(AND ROSES OF AUTUMN)
... _Rosa Sempiterna
Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole
Odor di lode al Sol._...
Sitting here, in an old garden by the sea, it is difficult for me to
realise that the swallow has gone on her long flight to the South,
that last night I heard countless teal flying overhead, and before
dawn this morning the mysterious _honk-honk_ of the wild-geese. A
white calm prevails. A sea of faint blue and beaten silver, still
molten, still luminous as with yet unsubdued flame, lies motionless
beneath an immeasurable dome of a blue as faint, drowned in a universal
delicate haze of silver-grey and pearl. But already a change to pale
apple-green and mauve is imminent. A single tern flashes a lonely wing
along a grey-green line that may be where sky and sea meet, or may
be the illusion of the tide refluent from green depths. On the weedy
rocks I cannot see even a sleeping seamew: on the havened stretch of
yellow-white sand a dotterel runs to and fro in sudden aimless starts,
but as suddenly is still, is all but unseen with her breast against a
rock covered with the blue-bloom of mussels, and now is like a shadow
licked up by twilight.
Along the husht garden-ways beside me and behind me are roses, crimson
and yellow, sulphur-white and pale carnation, the blood-red damask,
and a trailing-rose, brought from France, that looks as though it were
live flame miraculously stilled. It is the hour of the rose. Summer
has gone, but the phantom-summer is here still. A yellow butterfly
hangs upon a great drooping Marechal Niel: two white butterflies
faintly flutter above a corner-group of honey-sweet roses of Provence.
A late hermit-bee, a few lingering wasps, and the sweet, reiterated,
insistent, late-autumn song of the redbreast. That is all. It is the
hour of the rose.
“_C’est l’heure de la rose
L’heure d’ambre et flamme,
Quand dans mon àme
Je sens une Blanche Rose Éclose._”
To-night the sea-wind will go moaning from the west into the dark
north: before dawn a steely frost will come over the far crests of
the hills. To-morrow the garden will be desolate: a garden of phantom
dreams. They have waited long, spell-bound! but the enchantment
is fallen; in a few hours all shall be a remembrance. What has so
marvellously bloomed thus late, so long escaped devastating wind and
far-drifting rains and the blight of the sea, will pass in a night.
Already, a long way off, I hear a singular, faint, humming sound,
like stifled bees. So ... the foam of storm is on the skerries of the
seaward isles. Already from the north, a faint but gathering chill
comes on the slanting wings of twilight. I rise with a sigh, thinking
of an old forgotten refrain in an old forgotten poem:
“_Ged tha thu ’n diugh ’a d’aibheis fhuar,
Bha thu nair ’a d’aros righ_--”
“(_Though thou art to-day a cold ruin
Thou wert once the dwelling of a king._)”
In the long history of the Rose, from the time when the Babylonians
carried sceptres ornamented now with this flower now with the apple
or lotus, to the coming of the Damask Rose into England in the time
of Henry VII.: from the straying into English gardens, out of the
Orient, of that lovely yellow cabbage-rose which first came into notice
shortly after Shakespeare’s death, or from Shakespeare’s own ‘Provençal
rose,’ which is no other than the loved and common cabbage-rose of our
gardens: from the combes of Devon to the straths of Sutherland, to that
little clustering rose which flowered in Surrey meads in the days of
Chaucer and has now wandered so far north that the Icelander can gather
it in his brief hyperborean summer: from Keats’ musk-rose--
“The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves--”
to that Green Rose which for more than half a century has puzzled the
rose-lover and been a theme of many speculations ... a thousand wise
and beautiful things have been said of this most loved of flowers and
not a few errors been perpetuated.
What has become of the Blue Roses to which in 1800 a French writer,
Guillemeau, alludes as growing wild near Turin? They are no less
phantoms than some of the rose-allusions which the poet has made
sacrosanct, that to the Rhetorician have become an accepted convention.
Again, we are told and retold that the cult of the rose is a modern
and not an ancient sentiment. Even, it is said, the allusions of the
Latin poets are not those of lovers and enthusiasts. It is the Rose of
Catullus, we are reminded, that blooms in the old Italic literature,
the flower of festival, of Venus and Bacchus, alluded to more for its
associations and its decorative value than for love borne to it or
enthusiasm lit by it as by a fragrant flame.
All this may be so, and yet I am not persuaded that the people of
ancient days did not love this flower of flowers as truly as, if
perhaps differently than, we do. It is true that the ancients do not
appear to have regarded nature, either in the abstract or in the
particular, in the way characteristic of peoples of modern times and
above all of our own time. But literary allusiveness does not reveal
the extent or the measure of the love of objects and places. It is
almost inconceivable, for example, that so beauty-loving a people as
the Greeks did not delight in the rose. The fact that only a mere
handful of roses may be culled from all the poetry of Hellas, here a
spray from Sappho, a wine-flusht cluster from Anacreon, a dew-wet bloom
from Theocritus, a few wild-roses from the Anthology, an epithet from
Homer, an image from Simonides or Pindar, a metaphor in some golden
mouth, this paucity--so singular compared with the Rose of Poetry
in our English speech, from Chaucer’s ‘Rose of Rhone’ to Mr. Yeats’s
‘Rose on the Rood of Time,’ loved and sung through a thousand years.
Such paucity does not necessarily mean that only a few poets casually
alluded to this supreme flower, and that it was unnoticed or unloved of
the many. Doubtless rose-chaplets were woven for lovers, and children
made coronals, and at mourning ceremonies and marriage festivals these
flowers were strewn. The very fact that Sappho called the rose the
queen of flowers showed that it was distinguished from and admired
among even the violets, pre-eminently the flowers of Athens. That she
likened a young maiden to a rose is as indicative as when an Arab poet
likens his love to a delicate green palm, or as when a northern poet
speaks of her as a pine-tree swaying in the wind or a wave dancing on
the sea.
Then, again, the Rose would not have been consecrated to Venus, as
an emblem of beauty: to Eros, as an emblem of love: to Aurora, as an
emblem of Youth: and to Harpocrates, as an emblem of silence: if this
symbolic usage were not such as would seem fit and natural. That roses,
too, were in general demand is evident alone from their far-famed
culture and the great trade in them at Paestum, the Lucanian town
colonised by the Greek Sybarites five hundred years B.C. All mediæval
and later literature is full of the beauty and fragrance of the rose,
but were it not so, one could infer that the flower was held in high
esteem from the fact that it has for ages been the wont of the Popes
to have a golden rose exquisitely finished, and, when consecrated, to
present it to some Catholic monarch as a token of special regard. Thus
it seems to me that were there not a single allusion to the rose by
any great poet from Homer to Sappho, from Anacreon to Theocritus, we
might yet discern the love of the ancient Greeks for this flower from,
let us say, a single surviving phrase such as the anonymous lovely
epitaphial prayer-poem in the Anthology:--‘May many flowers grow on
this newly-built tomb; not the dried-up Bramble, or the red flower
loved by goats; but Violets and Marjoram, and the Narcissus growing in
water; and around thee may all Roses grow.’
In Persia and the East, from Hindustân to Palestine, from remotest Asia
to Abyssinia and Barbary, the Rose has ever been loved and honoured.
Sâdi of the Rose-garden and many another has sung of it with ecstasy.
The Hindû god Indra, even Buddha himself, suffered for robbing a
paradisaical garden of a rose. How suggestive it is, that the Eve of
the Aztec garden of Eden sinned, not for plucking an apple but a rose:
it was a fatal rose, too, that the Eve of primitive Mexican legend
gathered to her undoing and that of all her descendants.
What innumerable legends centre round this flower. In every country and
in either hemisphere, north of the Equator, the poet and the myth-maker
and the legend-weaver have occupied their imaginations to enhance its
beauty, to deepen its significance.
Long ago Bion told how the rose sprang from the blood of the wounded
Adonis, the supreme type of beauty, and of the tears of Venus. An older
Hellenic legend declares that the rose was originally white, till Eros,
dancing among the gods, upset a goblet of nectar upon Venus’s flower,
which thereupon became red. Christian legend, on the other hand, would
have it that the red rose sprang from the brands which had been lighted
at Bethlehem to burn to death a Christian virgin-martyr. Remote from
Syria as from Greece, the Scandinavian legend arose that this flower
was white till Baldur, the god of Youth and Love, bled at the coming of
Christ--akin to which is a Gaelic legend, that the flower was white
till a drop of Christ’s blood fell from the Cross ... a variant of
which is that the robin, who plucked at the thorns in Christ’s forehead
till they stained its breast red, leaned exhausted against a wild
white-rose on Calvary, which ever after was red as blood. I do not know
the origin of the legend save that it is Teutonic in its present colour
and shape, of how the Crown of Thorns was woven of the Briar-Rose,
and how the drops that fell from the thorns became blood-hued blooms.
Teutonic also, I think, is the legend that Judas made a ladder of the
rose-briar with which to reach the closed doors of heaven: hence why it
is that the name Judas-Stairs is given to the Briar in some parts of
Germany to this day, and why the scarlet hips are called _Judasbeeren_.
Most beautiful of surviving rose-customs is that akin to what is still
done in some remote parts of Europe, the placing of an apple into the
hand of a dead child, so that the little one may have something to
play with in Paradise. I know of a dead Irish girl into whose right
hand was placed a white rose, and of a drowned fisherman in whose hand
was placed a red rose, symbols of spiritual rebirth and of deathless
youth. Against this must be set the strange and widespread aversion
to throwing a rose into a grave, or even letting one fall or be
lowered there. (‘It is throwing red life away’ it was explained to me
once,--with the grim addition, ‘and Death will at once be hungry for
more of the rose-thrower.’)
Again, I recall an old legend of the last rose of summer, long anterior
to the familiar song so named: a legend of how at Samhain (Hallowmass)
when of old was held the festival of summer ended and of winter
begun, a young Druid brought a rose to the sunward Stones and, after
consecration and invocation, threw it into the sea.
To-day, sitting in my old garden amid many roses, and looking westward
across a waveless, a moveless sea, now of faint apple-green and
fainter mauve lost in a vast luminous space of milky, violet-shadowed
translucency, I dream again that old dream, and wonder what its portent
then, what its ancient significance, of what the symbol now, the
eternal and unchanging symbol. For nothing is more strange than the
life of natural symbols. We may discern in them a new illusion, a new
meaning: the thought we slip into them may be shaped to a new desire
and coloured with some new fantasy of dreams or of the unspoken and
nameless longing in the heart: but the symbol has seen a multitude of
desires come and go like shadows, has been troubled with many longings
and baffled wings of the veiled passions of the soul, and has known
dreams, many dreams, dreams as the uncounted sand, the myriad wave, the
illimitable host of cloud, rain that none hath numbered. The Symbol
of the Lily has been the chalice of the world’s tears; the symbol of
the Rose, the passion of uplifted hearts and of hearts on fire; in the
symbol of the Cross has dwelled, like fragrance in a flower, the human
Soul. The salt, mutable, and yet unchanging sea has been the phantom in
which empires have seen Time like a shadow, the mirage by which kings
have wept and nations been amorous in a great pride. The Wind, that no
man has seen, on whose rushing mane no hand has been laid, and in whose
mouth has been set no bridle since the world swung out of chaos on
chariots of flame, ... has not that solitary and dread creature of the
deeps been fashioned in our minds to an image of the Everlasting, and
in our hearts been shaped to the semblance of a Spirit?
A rose, laid on a stone-altar in the sunfire, and thrown into the
sea, with strange hymns, with supplication ... what a symbol this of
the desires that do not die with nations, the longings that outlive
peoples, the grass of prayer that Time has trampled upon and left and
forever leaves green and virginal?
To give that, that lovely fragrant flame of the old material earth, to
the altars of the bowed spirit: to clothe it in the fire of heaven: to
commit it to the unassuaged thirst of the everlasting graves of the
sea.--Surely, here, an image of that Rosa Mundi which has been set
upon the forehead of the world since time was, that Rose of Beauty,
that Rose of Time, that Rose of the world which the passion of the
soul has created as a prayer to the Inscrutable: the Rose of the Soul,
of you, of me, of all that have been, of all that are, of all unborn,
that we lay upon our places of prayer, and offer to the Secret Fires,
and commit to desolation, and sorrow, and the salt and avid hunger of
Death? What came of that mystical wedding, of the world we know and the
world we do not know, by that rose of the spirit, committed thus in so
great a hope, so great a faith? The Druid is not here to tell. Faith
after Faith has withered like a leaf. But still we stand by ancestral
altars, still offer the Rose of our Desire to the veiled Mystery,
still commit this our symbol to the fathomless, the everlasting, the
unanswering Deep.