyer
of its seed" -- an epithet which as Pliny explains in his Natural
History refers to the willow's typical shedding of its fruit before
the tree matures.
This association is not just Greek but IndoEuropean. The Homeric
Greek word for willow, itea, was actually witea (the w here standing
for digamma), which is cognate with English withy, and its
fruit-destroying quality is reflected in the willow's association in
English folk tradition with those whose lovers died before they
could marry them, which gives a poignant irony to the Queen's
description of Ophelia's death:
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream,
There with fantastic garlands did she come ...
Since this is supposed to be a forum about the practice of poetry
maybe I should here bend the tiller of my fancy back towards the
currents of relevancy to point out that Shakespeare like Homer could
invoke the reverberations of forty centuries of tradition with the
two syllables of a tree name, a magic which our language since seems
to have lost. Probably the most evocative two syllables in current
English are "O.J." which seems pretty piss poor by comparison. I
get the feeling that I am talking to myself again. But oh well
aren't we all.
Anyway to return to the question which occasioned this spew,
there is no doubt a dissertation or monograph on trees in ancient
literature, probably by a German. German philologists are very fond
of such categorical studies. It might take some digging in a major
research library to find it though. You could see if there was an
entry for willow (in German, Greek, or English) in Paulys
Realencyclopadie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. That might
tell you something.
twanky-dillow, twanky-dillow, twanky-dillow-dillow-dillow!
and he played on his merry bag-pipe
made of the green willow!
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