SEXUAL SYMBOLISM IN LITERATURE
I
The repression of the libido includes the damming and clogging up
of all the emotional concomitants that go with sexual attraction
and make up the feeling called love. Whenever then sex or libido is
referred to in psychoanalysis the word has the widest meaning. The man
who loves a woman with the greatest affection and passion, without
gratifying these, suffers a repression of the libido, as well as the
man who satisfies certain proclivities without feeling any tenderness
or love for the woman. In the emotion felt towards the other sex
called love, in which admiration, respect, self-sacrifice, tenderness
and other finer feelings play a great part, there is consciously or
unconsciously, however, the physical attraction. If this is totally
absent the emotion cannot be called "love." What differentiates our
feelings towards one of the opposite sex from those felt for one of the
same sex (assuming there are no homosexual leanings) is the presence of
this sexual interest. Love then must satisfy a man physically as well
as psychically. It is a concentration of the libido upon a person of
the opposite sex, accompanied by tender feelings.
Hence when we read the most chaste love poem, we see what is the
underlying motive in the poet's unconscious. He may write with utter
devotion to the loved one and express a wish to die for her, and
though he says nothing about physical attraction, we all know that it
is there in his unconscious. It is taken for granted that a man who
writes a real love poem to a girl wants to enjoy her love. And when
the poet complains because he is rejected or deceived, or of something
interfering with the course of his love, we are aware also that his
unconscious is grieved because his union is impeded or entirely
precluded. The suffering is greater the more he loves, for his finer
instincts, as well as his passion, are prevented from being fulfilled.
Let us take at random a few innocent poems and test the theory. There
is Ben Jonson's well known toast, "Drink to me only with thine eyes."
He tells how he sent Celia a rose wreath, that she breathed on it and
sent it back to him.
"Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee."
Odour is an important feature, it is well known, in sexual attraction.
In this poem the poet, after having received the returned rose breathed
upon by Celia, smells her perfume, which now submerges the natural
fragrance of the rose. In other words the poet's unconscious says that
he wishes to possess Celia physically. He is talking symbolically in
the poem.
There is the song in Tennyson's "The Miller's Daughter," beginning "It
is the miller's daughter." The poet says naïvely enough that he would
like to be the jewel in her ear in order to touch her neck, the girdle
about her waist ("I'd clasp it round so close and tight"), and the
necklace upon her balmy bosom to fall and rise; "I would lie so light,
so light." The unconscious sexual feelings here are only too apparent.
The symbols of the earring, girdle and necklace are unmistakable.
The poet is saying in a symbolical manner that he would possess the
miller's daughter.
Moreover one may see the sex motive in poems where it does not seem to
appear. If certain facts in an author's life are known, we may discern
the unconscious love sentiments in poems where no mention seems to be
made of them. Let me illustrate with a fine poem by Longfellow, the
familiar "The Bridge." Take the lines
"How often, O how often,
I had wished that the ebbing tide
Would bear me away in its bosom
O'er the ocean wild and wide!
"For my heart was hot and restless,
And my life was full of care,
And the burden laid upon me
Seemed greater than I could bear.
"But now it has fallen from me, etc."
To the student of Longfellow, this poem speaks of the time he found it
difficult to win the love of his second wife, Frances Appleton, love
for whom he confessed in his novel _Hyperion_, where he drew her and
himself. This story was published before she had as yet reciprocated
his love. He married her July 13, 1843. He finished the poem October
9, 1845. At the end of this year he wrote in his diary that now he
had love fulfilled and his soul was enriched with affection. He is
therefore thinking of the time when he had no love and longed for it,
and now that he has it, he is thinking of the love troubles of others.
In the olden days he wanted to be carried away by the river Charles,
for his long courtship, seemingly hopeless, made his heart hot and
restless and his life full of care. So we see that in this poem the
poet was thinking of something definite, relating to love (and hence
also sex), though there is no mention of either in the poem.
It is well known that all love complaints are the cries of the Jack who
cannot get his Jill; or who has lost the possibility of love happiness
by desertion, deception or death.
Read that fine and pathetic Scotch ballad, beginning "O waly, waly
up the bank." The girl (or woman) has been forsaken by her lover
and expects to become a mother. She longs for death. She complains
about the cruelty of love grown cold; she recalls the happy days. Her
unconscious sentiment is that her lover will never give her spiritual
happiness or satisfy her craving. Her life is empty. The poem was based
on an actual occurrence. It contains all the despair of love that was
once given and then withdrawn.
"O wherefore should I busk my head,
Or wherefore should I kame my hair?
"When we came in by Glasgow town
We were a comely sight to see;
My love was clad in the black velvet
And I myself in cramasie."
She does not want to dress herself gorgeously now as she has no lover.
Among other great love wails by a woman are the old Saxon elegy "A
Woman's Complaint" and the second Idyl of Theocritus.
All the pain of frustrated love is due to the repressing of the tender
as well as of the physical emotions, to the damming up of the libido,
which is love in its broadest sense.
Sometimes the poets tell us almost plainly their real loss, or suggest
it in such a manner that we feel the thought has become conscious
in the poem. Read in Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" the fifteen lines
beginning, "Is it well to wish thee happy," and one can see that the
victim is suffering because Amy is in another's embrace rather than in
that of the singer's. He thinks with maddening thoughts of the clown
she married.
"He will hold thee, when his passion shall have spent its novel forces,
Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse."
He calls sarcastically upon Amy to kiss her husband and take his hand.
"He will answer to the purpose." The singer clearly shows his pain
because he has been cheated out of physical pleasure.
When we come to the decadent poets, the loss is sung plainly. One of
the most beautiful poems of this kind is Dowson's _Cynara_. The poem
is frankly sexual. The poet, who was rejected by a restaurant keeper's
daughter, tries to console himself with another woman for his loss. The
words "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion" mean he
loves her in others. He tries to satisfy himself partly by thinking he
is with her while he is with another. It is a poem showing how a sexual
repression seeks an outlet with some one who did not arouse it and how
the poet forces himself to imagine that he is with the one who created
it. The poem makes this clear, that a love poem is always a complaint
that the libido is being dammed.
It is therefore true to say that even in the tenderest and sweetest
love lyrics, like those of Burns and Shelley for instance, one sees the
play of unconscious sexual forces. This fact does not make the poem any
the less moral or the poet any the less pure.
II
Probably the greatest objection to the application of psychoanalytic
methods to literature will be made to the transference of the sexual
interpretation of symbols from the realm of dreams to that of art. But
if the interpretation is correct in one sphere it is also true in the
other. Civilisation has made it necessary to refer in actual speech to
sexual matters in hidden ways, by symbolic representations; our faculty
of wit, due to the exercise of the censorship, also uses various
devices of symbolisation. Dreams and literature both make use of the
same symbols.
When Freud attributed sexual significance to certain typical dreams
like those of riding, flying, swimming, climbing, and to certain
objects, like rooms, boxes, snakes, trees, burglars, etc., he made
no artificial interpretations. He merely pointed out the natural and
concrete language of the unconscious.
Now the same interpretation must inevitably follow in literature, much
as authors and readers may object. If flying in dreams is symbolic of
sex, then an author who is occupied considerably with wishes to be a
bird and fly or with descriptions of birds flying--I do not mean an
isolated instance--is like the man who is always dreaming he is flying;
he is unconsciously expressing a symbolical wish. Many poems written to
birds in literature show unconscious sexual manifestations. Shelley's
"To A Skylark," Keats's "To A Nightingale" and Poe's "Raven" are poems
where the authors sang of repressed love; there is unconscious sex
symbolism in them.
Wordsworth, one of the poets who rarely mentioned sex, has in his "To
a Skylark" unconsciously given us a poem of sexual significance. The
motive of the poem is the intense longing to fly. But beneath the wish
to fly in the poem, as in the imaginary flying in the dream, a sexual
meaning is concealed. The poet is sad when he writes the poem "I have
walked through wildernesses dreary, and to-day my heart is weary." He
also thinks of the fact that the bird is satisfied in love. "Thou hast
a nest for thy love and thy rest."
Very few of the poems addressed to birds harp on the wish to fly to the
extent that Wordsworth does in this poem. Nearly half of the poem is
taken up with this wish, and for this reason the sexual interpretation
is unmistakable.
The first two stanzas are as follows:
"Up with me! up with me into the clouds!
For thy song, Lark, is strong;
Up with me, up with me into the clouds!
Singing, singing,
With clouds and sky about thee ringing,
Lift me, guide me till I find
That spot which seems so to thy mind!
"I have walked through wildernesses dreary
And to-day my heart is weary;
Had I now the wings of a Fairy,
Up to thee would I fly.
There is madness about thee, and joy divine,
In that song of thine;
Lift me, guide me high and high
To thy banqueting place in the sky."
The wish in literature corresponds to the fulfilment in the dream,
and the psychology of the poet who wishes to fly is like that of the
dreamer who does fly. Unconscious sex symbolism is voiced in poems
where the poet expresses a desire to be a bird, or fly like one, such
as those by Bernard de Ventadorn, the great Troubadour of the twelfth
century, "The Cuckoo," by Michael Bruce, the Scotch poet who died young
from consumption, and others.
I quote from memory the chorus of a poem sung in my school days:
"Oh, had I wings to fly like you
Then would I seek my love so true,
And never more we'd parted be,
But live and love eternally."
The author here tells us most plainly why he or she wants to fly like a
bird--for the satisfaction of love. He says practically that merely by
flying like the bird, he would have the embrace of the loved one. The
opening lines of the chorus show that it is no far-fetched idea, that
of seeing sex or love symbolism in birds flying or singing.
We recall Burns's famous poem to the bonny bird that sings happily
and reminds him of the time when his love was true. "Thou'll break
my heart, thou bonny bird," he sings in despair. A false lover stole
the rose and left the thorn with him. The entire poem is full of sex
symbolism. That he too would like to have love, is what he says when he
speaks of the bird singing.
"The more one is occupied with the solution of dreams," says Freud,
"the more willingly one must become to acknowledge that the majority
of the dreams of adults treat of sexual material and give expression
to erotic wishes.... No other impulse has had to undergo as much
suppression from the time of childhood as the sex impulses in its
numerous components; from no other impulse has survived so many and
such intense unconscious wishes, which now act in the sleeping state
in such a manner as to produce dreams."
This, to my mind, can not be contested, and these wishes appear
largely in the form of symbols. In early times sex was given great
significance, and we know that in early myths and literature many
events and things were sex symbols. When we dream symbolically, we go
back to a method of picturing events that in early history had value,
but of which the significance has been forgotten. The law of symbol
formation is in dreams not an arbitrary one; it is based on forms of
speech in the past and on witty conceptions of to-day. Folklore and
wit are full of sexual symbols corresponding to those in dreams. All
doubt has been removed of sexual symbolism in dreams by an experiment
made by means of hypnotism, where a patient was told to dream some
sexual situation. Instead of doing so directly she dreamed a situation
in symbolic form corresponding to that in ordinary dream life. Rank
and Sachs in their _The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental
Sciences_ have given us an excellent study of the nature of symbol
formation. Freud has furnished us a list of objects and actions that
are of sexual significance. W. Stekel has made an exhaustive study of
the subject in his _Sprache des Traumes_ (1911). Freud recognises R. A.
Scherner as the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams in his book _Das
Leben des Traumes_ (1896), but he admits that Artemidorus in the second
century A.D. also interpreted dreams symbolically.
Freud ventures the opinion that dreams about complicated machinery
and landscapes and trees have a definite sexual significance. If this
is so, and he gives his reason therefor, it would mean that all those
authors who have a partiality for describing landscapes and machinery
in their works continually, are unconsciously revealing a personal
trait they never intended to convey. Ruskin for example is rich in
landscapes in his works. Is there any connection between his propensity
for such description and his attachment to his mamma, his youthful
love disappointment, his unsuccessful marriage and his sad love for
Rose La Touche? Is it not likely that many of the painters who made a
specialty of landscape painting were driven to this special choice by
an unconscious cause that the world has not fathomed, a sexual one?
No doubt there is a connection between paintings of female nudes and
the sex life of the author in his unconscious; why should not the
same be true of the landscape painters and all the writers who abound
in landscape descriptions? Is it not possible that Turgenev, who has
given us so many landscapes, was unconsciously thinking of his first
love disappointment and also of his love for Madame Viardot? We find
landscapes in every literary work that deals with the country, but
Freud's theory can have applicability only to the author who has a
mania for them.
Why does Kipling have a keen interest in bringing descriptions of
machinery into his works? If dreams of machinery relate to sex, then we
must follow the logical conclusion that an undue interest in machinery
must evince a sexual meaning. We are also aware that a large number of
popular sexual terms are taken from instruments in the machine-shop.
I do not maintain that objects do not have a literal significance, free
from any symbolic intent.
There can be no doubt about the significance of the phallic worship of
old times, in which the serpent was symbolic. Dreams where the serpent
figures and folk tales telling of dragons who are symbolic of the
lustful side of man both have a sexually symbolic meaning.
Again, if Freud is right in claiming that the dream of a woman throwing
herself in the water is a parturition dream, then one would have to
conclude that a woman occupied constantly with stories about herself
swimming was probably absorbed with thoughts about child-bearing. That
this significance for such a dream is not absurd may be seen from the
following statement by Freud: "In dreams, as in mythology, the delivery
of a child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion
as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of
Adonis, Osiris, Moses and Bacchus are well known illustrations of this."
III
Freud was not the first one to interpret dreams symbolically. There
have been excellent symbolical interpretations in literature. I will
mention one in Chaucer and another in Ovid.
In Chaucer's _Troilus and Criseyde_, one of the greatest love poems
ever written and probably a greater work of art than any of the
_Canterbury Tales_, there is a true symbolic interpretation of an
anxiety dream. Troilus was pining for his love, Criseyde, who had been
led back by Diomede to the Greeks in exchange for Antenor. Troilus
dreamt that he saw a boar asleep in the sun and that Criseyde was
embracing and kissing it. His suspicions as to her faithfulness were
confirmed by the interpretation given by his sister Cassandra, who
told him that Criseyde now loved Diomede; Diomede was descended from
Meleager the slayer of the boar, which, according to the myth, once
ravaged among the Greeks.
Chaucer throughout his works attacks the theory that dreams may be
interpreted, but he gives us a true symbolical interpretation in
this poem. He also here recorded unconsciously some of his own past
griefs in love. Freud taught that anxiety dreams were due to the
repression of the libido being converted into fear. We also know from
anthropology that the boar was a sexual symbol. In the poem Diomede
appears to Troilus as a boar, also, because Troilus had heard the story
of Meleager and the boar and of the ancestry of Diomede. Even though
he had forgotten the tale, if he did, since he was reminded of it by
his sister, it was still present in his unconscious. His anxiety was
due to the fear that Diomede had really won Criseyde. The fear that
he experienced at day, that his sweetheart would be lost to him--the
anxiety that his libido would be repressed, become an anxiety dream in
which the boar is the symbol of his rival.
In the fifth elegy of the third book of Ovid's _Amores_, the author
reports a symbolical dream of the loss of his love. It is correctly
interpreted, in a Freudian manner, by an interpreter of dreams. The
poet dreamed that he took shelter from the heat in a grove under a
tree. He saw a very white cow standing before him, and her mate, a
horned bull, near her chewing his cud. A crow pecked at the breast of
the cow and took away the white hair. The cow left the spot; black
envy was in her breast as she went over to some other bulls. The
interpreter told Ovid that the heat which the poet was seeking to avoid
was love, that the cow was his white-complexioned mistress and that he
was the bull. The crow was a procuress who would tempt his mistress
to desert him. The sexual symbolic interpretation shows that Freud's
most unpopular idea was known among the Romans. It happened that Ovid's
mistress did prove unfaithful to him and he complained of the fact.
His dream arose, however, from his day fears, and he had previously
written a poem in the _Amores_ against a procuress.
Ovid is one of the greatest love poets in all literature, and his
Epistle of Sappho to Phaon in his _Heroides_ translated by Pope records
some of his own love griefs, though these are recorded in his _Amores_
directly.
The symbolism that psychoanalysis deals with is that of the
unconscious. Symbols may have the most significance when the dreamer or
writer least suspects it. And it is only by the study of folk-lore, wit
and the neuroses that one gets to see their meaning.
No doubt the critic who examines literary masterpieces to find sexual
symbols will not be a popular one; but that does not alter the fact
that the sexual meaning is there. The field will no doubt be taken up
in the future by some critic who will not fear to brave public wrath.
It will be seen that many writers who were deemed respectable and
pure because they never dealt with sexual problems are full of sex
symbolism. They consciously strove to conceal their sex interest, but
their unconscious use of sex symbolism shows that they were not as
indifferent to the problems as they would lead us to imagine.
Browning rarely wrote directly of sex. He is admired justly by all
lovers of literature; and women are among his most enthusiastic lovers.
It is true one of his poems, the "Statue and the Bust," has puzzled
his women admirers. Adultery seems to be defended here. Now there are
some innocent poems of the poet rich in sex symbolism. It is well known
that dreams of riding on horse-back, rocking, or any form of rhythmic
motion through which the dreamer goes, are sexually symbolical. In
older literature and in colloquial language the word to ride is
used in a sexual sense. Browning is especially addicted to writing
poems describing the pleasure of riding, or poems in rhythmic verse
which suggest the riding process. It has never dawned on critics to
suggest that there may be a cause for this that is to be found in the
unconscious of the author.
Take his "The Last Ride Together." The speaker who is rejected asks his
love to give him the pleasure of a last ride with her. Not being able
to get the pleasures of love from her, he seeks them in another form, a
symbolic one. He will now imagine that he receives them; he is prompted
to his strange request by unconscious causes. He wants a substitute
for the actuality. "We ride and I see her bosom heave," he says. Every
stanza says something about the riding. "I ride," "We ride," "I and
she ride" are repeated throughout the poem. He addresses the poet, the
sculptor and the musician and tells them that he is riding instead of
creating art; by this he means that they express their longing to love
in art; he does so by riding. "Riding's a joy." He also lies to himself
and pretends he is not angry at his mistress and that perhaps it was
best he didn't win her love; he pretends he has no regrets for the past
and that he is satisfied with the ride instead of her love. The poem is
an excellent example of the unconscious use of symbolism in literature.
The meaning is clear.
Two other poems of Browning where sexual symbolism may be present
though there is nothing of love in the poems are the famous "How They
Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent" and "Through the Metidja to
Abd-El-Kadr." The sexual significance can be seen in the rhythmic
swing, for both poems suggest the motion of the horse rider. The effect
in the latter poem is produced by the use of the words "I ride" twice
in the first, third and eighth lines of each of the five stanzas,
thirty times, and by having each of the forty lines end with "ride" or
a rhyme to "ride."
"As I ride, as I ride,
With a full heart for my guide,
So its tide rocks my side, as I ride,
As I ride, as I ride,
That, as I were double-eyed,
He, in whom our tribes confide,
Is descried, ways untried
As I ride, as I ride."
IV
I do not believe that nature worship idea in literature has been yet
fully analysed. Critics have refused to see the exact meaning of the
expression "love of nature." The poets themselves have told us that
they saw in nature lessons of moral improvement and inspirations for
humanitarianism. Granting that this is so, the fact still remains that
there is much left unsaid by the poets. Some of them recognised the
real significance of their love for nature when they told us how they
were inspired by her to love, or were reminded of their lack of love.
Wordsworth, who is one of the greatest nature poets the world has ever
had, appears singularly free from the voicing of the love passion in
his work. Except for the Lucy poems and a few others, he has given us
little love poetry. Hazlitt complained that he found no marriages or
giving in marriage in Wordsworth's poetry. But nevertheless the sex
element is there though never directly expressed. There is nothing,
it is well known, calculated to make a man long for the love of
woman or to miss her more than when he is in the presence of nature.
Anthropology teaches us the close connection between love and nature.
When Wordsworth sang of the beauties of nature he was voicing a cry
for satisfied love which he did not have up to his thirtieth year, when
he married. He was also pining for love of the girl he met in France
in his twenty-third year, the mother of his illegitimate daughter. The
poet was using symbols, such as trees and daisies, whose glory he sang
when he meant he wished he had love. Some things can be enjoyed alone,
though not altogether, such as food, plays, pictures, reading, music,
lectures, etc. It is the great distinction of nature that she inspires
human love and also provokes sadness.
Most of the old bucolic poets frankly associated their Corydons and
Amaryllises with enjoyment of nature. Wordsworth, who had much of the
English Puritanism, was reserved. Any reader who takes up the nature
poetry of Wordsworth lays it down after a while with the feeling that
the poet is not telling the whole truth. It does not follow that
Wordsworth was deliberately concealing it, for he may have been unaware
of what was in his unconscious. After he married and had love he
continued for a while to give us great nature poetry, for the most part
a reflection of his early mood. For it must not be assumed that because
a man has love he therefore loses his love for nature. Wordsworth's
greatest nature poem, "Lines on Tintern Abbey," was written before his
marriage; the nature poetry of the last thirty or forty years of his
life was rather poor.
The secret of Wordsworth's great nature poetry is this: it was a
sublimation of his unsatisfied love cravings and a symbolic means of
expressing them. Instead of singing directly of his longing for love,
or creating imaginary love scenes for himself, or voicing despair, as
other poets did, he expressed his passion for nature and thus vented
himself unconsciously of his feelings. True, the impulse of the vernal
wood interested him because it taught him much about moral evil and
good; it made him also think of love and he sang of his love indirectly
by praising that impulse.
This theory which seems so inevitable is one to which we are forced
from so many human experiences with nature and yet critics have not
dared to advance it. The psychology of nature worship will no doubt
be more completely studied by psychoanalysts some day, and we will
understand our nature poets better. The interpretation may offend those
who want to persuade themselves that nature has only sermons for us,
but let the reader take up some of the sensuous nature descriptions
in Keats and Spenser and he will realise more clearly the underlying
meaning of nature worship.
It is significant that much sexual symbolism has been found in two
poets who were deemed most reticent on the subject of sex--Wordsworth
and Browning.
V
There is no better proof that common objects, when possible, were
formerly assigned sexual associations, than the obscene riddles of
the Exeter Book. This work is largely attributed to the second great
English poet Cynewulf in the eighth century. Certain riddles are
propounded which reek with lewd suggestions, and the answer is supposed
to be some object innocent in itself; it is apparent, however, from the
questions and descriptions given that the interest in this object is
because it is sexually symbolical. Thus the answers meant for the 26th,
45th, 46th, 55th, 63rd and 64th riddles of the Exeter Book are leek,
key, dough, churn, poker and beaker, respectively. The reader will note
thus how these objects had a sexual symbolic meaning for our ancestors.
Professor Frederic Tupper in his scholarly work _The Riddles of
the Exeter Book_ says: "By far the most numerous of all riddles
of lapsing or varying solutions are those distinctly popular and
unrefined problems whose sole excuse for being (or lack of excuse)
lies in double meaning and coarse suggestion, and the reason for this
uncertainty of answer is at once apparent. The formally stated solution
is so overshadowed by the obscene subject implicitly presented in
each limited motive of the riddle, that little attention is paid to
the aptness of this. It is after all only a pretence, not the chief
concern of the jest." He quotes from another scholar, Wossidlo, a
number of other objects than those suggested in the Exeter Book, which
in other riddle books were invested with sexual symbolism. These are
spinning wheel, kettle and pike, yarn and weaver, frying-pan and hare,
soot-pole, butcher, bosom, fish on the hook, trunk-key, beer-keg,
stocking, mower in grass, butter-cask and bread-scoop.
Freud is apparently correct when he stated that familiar objects of our
day like umbrellas and machinery are given a sexual significance by our
dreams unconsciously.
That man early expressed his interest in love in symbolical terms is
conceded by most anthropologists and philologists. They have traced the
origins of many of our customs and institutions, our words and figures
of rhetoric, to the veiled eroticism of former times. In our speech are
many terms which now have a distinct sexual significance, though they
originally had a symbolic one. The word for seed in Hebrew is zera, the
Latin word is semen (from sero, to sow). Both words are also used for
spermatozoa. Man formerly sought analogies just as he does to-day; he
often feared to violate a taboo, or aimed at a delicacy of expression.
He saw the life producing principle at work everywhere, and he found
symbols for it in the phenomena of nature, in the sun, moon, water,
forest, garden, field, trees, roses; in animals like the serpent, the
horse, the bull, the fish, the goat, the dove; in implements like the
arrow, the sword, the plough. Common objects assumed for him suggestive
meanings. He saw a means of coining new expressions for generative acts
and objects; he found associations when he used the fire-drill drilling
in the hollow of the wood, or when he threw wood upon the fire. In
later time he coined new symbolical terms suggested by such acts of
his as stuffing a cork in a bottle, or putting bread in the oven, or
inserting a key in the lock.
Man speaks in symbolic language especially when it comes to sex
matters. This symbolism appears hence in his dreams and his literature.
The language of the unconscious is symbolic, and literature is often
expressing the author's unconscious in symbolic terms without his being
aware of this.
When poets celebrate the ceremonies about the May pole they may not
know that this celebration is related to early phallic worship. When
Æschylus wrote his play of Prometheus stealing the fire, or Milton
used the Biblical material of Eve tempted by the serpent, they were
probably ignorant of the sexual associations of fire and the serpent
in ancient times. But their own works thus become symbolical. Shelley,
for example, used the metaphor of the snake quite often, and one of the
best known passages in his works is the description of the fight of the
eagle and the serpent in _The Revolt of Islam_. He often referred to
himself also, as the snake. Yet he may not have been aware there was
an unconscious connection between his interest in free love and the
symbol of the serpent.
The part played by symbolism in love poetry is seen especially in _The
Song of Songs_. To us moderns and occidentals many of the comparisons
and symbolical representations seem very strange, but they had their
origin not in the poet's own conceits but in a historic use of the
language. This most celebrated of all love poems fairly swarms with
sensuous symbolic images. It proves that early man saw lascivious
suggestions everywhere in the landscapes, in flowers, rocks, trees,
country, city, animals. The speech of our ancestors was sexualised.
The beloved in the poem, which is a dialogue between her and her lover,
is like a wall with towers (the breasts); she is a vineyard; she is in
the clefts of the rock and the hidden hollow of the cliff. She has eyes
like doves, her hair is like a flock of straying goats, her teeth like
a flock of washed ewes, her lips like a scarlet thread, her temples
like pomegranate, her neck like the tower of David builded with turrets
and hung with shields, her breasts like twin fawns feeding among the
lilies. She is a closed garden, a shut up spring, a sealed fountain.
The roundings of her thighs are like the link of a chain, her navel is
like a round empty goblet, her belly like a heap of wheat set among
lilies, her eyes like the pools of Heshbon, her nose like the tower of
Lebanon.
The lover is like an apple tree among the trees of the wood; he is a
young hart. His head is as fine gold, his eyes are like doves, his
cheeks are a bed of spices, as a bank of sweet herbs; his lips are
lilies dropping myrrh, his hands are as rods of gold set with beryl,
his body is polished ivory overlaid with sapphires, his legs are
pillars of marble set in sockets of gold; his aspect like Lebanon,
chosen like the cedar.
The embrace of the lovers is described symbolically by means of the
tree symbol. It is known that the tree was formerly used to represent
both sexes. "The bisexual symbolic character of the tree," says Jung
in his _Psychology of the Unconscious_ (P. 248), "is intimated by the
fact that in Latin trees have a masculine termination and a feminine
gender." The lover in the _Song of Songs_ calls his beloved a tree and
says he will climb up to the palm tree and take hold of the branches;
his beloved's breasts will be as clusters of the vine and the smell of
her countenance like apples.
Students of anthropology will recognise all the sex symbols in this
poem and will find analogies in other literatures. This great love
poem is regarded by many, curiously enough, as a religious allegory.
The chapter headings in the King James version of the Bible represent
Christ and the Church as symbols of the lovers. Higher criticism has
recognised the fact that the poem is a love poem. This is also proved
by the fact that from time immemorial it has been the practice of
orthodox Hebrews to read it on the Sabbath eve, which is the time for
love embrace among them.
VI
Psychoanalysis has gone far, indeed, in seeing sex symbolism in many
objects and ceremonies and allegories where it was least expected to
exist. Freud and Jung, though they differ in their views here, see in
many symbols concealed incestuous wishes. They have dealt with the
subject in _Totem and Taboo_ and _The Psychology of the Unconscious_,
respectively. I have no intention of going into the differences between
their theories.
Artists in the mediæval ages, who always drew and painted the Virgin
Mary, showed also unconsciously in a symbolic form the infantile
incestuous wishes for their own mothers. By this I simply imply that
having failed to find love in real life, they took shelter in their
love for their mothers. A modern critic has divined the significance
of the worship of the Virgin in so fine a poet as Verlaine, who, while
he embraced Catholicism, was not a churchman in the strict acceptance
of the word. In his _French Literary Studies_, Professor T. B.
Rudmose-Brown says of Verlaine: "It is his intense need of a love that
will not return upon itself that makes Verlaine turn to Christ's Virgin
Mother--the Rosa Mystica in whom he found all the qualities he looked
for in vain in his cruelly divine child-wife and his many '_amies_' of
later life--and crouch like a weary child beneath her wondrous mantle."
Verlaine used the Virgin as a symbolic emblem. He unconsciously craved
for the love of his mother since in later life he was divorced by his
wife.
The symbol then often becomes under our new science the means of
recovering the love one felt as a child for one's own mother. The
author may not be aware that this use of the symbol is being made by
him. He uses the earth to-day, as man from time immemorial has used it,
as a symbol of the mother, when he exclaims he wants to die and go back
to mother earth.
The researches of scholars have established, then, the connection
between love and symbolic expressions thereof, and it will be the task
of future critics to discover the author's unconscious expression of
his love life by symbols. Just as the horse shoe, the mandrake and the
four-leafed clover, which are signs of good luck among superstitious
people, were originally symbols of fruitfulness, so other objects
described in books will be seen to have a sexual origin through a study
of anthropology.