The foam of the White Tide of blossom has been flung across the land.
It is already ebbing from the blackthorn hedges; the wild-cherry
herself is no longer so immaculately snow-white. It drifts on the wind
that has wooed the wild-apple. The plum is like a reef swept with surf.
Has not the laurustinus long been as cream-dappled as, later, the elder
will be in every hedgerow or green lane or cottage-garden? Not that
all the tides of blossom are like fallen snow: is not the apple-bloom
itself flushed with the hearts of roses? Think of the flowering almond,
that cloud of shell-heart pink: of the delicate bloom of the peach
that lives on the south wind: of the green-gold of the sallow catkins:
of the blazing yellow of the gorse: of the homely flowering-currant,
which even by mid-March had hung out her gay tangle of pinky blooms: of
the purple-red of the deadnettle in the ditch, and of the ruddy-hued
fallaways of the poplar overhead. I wonder if in most places the
flowering-currant is no more than an ordinary shrub. Here, where I
write, there are several small trees of it, taller than the general
growth of the lilac, tall as the laburnum, though at the time of their
unloosening the one had not revealed her delicate mauve and white,
while the other was still a miser of the countless gold he will now
soon be spreading upon the wind. The pink blooms, carmine-ended where
the five or six unfolded blossoms hang like fruit, droop in a roseal
shower, as innumerous as the golden drops of the laburnum-rain or the
suspended snowflakes of the white lilac themselves. The brown bees
have long discovered this flusht Eden; their drowsily sweet murmurous
drone is as continuous as though these slow-swaying pastures were of
linden-bloom and the hour the heart of summer.
Everywhere the largesse of Spring has followed her first penury in the
scanty snow of the blackthorn on bare boughs. What, by the way, is the
origin of the phrase ‘Blackthorn-sorrow’? I heard it again recently,
as though to say that summer was safely at hand so that now there
was no more fear of the blackthorn sorrow. However, as later I hope
to deal with the complex folklore of the Thorn, I need not let the
subject delay me now, except to say that in the North-West Highlands
I have heard the blackthorn called _Bròn Lochlannach_, the Northman’s
woe, literally Norse or Norland Sorrow or Mourning, ... a legendary
designation to which there is, I believe, a North-German analogue.
The idea here is that the blackthorn sprang from the blood of the
slain Norse invaders, the ‘pagans from Lochlin’ of mediæval Gaelic
story. In many parts of the kingdom it is looked on askance, and cut
sprays of it brought into a house are considered as a menace of ill,
as a death-token even; and it has been surmised that this is due to
some confused memory of a druidical or other early symbolism of the
commingling of winter and summer, in other words of life and death,
in the blackthorn’s blossom-strewn leafless branches. It may be so,
but does not seem to me likely, for by far the greater part of flower
and tree folklore has little to do with such subtle conceptions. Too
many of these are as vague and fantastical as that legend which says
that one must not taste of the root of the peony if a woodpecker be in
sight, or else the penalty may be blindness: a safe prognostication!
It is that other thorn which holds us now, that lovely torch of
blossom which has taken to itself the name of the lovers’-month. Not
that the hawthorn has unchallenged use of May as a name. In Devon the
white lilac is often called the May, and elsewhere too the ‘laylock’
is spoken of as May-bloom. The laurustinus, again, is thus named in
some parts of Somerset, and I have heard lilies-of-the-valley called
May-blossoms. In Scotland I have often heard the hawthorn-in-bloom
called Queen of the May and even Queen of the Meadow, though neither
name properly belongs to it, and the latter is the inalienable title
of the meadowsweet. But of all wild-blossom nothing surpasses in mass
that of the hawthorn. It, truly, is the foam of the groves and hollows.
From the south to the north it flows in a foaming tide. ‘Bride of the
world’ I have heard it called in a Gaelic song, and long ago an ancient
Celtic bard spoke of it lovingly ... ‘white is every green thorn, and
honeysweet.’
But it is of the Apple I want to write just now, she whose coronal of
blossom is surely loveliest of all fruitbearers: Bride of the Wind we
may say--‘Persephone herself’ as a modern Italian poet calls her.
In the Highlands to-day the Apple (_Ubhal_), or the Wild-Apple or
Crab-Apple (_Ubhal-fiadhaich_), is still common in woods and by
stream-sides. The bitter juice of the fruit is still used for sprains
and bruises, and to-day as of old the Gaelic poet has no more frequent
comparison of his sweetheart’s charm than to the delicate-hued,
sweet-smelling apple--_e.g._,
“_Iseabail òg
An òr-fhuilt bhuidhe--
Do ghruaidh mar ròs
’S do phòg mar ubhal,_”
where the poet praises his Isabel of the yellow tresses and rose-flusht
cheek and kissing-mouth sweet as an apple. Once the apple was far more
common in Scotland than it is now. An old authority, Solinus, says
that Moray and all the north-east abounded in the third century with
fruit-bearing apple-trees, and Buchanan even speaks of Inverness-shire
as being unsurpassed for the fruit. Visitors to Iona, to-day, who see
it a sandy treeless isle, may hardly credit that it was once famous for
its apple-orchards, and that too as late as the ninth century, till the
monks of Iona were slain and the orchards destroyed by the ravaging
vikings out of Norway. Beautiful Arran, too, was once lovelier still,
so lovely with apple-blossom and ruddy yellow fruit that it was called
Emhain Abhlach, the Avalon of the Gael.
To come in a waste piece of tangled woods, or on some lapwing-haunted
pasture-edge, or in the heathy wilderness, on the wild-apple in bloom,
is to know one of the most thrilling experiences of the Spring. As a
rule the wild-apple stands solitary. Seen thus, it has often something
of the remote element of dreamland. I came once, in the heart of
a beechwood, on a single tree of laburnum, in full glory of dense
unfallen gold. How did it come to be there, what wind had first brought
it on the tides of birth, what friendly nurture had led the seedling
to the sapling and the sapling to lovely youth? I wondered; but most I
wondered at the sudden beauty, at the unexpected revelation of vistas
other than those of the woodland, at the unloosening of the secret
gates of dreams and the imagination. Faerie stood open. Angus Og,
the Celtic Apollo Chrusokumos, the golden Balder of the Gael, stood
yonder just a moment ago, surely? Yonder, in the sunlit greenness,
Midir of the Dew it was who passed swiftly among the batwings of
disguising shadows? Was that Findabair going like a moonbeam, there
in the sea-caverns of the green leaf? Or was it Fand, whose laughter
the storm-thrush caught, long, long ago? Surely that was an echo of
old forgotten song in the gloom of the beeches? Could it be Fedelm of
the _Sìdhe_, ‘the young girl of the mouth of red berries, with voice
sweeter than the strings of a curved harp, and skin showing like the
snow of a single night’? And there, vanishing in the sunlit cataract of
gold itself, like a rainbow behind falling water, was not that Niamh
of the Golden Tresses? ... Niamh, whose beauty was so great that the
poets of the Other-world and those who died of love for her called her
Love Entangled, she whose beauty filled three hundred years in the
single hour that Fionn thought he was with her, in the days when the
ancient world had suddenly grown old, and the little bell of Patrick
the Christ-Bringer had tinkled sorrow and desolation and passing away
across the Irish hills. Up among the devious green pathways of the
travelling wood what lost king’s voice was that? ...
“Say, down those halls of Quiet
Doth he cry upon his Queen?
Or doth he sleep, contented
To dream of what has been?”
... what poet of long ago, living in a flame of passion still, a
wandering breath for ever, went by on that drowsy wind?--
“Across the world my sorrow flies,
A-hunger for the grey and wistful
Beauty of Feithfailge’s eyes.”
Something of that emotion as of ancestral memories, as of an awakened
past, of an unloosening of the imagination, may well come to any
imaginative nature encountering suddenly a wild-apple in blossom in
some solitary place. To people of a Celtic race or having a dominant
Celtic strain, in particular, perhaps; for to the Gael, the Cymru
and the Breton the Apple-tree is associated with his most sacred
traditional beliefs. Of old it was sacrosanct. It was the Celtic Tree
of Life, what Yggdrasil was to the ancient dreamers of Scandinavia.
He cannot think of it, but of the kingdom of eternal youth: of Emhain
Abhlach, of Y Breasil, of Avalon, of drowned Avillion. It waves over
the lost Edens. In Tir-na-n’Og its boughs, heavy with blossom, hang
above the foam of the last pale waters of doom. The tired islander, who
has put away hunger and weariness and dreams and the old secret desire
of the sword, lays himself down below its branches in Flatheanas,
and hears the wild harpers of Rinn in a drowsy hum like the hum of
wild bees. Grey-haired men and women on the shores of Connemara look
out across the dim wave and see the waving of its boughs. The Breton
peasant, standing at twilight on the rock-strewn beaches of Tregastèl,
will cross himself as he smells the fragrance of apple-blossom coming
from sunken isles across the long rolling billows, and remember,
perhaps, how of old in moonlit nights he has seen his keel drive
through the yielding topmost branches of the woods of Avalon. Many
poets have wandered in the secret valleys of Avillion, and have passed
under boughs heavy with foam of dreams, and have forgotten all things
and been uplifted in joy. In the glens of the Land of Heart’s Desire
the tired singers of the world have become silent under the windless
branches, snow-white in the moonshine, having found the Heart of Song.
The cross and death-coffer of apple-wood, the crown of wild-apple, the
apple-staff, the poet’s tablets of apple-wood, all the apple-myths and
apple-legends, how could one tell of them in a few words. They are in
old songs and old tales of all lands. Our Gaelic literature alone is
fragrant with apple-bloom, is lovely with the flickering shadow of the
apple-leaf, mysterious with symbol of fruit and the apple-wood that
holds life and death in one embrace. Many readers will at once recall
that lovely old tale of Bailê the Sweet-spoken and Ailinn Honeymouth,
whose love was so great that when in their beautiful youth they died
and were buried, one in a grave to the north and one in a grave to
the south, grave-wood grew into grave-wood, and green branches from
the north and the south became one overhanging branch, under which the
winds murmured of passion that winter-death could not kill nor the
hot noons of summer lull into forgetfulness. There is an older and
less-known _sgeul_ of how Ana, that most ancient goddess, the Mother,
after she had fashioned all the gods, and had made man out of rock
and sand and water and the breathing of her breath, made woman out of
the body of a wave of the sea and out of foam of apple-blossom and
out of the wandering wind. And there are many tales that, in this way
or a like way, have in them the mysterious wind of the wild-apple,
many poems on whose shadowy waters float the rose-flusht snow of the
scattered blossoms of dreams and desires. Was not the apple-blossom
first stained through the inappeasable longing of a poet-king, who,
yet living, had reached Y Breasil? Ulad saw there a garth of white
blossom, and of this he gathered, and warmed all night against his
breast, and at dawn breathed into them. When the sunbreak slid a rising
line along the dawn he saw that what had been white blooms, made warm
by his breath and flusht by the beating of his heart, was a woman.
And how at the end Fand became once more a drift of white blossom upon
the deerskin. For, when the longing and the sorrow of all sorrows
in the heart of Ulad wrapt his heart in flame, suddenly a wind-eddy
scattered the blossoms upon the deerskin, so that they wavered hither
and thither, but some were stained by the wandering fires of a rainbow
that drifted out of the rose-red thickets of the dawn.
How far back do these apple-legends go? I know not. But when Aphrodite
was born of the Idalian foam she held an apple in her hand, as Asia
or Eve looked long upon the fruit of life and death in Eden. In Hades
itself was it not the lure and the bitterness of Tantalus? All old
poems and tales, as I have said, have it, whether as legend, or dream,
or metaphor, or as a simile even, as in the seventh-century MS. of the
_Caïn Adamnain_, where Adanman’s old mother cries _mo maccansa suut
amail bis ubull fo’ tuind_ ... ‘my dear son yonder is like an apple on
a wave’: [_i.e._] little is his hold on the earth. And those of us who
have read, and remember, the _Prose Edda_, will recall how Iduna ‘keeps
in a box, Apples, which the gods, when they feel old age approaching,
have only to taste to become young again.’
Is that too a dream, or is there no Ragnarök for the gods to fear?
This at least we know, that as the winter-tide, the death-tide,
eternally recurs, so is the foam-white Dream continually rewoven, so
everlastingly does Spring come again in the green garment that is the
symbol of immortality and wearing the white coronals of blossom which
stand for the soul’s inalienable hope, for the spirit’s incalculable
joy. For Avalon is not a dream. It is with us still. It is here indeed,
though set within no frontiers, and unlimned in any chart. And even the
apples of Iduna grow within reach: the least of us may eat of the fruit
... till the coming of Ragnarök.