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‘I Was But an Inverted Tree’: Notes toward the History of an Idea

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

A. B. Chambers
A. B. Chambers*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
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Extract

One brief section of Marvell's ‘Upon Appleton House’ describes the flooding of a nearby meadow. The inundation is clearly literal, but beneath the surface of these waters lurks a submerged meaning. An examination of it yields a fuller understanding of Marvell's retreat to the higher and safer ground of a wooded hill, for the flood is perceived to be the final scene in a symbohc enactment of England's civil wars. The meadow had seemed ‘A Camp of Battail newly fought’, a plain ‘quilted ore with Bodies slain’ (stanza LIII). When the waters appear ‘to conclude’ what—with fine irony—Marvell calls ‘these pleasant Acts’, and to make ‘the Meadow truly be (What it but seem'd before) a Sea’ (LX), then truly is the time for thoughtful men to meditate upon what they and their revolutionary world have become.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 8 , 1961 , pp. 291 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1961

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References

1 Poems and Letters, ed. Margoliouth (2d ed., Oxford, 1952).

2 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. W. R. Trask (N. Y., 1953), pp. 94-98.

3 Timaeus, 90A. Here and later, I use Cornford's translation (Plato's Cosmology, London, 1952). The Greek certainly implies all that Cornford says but is not so straightforward in doing so:

4 De exilio, v (6OOF); see also De Pythiae oraculis, XII (400B).

5 Quod deterius potiori insidiari solet, XXIII. Philo and Plato are both noticed by Adolph Jacoby, ‘Der Baum mit den Wurzeln nach oben und den Zweigen nach unten’, Zeit. für Missionskunde und Religionswissenschaft XLIII (1928), 78-85. Jacoby, who works almost exclusively with Kabbalah, Upanishad, and German folklore materials, is not primarily interested in human inverted trees. A convenient example of the kind of unmetaphorical tree which receives his attention—though, in fact, this one does not—is Dante, Purg., XXXII, 38-41 (amplified by XXXIII, 65-66).

6 In Platonis Rem Publicam commentarii, ed. Kroll (Leipzig, 1901), II, 334.

7 Hermetica, ed. and tr. Walter Scott (Oxford, 1924), 1, 297.

8 Clement, Protrepticos, x (PG, VIII. 216); Nemesius, De natura hominis, 1 (PG, XL. 533-535)-

9 Homilia, IX. 2 (PG, XXIX. 192). See note 17 for the Cratylus. Man's erect posture is, of course, a far more popular subject for discussion than the inverted tree. Almost every commentary which I have examined in search of trees introduces the topic in connection with ‘Let us make man in our image’. Ovid's Metamorphoses, 1. 84-86 is frequently cited as the source. Numerous examples are noted by C. A. Patrides, ‘Renaissance Ideas on Man's Upright Form’, JHI XIX (1958), 256-258.

10 Op. cit., ed. John Brown (Edinburgh, 1857), p. 81. Fifty years later still, Matthew Henry, commenting on Gen. ii. 4-7, referred to the soul as ‘that plant of renown’ (Com mentary on the Whole Bible [Scottdale, Pa., n.d.]). Two other examples are Juan Horozco y Covarruvias, Emblemas morales (Segovia, 1591), f. 29v and Ulysses Aldrovandus, Dendrologiae … libri duo (Bologna, 1668), p. 107. A doubtful example may be William Alabaster's Sonnets, ed. Story and Gardner (Oxford, 1959), p. 7.

11 De partibus animalibus, IV. 10 (686B). See also De incessu animalium, 705B, De anima, 416A, Parua naturalia, 467B and 468A. All of these are considered by W. K. Kraak, ‘Aristote est-il toujours resté fidèle à sa conception que la plante se tient la tête en bas?’ Mnemosyne, ser. 3, x (1942), 251-262.

12 Simplicius in Commentaria in Aristotelemgraeca, XI (Berlin, 1882), p. 112; Themistius, ibid., v, pars III (1899), p. 51; Sophonias, ibid., XXIII, pars I (1883), p. 59; Michael of Ephesus, ibid., XXII, pars II (1904), p. 141.

13 Ibid., xv (1897), p. 276.

14 The quoted phrase is from Aquinas, In libros Aristotelis De caelo et mundo expositio, n, ii, ed. Spiazzi (Turin, 1952), p. 151. See also Aquinas, In Aristotelis librum De anima commentarium, II, viii, ed. Pirotta (Turin, 1936), p. 115, and Averroes, Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, ed. Crawford (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 109.

15 Sylva Sylvarum, VI, 607 ﹛Works, ed. Spedding, Ellis, Heath, London, 1870, n, 530).

16 Boethius, De consolatio, III, prose xi; Leone Ebreo, Dialoghi d'amore, ed. Caramella (Bari, 1929), p. 87.

17 The quoted passage is from the Distinctiones monastice, cited by Pitra, J. B., Spicilegium solesmense (Paris, 1852), II, 354 Google Scholar; for Alain, see PL, ccx, 707.1 am unable to suggest a justification or source for this etymology. The standard linguistic treatment depended on Plato, Cratylus 399c, to derive from and See, e.g., Lactantius, Institutes, II, i, or Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, XI, i, 5. Still more common practice, of course, was to derive homo from humus, or Adam from the Hebrew ‘red earth'.

18 Reisch, Margarita philosophica (Freiburg, 1503), sig. E6r Sylvester's Bartas His Divine Weekes and Workes (London, 1608), p. 167; Lapide, Commentaria injosue … (Antwerp, 1681), s.v. Judges ix. 8, and Commentaria in epistolas canonicas (Antwerp, i68i),s.v. Jude 12.

19 The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings, tr. A. E. Waite (London, 1894), 1, 229.

20 The Glory of the World, in The Hermetic Museum Restored and Enlarged, tr. A. E. Waite (London, 1893), I, 217-218 (the original Latin is in the Musaeum hermeticum, Frankfurt, 1677, pp. 270-271). See also Mignault's commentary on Alciati's emblem 212 (Andreae Alciati Emblemata cum commentariis …, Padua, 1676, p. 888), and R. P. Iacobus Mesenius, Speculum imaginum veritatis occultae (Cologne, 1664), pp. 781-782.

21 De plantatione, rv.

22 De subtilitate, CXL, 2 (Frankfurt, 1576), 1, 474.

23 ‘It was as when a man stands on his head, resting it on the earth, and holds his feet aloft by thrusting them against something: in such a case right and left both of the man and of the spectators appear reversed to the other party’ (Timaeus 43 E).

24 Reproduced from the 1661 edition by the Facsimile Text Society (N. Y., 1931), p. 118.

25 Ibid., p. 243.

26 Epistulae morales, CXXIV.

27 Compendium in Timaeum, XXXVIII, in Divini Platoni Opera omnia (Frankfurt, 1602), p. 1036.

28 Gargantua, IV, 32 (Works, tr. Nock and Wilson, N. Y., 1931, pp. 693-694).

29 The View of Worldly Vanities (Works, ed. Cunliffe, II, Cambridge, 1910, p. 221.

30 The Prose Works, ed. Davis, I (Oxford, 1939), pp. 239-240.

31 Timaeus, 91E.

32 Sylva, bk. IV (York and London, 1812), II, 362: ‘That our tree, like man (whose inverted symbol he is,) being sown in corruption, rises in glory.’ While this article was in press, two other noteworthy examples turned up. The first, a conflation of Platonic and Aristotelian trees, is given by pseudo-Hugh of St. Victor, De bestiis, III. 58 (PL, CLXXVU. 119). The second, a topsy-turvy tree, is given by Innocent in, De miseria humane conditions, I.viii, ed. Maccarone (Lucani, c. 1955), p. 15.