Laudator Temporis Acti

J.R.R. Tolkien, O'Donnell Lecture on English and Welsh:

Most English-speaking people will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful,' especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well, then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant.

Credit for the notion that cellar door is beautiful or musical has been given to several different literary figures, including Edgar Allen Poe, Dorothy Parker, H.L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, et al. Unfortunately, those who give credit seldom if ever cite chapter and verse. Here is some actual evidence, in reverse chronological order.

A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf, 1949; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 459, with reference to a column by Mencken in The Smart Set (June 1920), pp. 138-143:

Poetry, in fact, is two quite distinct things. It may be either or both. One is a series of words that are intrinsically musical, in clang-tint and rhythm, as the single words cellar-door and sarcoma are musical. The other is a series of ideas, false in themselves, that offer a means of emotional and imaginative escape from the harsh realities of everyday.

Alma Blount, Intensive Studies in American Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1914), pp. 30-31:

Poe, who studied sound effects carefully, says that he chose "Nevermore" as the refrain for The Raven largely because the word contains the most sonorous vowel, o, and the most "producible" consonant, r. An amusing story is told of an Italian lady who knew not a word of English, but who, when she heard the word cellar-door, was convinced that English must be a most musical language. If the word were not in our minds hopelessly attached to a humble significance, we, too, might be charmed by its combination of spirant, liquids, and vowels.

"The Spectator," The Outlook 93 (September 4, 1909) 16-18 (at 18):

The Spectator heard, not long ago, of a Spanish gentleman who politely disclaimed for his own language any monopoly of musical words, saying, "What word in Spanish is more musical than your own term 'cellar door'?" And, indeed, if, instead of being a term suggestive of ashes and dilapidation, the same sounds, Celadore, were, let us say, the name of a beautiful heroine in a play of Shakespeare's, we might readily understand how the ear might find them musical.

Cyrus Lauron Hooper, Gee-Boy (New York: John Lane, 1903), pp. 43-44:

Even into advanced manhood he remembered with approval these experiences, and had no sympathy with those unmusical souls (God save the mark!) who see no beauty in a word. He even grew to like sounds unassociated with their meaning, and once made a list of the words he loved most, as doubloon, squadron, thatch, fanfare (he never did know the meaning of this one), Sphinx, pimpernel, Caliban, Setebos, Carib, susurro, torquet, Jungfrau. He was laughed at by a friend, but logic was his as well as sentiment; an Italian savant maintained that the most beautiful combination of English sounds was cellar-door; no association of ideas here to help out! sensuous impression merely! the cellar-door is purely American.

I haven't been able to find any example earlier than Hooper in 1903. It's noteworthy that Max Beerbohm, without mentioning cellar door, made the following observation a year earlier, in "The Naming of Streets," The Pall Mall Magazine Vol. XXVI, No. 105 (January 1902) 139-144 (at 141):

What you take to be beauty or ugliness of sound is indeed nothing but beauty or ugliness of meaning. You are pleased by the sound of such words as gondola, vestments, chancel, ermine, manor-house. They seem to be fraught with a subtle onomatopoeia, severally suggesting by their sounds the grace or sanctity or solid comfort of the things which they connote. You murmur them luxuriously, dreamily. Prepare for a slight shock. Scrofula, investments, cancer, vermin, warehouse. Horrible words, are they not? But say gondola—scrofula, vestments—investments, and so on; and then lay your hand on your heart, and declare that the words in the first list are in mere sound nicer than the words in the second. Of course they are not. If gondola were a disease, and if a scrofula were a beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city, the effect of each word would be exactly the reverse of what it is. This rule may be applied to all the other words in the two lists. And these lists might, of course, be extended to infinity. The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes. Beauty sounds as ugly as ugliness sounds beautiful. Neither of them has by itself any quality in sound.

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, Part II (The Two Towers), Book III, Chapter IV (Treebeard):

'There were rowan-trees in my home,' said Bregalad, softly and sadly, 'rowan-trees that took root when I was an Enting, many many years ago in the quiet of the world. The oldest were planted by the Ents to try and please the Entwives; but they looked at them and smiled and said that they knew where whiter blossom and richer fruit were growing. Yet there are no trees of all that race, the people of the Rose, that are so beautiful to me. And these trees grew and grew, till the shadow of each was like a green hall, and their red berries in the autumn were a burden, and a beauty and a wonder. Birds used to flock there. I like birds, even when they chatter; and the rowan has enough and to spare. But the birds became unfriendly and greedy and tore at the trees, and threw the fruit down and did not eat it. Then Orcs came with axes and cut down my trees. I came and called them by their long names, but they did not quiver, they did not hear or answer: they lay dead.

O Orofarnë, Lassemista, Carnimírië!
O rowan fair, upon your hair how white the blossom lay!
O rowan mine, I saw you shine upon a summer's day,
Your rind so bright, your leaves so light, your voice so cold and soft:
Upon your head how golden-red the crown you bore aloft!
O rowan dead, upon your head your hair is dry and grey;
Your crown is spilled, your voice is stilled for ever and a day.
O Orofarnë, Lassemista, Carnimírië!

The hobbits fell asleep to the sound of the soft singing of Bregalad, that seemed to lament in many tongues the fall of trees that he had loved.

Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), p. 224 (letter to Richard Jeffery, September 7, 1955):

Orofarne, lassemista, carnemírie [sic] is High-elven (the language preferred by Ents) for 'mountain-dwelling, leaf-grey, with adornment of red jewels'.

Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans, Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006), pp. 131-132, suggest that Gerard Manley Hopkins' Binsey Poplars could have been a "direct inspiration" for Bregalad's Lament.

European Rowan (Sorbus aucuparia)
Related posts: Petition of a Poplar; Cactus Ed and Arboricide; Views from the Center of Highgate Wood; Artaxerxes and Arboricide; When the Last Tree Falls; The Hamadryads of George Lane; Sorbs and Medlars; So Foul a Deed; Like Another Erysichthon; The Fate of Old Trees; Scandalous Misuse of the Globe; The Groves Are Down; Massacre; Executioners; Anagyrasian Spirit; Butchers of Our Poor Trees; Cruel Axes; Odi et Amo; Kentucky Chainsaw Massacre; Hornbeams; Protection of Sacred Groves; Lex Luci Spoletina; Turullius and the Grove of Asclepius; Caesarian Section; Death of a Noble Pine; Two Yew Trees in Chilthorne, Somerset; The Fate of the Shrubbery at Weston; Willows; Mourning Over Trees; The Trees Are Down; Sad Ravages in the Woods; An Old Saying; Strokes of Havoc; Maltreatment of Trees; Arboricide; An Impious Lumberjack; Erysichthon in Ovid; Erysichthon in Callimachus; Vandalism.

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders, XLVII:

"Think as I think," said a man,
"Or you are abominably wicked;
You are a toad."

And after I had thought of it,
I said, "I will, then, be a toad."

Bufo americanus

Max Beerbohm on Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman:

How compare either of these grim two?
  Each has an equal knack,
Hardy supplies the pill that's blue,
  Housman the draught that's black.

John Ruskin, Praeterita, X (Crossmount):

Flowers, like everything else that is lovely in the visible world, are only to be seen rightly with the eyes which the God who made them gave us; and neither with microscopes nor spectacles. These have their uses for the curious and the aged; as stilts and crutches have for people who want to walk in mud, or cannot safely walk but on three legs anywhere. But in health of mind and body, men should see with their own eyes, hear and speak without trumpets, walk on their feet, not on wheels, and work and war with their arms, not with engine-beams, nor rifles warranted to kill twenty men at a shot before you can see them. The use of the great mechanical powers may indeed sometimes be compatible with the due exercise of our own ; but the use of instruments for exaggerating the powers of sight necessarily deprives us of the best pleasures of sight. A flower is to be watched as it grows, in its association with the earth, the air, and the dew; its leaves are to be seen as they expand in sunshine; its colours, as they embroider the field, or illumine the forest. Dissect or magnify them, and all you discover or learn at last will be that oaks, roses, and daisies, are all made of fibres and bubbles; and these, again, of charcoal and water; but, for all their peeping and probing, nobody knows how.

From The Letters of A.E. Housman, Volume II. Edited by Archie Burnett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007):

P. 5 (to Alice Rothenstein, January 16, 1927):

Your story about the sycamores is just like what has happened in the Woodchester valley. On the east side there used to be a belt of beeches half way up the hill, dividing the downs from the fields, and making a piece of scenery which was in its way as beautiful as anything anywhere; and now the greater part of them are down and the whole look of the place changed.

P. 6 (to J.W. Mackail, January 20, 1927):

Virgil's besetting sin is the use of words too forcible for his thoughts.

P. 48 (to Basil Housman, December 29, 1927):

I had a visit not long ago from Clarence Darrow, the great American barrister for defending murderers. He had only a few days in England, but he could not retun home without seeing me, because he had so often used my poems to rescue his clients from the electric chair. Loeb and Leopold owe their life sentence partly to me; and he gave me a copy of his speech, in which, sure enough, two of my poems are misquoted.

Pp. 111-112 (to Laurence Housman, February 16, 1929):

The financial expert who reorganised Grant Richards' business for his creditors thought he would like to read A Shropshire Lad. He did, or as much as he could; then, in his own words, 'I put it behind the fire. Filthiest book I ever read: all about rogering girls under hedges.'

P. 121 (to Jeannie Housman, April 3, 1929):

Many thanks for your kind attempt to cheer the gloom of a seventieth birthday.

Pp. 153-154 (to Arnold Rubin, November 17, 1929):

Assuming that you have to earn your living, I advise you to follow chemistry or any other honest trade rather than literature, which, as Scott said, may be a good walking-stick, but is a bad crutch. It cannot be depended on. Maurice Hewlett, when his novels were selling well, threw up a post in the Civil Service, intending to live by his pen; the public ceased to read his novels, and he died in poverty. And of all forms of literature, poetry is the straightest way to starvation. There is one living poet who boasts that he lives on the proceeds of his poetry, but he is a bad one. Moreover poetry is not a job to fill all one's time, and poets like Wordsworth and Byron, who were always writing, would have done better to write less.

P. 233 (to I.R. Brussel):

I find it a trouble to invent titles for poems, and do not think it worth while.

P. 247 (to Charles Wilson, June 4, 1931):

Class is a real thing: we may wish that it were not, and we may pretend that it is not, but I find that it is.

P. 248 (to Harold Wilensky, June 6, 1931):

Anything is better than trusting to literature for a livelihood; and if I had tried it I should have starved. I earned my bread by teaching. I did not enjoy it, and some of my pupils in London did not care for anything beyond passing examinations.

P. 284 (to Cyril Clemens, March 4, 1932):

I do not kow why Americans are so fond of writing—and apparently of reading—about personal matters; but it seems to be a national characteristic, and it makes me unwilling to meet them, though they are always so kindly and friendly.

P. 302 (to F.H. Fobes, June 24, 1932):

The reform most needed in Greek type, now that the double sigma has been got rid of, seems to me to be the abolition of the subscript iota and the substitution, not simply of the adscript, which often causes ambiguity, but of the diminished adscript, as in Porson's last edition of the Hecuba.

P. 329 (to Maurice Pollet, February 5, 1933):

'Reader of the Greek Anthology' is not a good name for me. Of course I have read it, or as much of it as is worth reading, but with no special heed; and my favourite Greek poet is Aeschylus....I respect the Epicureans more than the Stoics, but I am myself a Cyreniac.

P. 337 (to Cyril Clemens, March 26, 1933):

Thank you for sending me your delightful Josh Billings, Yankee Humorist, which I found interesting reading. I had heard of, and enjoyed, the inimitable humor of Artemus Ward, but Josh Billings was new to me, and I am indebted to you for making such a robust and characteristic Yankee known to me. I have always been interested in American humour.

P. 341 (to Grant Richards, April 22, 1933):

I strictly enjoin you to tell Miss Shirley Pratt nothing. The sham education given at American Universities has resulted in my receiving about half-a-dozen similar enquiries fom its victims.

P. 406 (to A.S.F. Gow, February 12, 1934):

As the meaning of a poem is what it conveys, not anything else which its author may or may not have wished it to convey, I don't think that this poem, considered as a whole, has a meaning. It sems to be a rather random assemblage of pretty words, or words which he thinks pretty, without much to express but a vague agitation of mind.

P. 453 (to Katherine Symons, December 3, 1934):

I can bear my life, but I do not at all want it to go on, and it is a great mistake that it did not come to an end a year and a half ago. This period has been a serious subtraction from the total pleasure (such as it was) of my existence.

P. 528 (to Houston Martin, March 22, 1936):

In philosophy I am a Cyreniac or egoistic hedonist, and regard the pleasure of the moment as the only possible motive of action. As for pessimism, I think it almost as silly, though not as wicked, as optimism. George Eliot said she was a meliorist: I am a pejorist.

Related post: Excerpts from Housman's Letters.

Anent Illustrations of the Heliades, a correspondent drew my attention to a couple of unusual pictures of metamorphoses. The first, by Charles Jameson Grant, is titled Singular Effects of the Universal Vegetable Pills on a Green Grocer:

The second is from Miscellanea d'alchimia (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana di Firenze, Codex Ashburnham 1166, folio 16):

The second picture, depicting the alchemical or philosophical tree, is supposed to have a mystical meaning, but to my irreverent eye the supine gentleman appears to have a massive "woody" (cf. Catullus 32.10-11: nam pransus iaceo et satur supinus / pertundo tunicamque palliumque).

The second picture also calls to mind certain representations of the Jesse Tree inspired by Isaiah 11.1 (et egredietur virga de radice Iesse et flos de radice eius ascendet), e.g. one in the Winchester Psalter (British Museum, MS. Cotton Nero C.IV, folio 9, color photo here):

and this illustration from a French bible (Bibliothèque nationale, Français 3, folio 180):

Thanks to Mike Salter, who writes in an email:

Your post "Take it as it comes" reminded me of a 19th-century educational polemic I once read by a certain Professor Hale on the importance of reading Latin in the "given" word order. It's available on the net in full I think - if you google "art of reading latin hale" you can probably find it. An interesting read, and I tend to agree with him...I try to inculcate this in my 21st century students as well, once they've reached a certain level!

The reference is to William Gardner Hale, The Art of Reading Latin: How to Teach It (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1887), from which the following excerpts come:

Pp. 16-17:

After my little jest about the Romans hunting up first the subject and then the predicate as Cicero talked to them, or first the predicate and then the subject, whichever one thinks the Roman method may have been, I assure them that "what we have to do is to learn to understand a Roman sentence precisely as a Roman understood it as he heard it or read it, say in an oration, for example. Now the Roman heard, or read, first the first word, then the second, then the third, and so on, through sentence after sentence, to the end of the oration, with no turning back, with no hunting around. And in doing this he so was guided all the time, by indications of one kind or another in some way strown through each sentence, that, when the last word of that sentence had been spoken or read, the whole of the meaning had reached his mind."

P. 31, n. 1:

At the meeting of the Philological Association at Ithaca last summer, Professor Gildersleeve, in the course of some remarks upon the reading of Greek and Latin, expressed himself with great severity in regard to the habitual way of doing the thing, and suggested that it would be desirable, in order to force students to accept the order of the original, to require them to read through a hole in a piece of paper, or with a notched card.

Cf. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, "A Novice of 1850," Johns Hopkins Alumni Magazine 1 (1912) 3-9, rpt. in Ward W. Briggs Jr., ed. Soldier and Scholar: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), pp. 66-74 (at 73):

I have in all my teachings laid stress on the appeal to the ear rather than to the eye; and when the eye is used, the student must be trained to follow the order of the original, which is the order of the ear. The analytical method—subject, predicate, modifier and the like—is fatal to any true mastery of the language.

One of my Greek teachers used to say, at least once during every class, "Take it as it comes," by which he meant, "Try to understand the Greek words in the order in which they appear." Years later, I am still trying to follow this wise counsel. My natural tendency is not to "take it as it comes," but to skip around, to find the main clause with subject and verb first.

Most of the literature that survives from Greek and Roman times was meant to be understood with the ears, "as it comes," not perused silently with the eyes. Philip did not "see" the eunuch reading Isaiah, he "heard" him reading (Acts 8:30), because the eunuch, like most people of his day, was reading aloud.

Some bibliography: Josef Balogh, "Voces paginarum: Beiträge zur Geschichte des lauten Lesens und Schreibens," Philologus 82 (1927) 84-109 and 202-240; G.L. Hendrickson, "Ancient Reading," Classical Journal 25 (1929) 182-196; E.S. McCartney, "Notes on Reading and Praying Audibly," Classical Philology 43 (1948) 184-187; Bernard M.W. Knox, "Silent Reading in Antiquity," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 9 (1968) 421-435; Paul J. Achtemeier, "Omne Verbum Sonat: The New Testament and the Oral Environment of Late Antiquity," Journal of Biblical Literature 109 (1990) 3-27; Raymond J. Starr, "Reading Aloud: Lectores and Roman Reading," Classical Journal 86 (1991) 337-343.

"Take it as it comes" is advice that applies not only to reading Greek, but to life. As Horace said (Odes 3.8.27), "With joy seize the gifts of the current hour" (dona praesentis cape laetus horae).

John Earle, "An Antiquary," from Microcosmography or, a Piece of the World Discovered, in Essays and Characters:

He is a man strangely thrifty of time past, and an enemy indeed to his maw, whence he fetches out many things when they are now all rotten and stinking. He is one that hath that unnatural disease to be enamoured of old age and wrinkles, and loves all things (as Dutchmen do cheese) the better for being mouldy and worm-eaten. He is of our religion, because we say it is most antient; and yet a broken statue would almost make him an idolater. A great admirer he is of the rust of old monuments, and reads only those characters, where time hath eaten out the letters. He will go you forty miles to see a saint's well or a ruined abbey; and there be but a cross or stone foot-stool in the way, he'll be considering it so long, till he forget his journey. His estate consists much in shekels, and Roman coins; and he hath more pictures of Caesar, than James or Elizabeth. Beggars cozen him with musty things which they have raked from dunghills, and he preserves their rags for precious relicks. He loves no library, but where there are more spiders' volumes than authors, and looks with great admiration on the antique work of cobwebs. Printed books he contemns, as a novelty of this latter age, but a manuscript he pores on everlastingly, especially if the cover be all moth-eaten, and the dust make a parenthesis between every syllable. He would give all the books in his study (which are rarities all) for one of the old Roman binding, or six lines of Tully in his own hand. His chamber is hung commonly with strange beasts' skins, and is a kind of charnel-house of bones extraordinary; and his discourse upon them, if you will hear him, shall last longer. His very attire is that which is the eldest out of fashion, and you may pick a criticism out of his breeches. He never looks upon himself till he is grey-haired, and then he is pleased with his own antiquity. His grave does not fright him, for he has been used to sepulchers, and he likes death the better, because it gathers him to his fathers.

Related post: An Antiquary (by Samuel Butler).

Excerpts from J.D. Denniston's posthumous Greek Prose Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952; rpt. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979):

P. 5:

It is easy to regard Herodotus as an entertaining old fellow gifted with unlimited credulity and a knack for telling amusing, sometimes improper, stories in an Ionic brogue. But he was more than this. There is, at certain moments, a hushed intensity in his style which recalls Homer, Malory, or the English Bible: the story of Croesus and Solon, for example, or the story of Harpagus, who unwittingly ate the flesh of his murdered son at Astyages' table.

P. 6:

One is too apt to take for granted the reserve and restraint of the classics.

P. 8:

One of the reasons why writing Greek prose is such a fascinating occupation is that it offers a release from the comparatively strict bondage of English structure.

P. 16:

Exalted language wedded to pedestrian thought brings forth burlesque.

P. 61:

We must now consider the principles governing the architecture of the Greek sentence. To begin with, the units are normally small. The edifice, lofty though it may be, is built of bricks, not of huge blocks of Cyclopean masonry. To adopt another metaphor, a Greek period, though capable of sustaining itself, if need be, for twenty lines or so, demands frequent halts—like men who can walk all day if they are allowed to rest every now and then.

P. 72:

Sometimes, however, the orators employ antithesis as an end in itself, and language becomes the master, instead of the servant, of thought.

P. 124:

We do not know with any accuracy what ancient Greek sounded like; but even after allowing for this uncertainty, it is clear, I think, that the Greek ear differed from our own.

P. 132:

...the Laws, a work in which a certain πρεσβυτικὴ παιδιά not infrequently appears.

P. 136:

'Punning' is, it is true, an unfortunate description, because it connotes for us a humorous intention, while by the Greeks it was frequently regarded as a means of attaining truth, or as aesthetically valuable in itself.

Hilaire Belloc, October:

Look, how those steep woods on the mountain's face
Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold
Invades our very noon: the year's grown old,
Mornings are dark, and evenings come apace.
The vines below have lost their purple grace,
And in Forreze the white wrack backward rolled,
Hangs to the hills tempestuous, fold on fold,
And moaning gusts make desolate all the place.

Mine host the month, at thy good hostelry,
Tired limbs I'll stretch and steaming beast I'll tether;
Pile on great logs with Gascon hand and free,
And pour the Gascon stuff that laughs at weather;
Swell your tough lungs, north wind, no whit care we,
Singing old songs and drinking wine together.

Where is Forreze? Could it be a misprint for Corrèze (in Gascony)?

John Buchan, An Autumn Picture:

As here I sit this languid Autumn day,
Before me stretch great shores of sunset leaves,
Crowning the gaunt boughs ere the wind bereaves
The woods of these, the lingering leaves of May.

Crimson and golden in a death display
Bright flare the blossoms of the falling year.
Now gone the green of beech, and cold and sere
The yielding hazel. All the skies are gray.

High from the wild woods stretch the upland spaces,
Brown is the bent and cumbered with dead bloom;
No cheerful song of lark the moorland thrills;

But dim and distant gleam the mountain places,
And, hovering half in daylight and in gloom,
The clear October shadows fold the hills.

Jasper Francis Cropsey, Conversation at the Fence

Searching for illustrations of the Heliades turning into poplar trees, I found a couple of 16th century examples. The first is from a 1591 edition of Ovid:


The second is a fresco by Santi di Tito (1536-1603):


But the most serendipitous find was a painting by a contemporary artist, Paul Reid, born in 1975:


Reid confines himself mostly to mythological subjects. "There's plenty enough in classical myth," he said.

Laura Gascoigne has written enthusiastically and perceptively about Paul Reid and his work in:

• Excerpt from University of Dundee exhibition catalogue, and
  
• Article at Isis Gallery web site.

Duncan Macmillan, in "Can the age of gods speak to us today?," The Scotsman (June 6, 2008), a review of an exhibition of Paul Reid's paintings and drawings at Perth Museum and Art Gallery, is snarky: "stiffly posed figures," "old-fashioned pictures," "stagey," "not even postmodern."

To this laudator temporis acti, Paul Reid's paintings of mythological subjects are a refreshing oasis in the postmodern wasteland.

Related post: Anachronists.

Greek Anthology 9.706 (Antipater, tr. W.R. Paton):

I am a holy tree. Beware of injuring me as thou passest by, stranger, for I suffer pain if I am mutilated. Remember that my bark is still virginal, not like that of savage wild pear-trees. Who does not know what the race of poplars is like? If thou dost bark me, as I stand here by the road, thou shalt weep for it. Though I am but wood, the Sun cares for me.

Δένδρεον ἱερόν εἰμι· παρερχόμενός με φυλάσσευ
  πημαίνειν· ἀλγῶ, ξεῖνε, κολουομένη.
μέμνεο, παρθένιός μοι ἔπι φλόος, οὐχ ἃπερ ὠμαῖς
  ἀχράσιν· αἰγείρων τίς γένος οὐκ ἐδάη;
εἰ δὲ περιδρύψῃς με παρατραπίην περ ἐοῦσαν.
  δακρύσεις· μέλομαι καὶ ξύλον Ἠελίῳ.

A.S.F. Gow and D.L. Page on line 3:

When Phaethon in the chariot of the Sun, his father, was struck by lightning and fell into the Eridanus, his sisters, the Heliades or Phaethonti(a)des, weeping on its banks, were turned into poplar-trees.^1
1 Alders in Virg. Ecl. 6.63 (but poplars in Aen. 10.190).

Ovid (Metamorphoses 2.340-365, tr. Brookes More) tells the story of the transformation of the Heliades into poplars:

And all the daughters of the Sun went there
giving their tears, alas a useless gift;—
they wept and beat their breasts, and day and night
called, "Phaethon," who heard not any sound
of their complaint:—and there they lay foredone,
all scattered round the tomb. The silent moon
had four times joined her horns and filled her disk,
while they, according to an ancient rite,
made lamentation. Prone upon the ground,
the eldest, Phaethusa, would arise
from there, but found her feet were growing stiff;
and uttered moan. Lampetia wished to aid
her sister but was hindered by new roots;
a third when she would tear her hair, plucked forth
but leaves: another wailed to find her legs
were fastened in a tree; another moaned
to find her arms to branches had been changed.
And while they wondered, bark enclosed their thighs,
and covered their smooth bellies, and their breasts,
and shoulders and their hands, but left untouched
their lips that called upon their mother's name.
What can she do for them? Hither she runs
and thither runs, wherever frenzy leads.
She kisses them, alas, while yet she may!
But not content with this, she tried to hale
their bodies from the trees; and she would tear
the tender branches with her hands, but lo!
The blood oozed out as from a bleeding wound;
and as she wounded them they shrieked aloud,
"Spare me! O mother spare me; in the tree
my flesh is torn! farewell! farewell! farewell!"
And as they spoke the bark enclosed their lips.
Their tears flow forth, and from the new-formed boughs
amber distils and slowly hardens in the sun.

Related posts: Cactus Ed and Arboricide; Views from the Center of Highgate Wood; Artaxerxes and Arboricide; When the Last Tree Falls; The Hamadryads of George Lane; Sorbs and Medlars; So Foul a Deed; Like Another Erysichthon; The Fate of Old Trees; Scandalous Misuse of the Globe; The Groves Are Down; Massacre; Executioners; Anagyrasian Spirit; Butchers of Our Poor Trees; Cruel Axes; Odi et Amo; Kentucky Chainsaw Massacre; Hornbeams; Protection of Sacred Groves; Lex Luci Spoletina; Turullius and the Grove of Asclepius; Caesarian Section; Death of a Noble Pine; Two Yew Trees in Chilthorne, Somerset; The Fate of the Shrubbery at Weston; Willows; The Trees Are Down; Sad Ravages in the Woods; An Old Saying; Strokes of Havoc; Maltreatment of Trees; Arboricide; An Impious Lumberjack; Erysichthon in Ovid; Erysichthon in Callimachus; Vandalism.

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Act 2, Scene 8:

'Tis mirth that fills the veins with blood,
More than wine, or sleep, or food;
Let each man keep his heart at ease;
No man dies of that disease.
He that would his body keep
From diseases, must not weep;
But whoever laughs and sings,
Never he his body brings
Into fevers, gouts, or rheums,
Or lingeringly his lungs consumes;
Or meets with achës in the bone,
Or catarrhs or griping stone:
But contented lives for aye;
The more he laughs, the more he may.

Robert Frost, Gathering Leaves:

Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.

I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.

But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.

I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?

Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.

Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?

Jervis McEntee, Gathering Autumn Leaves

Edward Abbey, The Crooked Wood:

My father has been a logger, sawyer, and woodsman for most of his life. I myself have put in a fair share of time with ax, crosscut saw, chain saw, sledge, and wedge at the reduction of trees into fuel, post, and lumber. I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All men and women require shelter. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain. Knowing now what we have learned, unless the need were urgent, I could no more sink the blade of an ax into the tissues of a living tree than I could drive it into the flesh of a fellow human.

Such a sentiment might have been expected from Empedocles, who thought (fragment 117, tr. Matthew P.J. Dillon) that his soul had once occupied a bush (thámnos), if not a tree:

For I have already been born as a boy and a girl and a bush and a bird and a dumb fish leaping out of the sea.

ἤδη γάρ ποτ' ἐγὼ γενόμην κοῦρός τε κόρη τε θάμνος τ' οἰωνός τε καὶ ἔξαλος ἔλλοπος ἰχθύς.

Homer, Iliad 16.482-484 (tr. Richmond Lattimore), compared the death of a man (Sarpedon) with the fall of a tree:

He fell, as when an oak goes down or a white poplar,
or like a towering pine tree which in the mountains the carpenters
have hewn down with their whetted axes to make a ship-timber.

ἤριπε δ᾽ ὡς ὅτε τις δρῦς ἤριπεν ἢ ἀχερωῒς
ἠὲ πίτυς βλωθρή, τήν τ᾽ οὔρεσι τέκτονες ἄνδρες
ἐξέταμον πελέκεσσι νεήκεσι νήϊον εἶναι.

See also Edward Abbey, letter to the editor of the Arizona Daily Star (June 29, 1988):

The Pima County Transportation Department is doubling the width of Sweetwater Street, in the process destroying some of the biggest, oldest and loveliest palo verde trees in the city. (Our state tree, by the way.)

Related posts: Views from the Center of Highgate Wood; Artaxerxes and Arboricide; When the Last Tree Falls; The Hamadryads of George Lane; Sorbs and Medlars; So Foul a Deed; Like Another Erysichthon; The Fate of Old Trees; Scandalous Misuse of the Globe; The Groves Are Down; Massacre; Executioners; Anagyrasian Spirit; Butchers of Our Poor Trees; Cruel Axes; Odi et Amo; Kentucky Chainsaw Massacre; Hornbeams; Protection of Sacred Groves; Lex Luci Spoletina; Turullius and the Grove of Asclepius; Caesarian Section; Death of a Noble Pine; Two Yew Trees in Chilthorne, Somerset; The Fate of the Shrubbery at Weston; Willows; The Trees Are Down; Sad Ravages in the Woods; An Old Saying; Strokes of Havoc; Maltreatment of Trees; Arboricide; An Impious Lumberjack; Erysichthon in Ovid; Erysichthon in Callimachus; Vandalism.

Thanks to David Norton for another example of marcescence, in Robert Frost's poem A Boundless Moment (see last line):

He halted in the wind, and—what was that
Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?
He stood there bringing March against his thought,
And yet too ready to believe the most.

"Oh, that's the Paradise-in-bloom," I said;
And truly it was fair enough for flowers
Had we but in us to assume in March
Such white luxuriance of May for ours.

We stood a moment so in a strange world,
Myself as one his own pretense deceives;
And then I said the truth (and we moved on).
A young beech clinging to its last year's leaves.

---

Thanks to Roger Kuin for passing along the Oxford English Dictionary's etymological note on macabre:

< Middle French Macabré, of uncertain origin.

The Middle French word occurs first in Jean le Fèvre's Respit de la Mort (1376), where the author says 'Je fis de Macabré la dance': this is apparently a claim to have written a work called la danse Macabré. In form the word might be a popular alteration of Old French Macabé Maccabaeus (examples of Judas Macabré(s) occur at the end of the 12th cent.): see Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus for investigation of the range of forms and spellings attested in Middle French for both the present word and for words and expressions independently derived from the biblical proper name. As regards meaning, it may be connected with the late medieval liturgical dance or procession called chorea Machabaeorum in Latin (Besançon, 1453) and in Middle Dutch Makkabeusdans (15th cent.), which has been explained as arising from 2 Maccabees 7: Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch suggests also the association of the liturgical office of the dead with 2 Maccabees 12:43-6 in the Vulgate (A.V. 43-5) as a reason for a link between a cult of the Maccabees and the dance of the dead tradition in art and literature. In Middle French the metaphor aller a la dance De Macabré 'to die' is found in the 15th cent.

A less likely explanation is that Macabré was the name of the artist who painted the picture which suggested the first poem on the subject. There is no evidence to support the theory that the word derives from Arabic maqābir, plural of maqbara cemetery (Moroccan colloquial Arabic məqāber, plural of məqebra tomb), or from Syriac meqabberēy gravediggers. For summaries of further explanations which have been advanced see Trésor de la langue française at macabre, Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at Macchabeus.

Brandon Watson at Siris, in A Bonfire of Bibles, quotes an invitation from Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina, to participate in its Halloween Book Burning:

Come to our Halloween book burning. We are burning Satan's bibles like the NIV, RSV, NKJV, TLB, NASB, NEV, NRSV, ASV, NWT, Good News for Modern Man, The Evidence Bible, The Message Bible, The Green Bible, ect. These are perversions of God's Word the King James Bible.

We will also be burning Satan's music such as country, rap, rock, pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel, contempory Christian, jazz, soul, oldies but goldies, etc.

We will also be burning Satan's popular books written by heretics like Westcott & Hort, Bruce Metzger, Billy Graham, Rick Warren, Bill Hybels, John McArthur, James Dobson, Charles Swindoll, John Piper, Chuck Colson, Tony Evans, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swagart, Mark Driskol, Franklin Graham, Bill Bright, Tim Lahaye, Paula White, T.D. Jakes, Benny Hinn, Joyce Myers, Brian McLaren, Robert Schuller, Mother Teresa, The Pope, Rob Bell, Erwin McManus, Donald Miller, Shane Claiborne, Brennan Manning, William Young, etc.

We are not burning Bibles written in other languages that are based on the TR. We are not burning the Wycliffe, Tyndale, Geneva or other translations that are based on the TR.

We will be serving Bar-b-Que Chicken, fried chicken, and all the sides.

If you have any books or music to donate, please call us for pick-up. If you like you can drop them off at our church door anytime. Thanks.

This reminded me of Bertolt Brecht's poem Die Bücherverbrennung (The Burning of the Books, tr. John Willett):

When the Regime commanded that books with harmful knowledge
Should be publicly burned and on all sides
Oxen were forced to drag cartloads of books
To the bonfires, a banished
Writer, one of the best, scanning the list of the
Burned, was shocked to find that his
Books had been passed over. He rushed to his desk
On wings of wrath, and wrote a letter to those in power.
Burn me! he wrote with flying pen, burn me! Haven't my books
Always reported the truth? And here you are
Treating me like a liar! I command you:
Burn me!

Als das Regime befahl, Bücher mit schädlichem Wissen
Öffentlich zu verbrennen, und allenthalben
Ochsen gezwungen wurden, Karren mit Büchern
Zu den Scheiterhaufen zu ziehen, entdeckte
Ein verjagter Dichter, einer der besten, die Liste der
Verbrannten studierend, entsetzt, dass seine
Bücher vergessen waren. Er eilte zum Schreibtisch
Zornbeflügelt, und schrieb einen Brief an die Machthaber.
Verbrennt mich! schrieb er mit fliegender Feder, verbrennt mich!
Tut mir das nicht an! Lasst mich nicht übrig! Habe ich nicht
Immer die Wahrheit berichtet in meinen Büchern? Und jetzt
Werd ich von euch wie ein Lügner behandelt! Ich befehle euch,
Verbrennt mich!

The banished writer was Oskar Maria Graf, who published Verbrennt mich! in Arbeiterzeitung (May 12, 1933).

These words from Wendell Berry, "The Burden of the Gospels," The Way of Ignorance and Other Essays (2005), pp. 127-137 (at 127), are worth pondering:

Anybody half awake these days will be aware that there are many Christians who are exceedingly confident in their understanding of the Gospels, and who are exceedingly self-confident in their understanding of themselves in their faith. They appear to know precisely the purposes of God, and they appear to be perfectly assured that they are now doing, and in every circumstance will continue to do, precisely God’s will as it applies specifically to themselves. They are confident, moreover, that God hates people whose faith differs from their own, and they are happy to concur in that hatred.

Having been invited to speak to a convocation of Christian seminarians, I at first felt that I should say nothing until I confessed that I do not have any such confidence. And then I understood that this would have to be my subject. I would have to speak of the meaning, as I understand it, of my lack of confidence, which I think is not at all the same as a lack of faith.