The Gourd and the Palm-tree is a rare fable, first recorded in Europe in the Middle Ages, that was occasionally counted as one of Aesop's Fables. In the Renaissance a variant appeared in which a pine takes the palm-tree's place.
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The story concerns a gourd that roots itself next to a palm tree and quickly equals her in height. The gourd then asks its sister her age and on learning that she is a hundred years old thinks itself better because of its rapid rise. Then the palm explains that slow and mature growth will endure while swift advancement is followed by as swift a decay. At the time of writing, the account was directed against the new rich in a feudal society which had yet to find a place for them.
The fable first appeared in the west in the Latin prose work Speculum Sapientiae (Mirror of wisdom)[1], which groups fables into four themed sections. At one time attributed to the 4th century Cyril of Jerusalem, it is now thought to be by the 13th century Boniohannes de Messana.[2]
The Speculum Sapientiae was eventually translated into German under the title Das buch der Natürlichen weißheit by Ulrich von Pottenstein (c.1360-1417) and first printed in 1490. In 1564 a poetic version of the fable was included under its Latin title of Cucurbita et Palma in Hieronymus Osius' Fabulae Aesopi carmine elegiaco redditae and so entered the Aesopic tradition. In the 18th century it was adapted by August Gottlieb Meissner (1753-1807) and published with the work of other German fabulists in 1783.[3] An anonymous translation later appeared in the New York Mirror[4] in 1833 and a poetic version by Mrs Elizabeth Jessup Eames in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1841.[5]
This new version of the fable ran as follows in its American prose translation:
During the vogue for Emblem books in the 16th-17th centuries, the gourd was taken as the symbol of evanescence and became associated with a new version of the fable in which a pine took the place of the palm-tree. Its first appearance was in the Latin poem by Andrea Alciato that accompanied what was to become Emblem 125 (on brief happiness) in his Emblemata.[6] A translation of this runs: 'A gourd is said to have sprung up close to an airy pine tree, and to have grown apace with thick foliage: when it had embraced the pine's branches and even outstripped the top, it thought it was better than other trees. To it spoke the pine: Too brief this glory, for soon to come is that which will completely destroy you - winter!'
One of the first of the English emblem writers, Geoffrey Whitney, borrowed Alciato's device for his own treatment of the theme of 'happiness that endures only for a moment' in his Choice of Emblemes, published in Leiden by Christopher Plantin in 1586 (p.34).[7] It was accompanied by a 24-line poem, retelling the fable and reflecting upon it. Two of its four stanzas are given to the pine's reply when the gourd presumes to deride his host:
A different device accompanies Johann Ebermeier's treatment of the fable in his Neu poetisch Hoffnungs-Gärtlein (new poetic little garden of hope, Tübingen, 1653). It stands at the head of a short poem Latin poem with a longer German translation titled "Like a shadow and a gourd’s leaf is happiness".[8] There was also a Latin prose version of the fable included in the Mithologica sacro-profana, seu florilegium fabularum (1666), by the Carmelite monk Father Irenaeus. There it illustrates the moral that prosperity is short and the story is told of either a pine or an olive tree (seu olae) next to which a gourd grows, only to die lamenting in winter.[9]
That the story was still known in England is suggested by Robert Dodsley's chance reference, that 'the gourd may reproach the pine' (the word Whitney used was 'deride'), in his essay on the fable genre, although he did not choose to include this one in his Select Fables of Esop.[10] However, it did eventually appear in the United States in For the children’s hour (1906). The version there, retold by Clara M.Lewis, is described as being 'from the fables of Aesop'.[11]
The first recorder of the fable, Boniohannes de Messana, was from the Sicilian Crusader port now called Messina, so there is the possibility that it might originally have come from the Eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, the gourd and tree are found in important Persian works, as an image if not as a fully-fledged fable.
"The Romance of Alexander", one of the five books of Nizami's late 12th century Khamsa, recounts how Alexander the Great's courtiers compared him to a tall cypress, calling his enemy Darius an old willow.[12] In the opposite camp, Darius's advisors describe him as a plane tree and Alexander as a gourd that may have climbed higher but will not last long: as Henry Wilberforce-Clarke's very literal 1881 translation has it:
While Nizami uses the figure of the gourd and the tree in a political sense, Rumi's 13th century Persian classic the Masnavi employs it to picture the imitative person hasty for spiritual growth:
Further support for the oriental origin of the fable seems to be given by an American claim that a poem beginning "How old art thou? said the garrulous gourd" relates 'a Persian fable'. This was first made by Ella Rodman Church when she included it in an instructional work for children.[15] The same poem was later reprinted in Frances Jenkins Olcott's anthology of Story-Telling Poems (New York, 1913) with the same claim. However, not only is the poem very obviously derived from Meissner's German fable, but its original (and unacknowledged) Scottish author, Charles Mackay, nowhere credits it with an Eastern origin in the collection in which it first appeared.[16]
The reference to the 'little dog rose' in Rumi's poem does raise the possibility that it might be related to the similar fable of "The Oak and the Rose Tree" that appeared in John Trotter Brockett's Select Fables (Newcastle 1820):
Brockett's book reuses woodcuts by Thomas Bewick and also many of the stories that appeared in Bewick's editions of Aesop's fables. This fable, however, seems to be original. Its intimation that 'one swallow does not make a summer' allies it with the Aesopic cautionary tale of The Young Man and the Swallow. Its conclusion that 'He who is puffed up with the least gale of prosperity will as suddenly sink beneath the blasts of misfortune' looks back to the emblematic story of the gourd and the pine tree and even further to the one recorded in the Speculum Sapientiae.
A similar lesson is conveyed by an anonymous Chan poem from China which involves a pine tree and unspecified flowers:
The pine is traditionally known as one of the 'Three Friends of Winter' in China.[19] In the poem it is not the fact of the flower's rapid growth that makes the main contrast but the ability of the tree to withstand adverse conditions. However, in its comparison of outward show with inner virtue, the imagery is equally as emblematic as the European variant.