Halloween is a contraction of “All Hallows’ Eve,” a Christian descendant of the Celtic feast day Samhain (pronounced, in that mysterious way of Gaelic, “SOW-in”). Samhain marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the “dark half” of the Celtic calendar.
The pagan Celtic year was divided into quarters and these Bronze Age [...]
Archive for the ‘As Symbol’ Category
Harvest’s End
Posted in As Obliquity, As Symbol, tagged growing season, harvest, seasons, solar cycle on October 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Dead Flowers
Posted in As Kind, As Symbol on August 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you’re the Queen of the Underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave”
This song from the Rolling Stones 1971 album Sticky Fingers [...]
Flower in Ulysses: Stuck in the Middle
Posted in As Obliquity, As Symbol, tagged Bloomsday, James Joyce, Ulysses on June 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
In honor of Bloomsday, June 16
IV.
The morning of December 16, 2004 is cold. Henry Flower sees this through his kitchen window, pausing in the middle of scrambling breakfast for his wife Moira, who was still in bed: a bright clear blue through the trees, though it was only 8 a.m. Still, implacable, its substance invisible, [...]
Meditation on Oleander
Posted in As Object, As Obliquity, As Symbol, tagged cure, delmhorst, lyric, oleander, toxin on April 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Born a little soon, raised on too much moon,
learned to get by on “Leave me alone.”
Be the restless one, be the burning son.
Then you filled your hands with oleander and
all the strippings of pride gone astray.
All that secret work, all those pretty words
that still don’t hold you
Now you spend your days in the dappled rays
of [...]
The People Have the (Flower) Power
Posted in As Symbol on July 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I am going to guess that it was in the spring or summer of 1970 that my brother and I went into the garage one morning and stuck “flower power” stickers all over our mother’s beige VW squareback. I would have been nearly 10 and my brother about eight.
The stylized daisy stickers had been a [...]
Traditional Allusions
Posted in As Symbol on June 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The violet and the primrose too
Beneath a sheltering thorny bough
In bright and lively colours blow
And cast sweet fragrance round.
Where beds of thyme in clusters lay
The heath rose opens its eyes in May
And cowslips, too, their sweets display
Upon the heathy ground.
“Flowers of the Heath” is a traditional song of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. For the sheer [...]
What’s in a Name?
Posted in As Symbol on February 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Giving flower names to girls at birth has a long history. Boys are less commonly named for plants, and then it is generally for trees (former Indiana Senator Birch Bayh comes to mind). Exceptions exist, including the rather Edwardian-sounding Eglantine, which is an old name for the sweetbriar, a variety of rose (Rosa rubiginosa or [...]
The Christmas Rose
Posted in As Symbol on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Helleborus niger, the black hellebore, is native to northeastern Italy, Austria and Croatia. It grows in the shade of deciduous trees and flowers through the winter from December to April while the branches of these trees are bare. A plant that flowers when there is snow on the ground is bound to attract a legend; [...]
Grave Occasions
Posted in As Symbol on October 8, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
A mysterious person, known as the “Poe Toaster,” has visited the grave of Edgar Allan Poe every January 19 since 1949. Because the visitor has been arriving on Poe’s birthday for 58 years, it is assumed that he represents a tradition carried on by a series of Poe admirers. Each year, however, the ritual is [...]
A Rose Is A Rose
Posted in As Symbol on October 1, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Ring around the rosie
A pocket full of posies
Ashes, Ashes
All fall down
This old nursery rhyme goes with a children’s game that involves standing in a circle and holding hands, skipping in a circle and then falling down on the last line. The supposed connection of the words to the bubonic or black plague is apparently without [...]
