The Gourd and the Palm-tree is a rare fable, first recorded in Europe in the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, that was occasionally counted as one of Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables

Aesop's Fables or the Aesopica are a collection of fables credited to Aesop, a slave and story-teller believed to have lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 560 BCE. The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today...

. In the Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 a variant appeared in which a pine takes the palm-tree's place.

The fable and its history

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), which groups fables into four themed sections. At one time attributed to the 4th century Cyril of Jerusalem

Cyril of Jerusalem

Cyril of Jerusalem was a distinguished theologian of the early Church . He is venerated as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion. In 1883, Cyril was declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIII...

, it is now thought to be by the 13th century Boniohannes de Messana.

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

Hieronymus Osius

Hieronymus Osius was a German Neo-Latin poet and academic about whom there are few biographical details. He was born about 1530 in Schlotheim and murdered in 1575 in Graz. After studying first at the university of Erfurt, he gained his Masters degree from Wittenberg university in 1552 and later...

' 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. An anonymous translation later appeared in the New York Mirror

New York Mirror

The New-York Mirror was a weekly newspaper published in New York City from 1823 to 1842, and again as a daily newspaper renamed The Evening Mirror from 1844 to 1898.-History:...

in 1833 and a poetic version by Mrs Elizabeth Jessup Eames in the Southern Literary Messenger

Southern Literary Messenger

The Southern Literary Messenger was a periodical published in Richmond, Virginia, from 1834 until June 1864. Each issue carried a subtitle of "Devoted to Every Department of Literature and the Fine Arts" or some variation and included poetry, fiction, non-fiction, reviews, and historical notes...

in 1841.

This new version of the fable ran as follows in its American prose translation:

A gourd wrapped itself round a lofty palm and in a few weeks climbed to its very top.

‘And how old mayest thou be?’ asked the newcomer; ‘About a hundred years,’ was the answer.

‘A hundred years and no taller? Only look, I have grown as tall as you in fewer days than you can count years.’

‘I know that well,’ replied the palm; 'every summer of my life a gourd has climbed up round me, as proud as thou art, and as short-lived as thou wilt be.’

The emblematic gourd

During the vogue for Emblem book

Emblem book

Emblem books are a category of mainly didactic illustrated book printed in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, typically containing a number of emblematic images with explanatory text....

s 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

Andrea Alciato

Andrea Alciato , commonly known as Alciati , was an Italian jurist and writer. He is regarded as the founder of the French school of legal humanists.-Biography:...

 that accompanied what was to become Emblem 125 (on brief happiness) in his Emblemata. 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

Geoffrey Whitney

Geoffrey Whitney was an English poet, now best known for the influence on Elizabethan writing of the Choice of Emblemes that he compiled.-Life:...

, 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). 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:

To whome the Pine, with longe Experience wise,

And ofte had seene suche peacockes loose theire plumes,

Thus aunswere made, thow owght'st not to despise,

My stocke at all, oh foole, thow much presumes.

In coulde and heate, here longe hath bene my happe,

Yet am I sounde and full of livelie sappe.

But, when the froste and coulde shall thee assaie,

Thowghe nowe alofte, thow bragge, and freshlie bloome,

Yet, then thie roote shall rotte and fade awaie,

And shortlie, none shall knowe where was thy roome:

Thy fruicte and leaves, that nowe so highe aspire,

The passers by shall treade within the mire.

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". 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.

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. 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'.

A question of origin

The first recorder of the fable, Boniohannes de Messana, was from the Sicilian Crusader

Crusades

The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem...

 port now called Messina, so there is the possibility that it might originally have come from the Eastern Mediterranean

Eastern Mediterranean

The Eastern Mediterranean is a term that denotes the countries geographically to the east of the Mediterranean Sea. This region is also known as Greater Syria or the Levant....

. Indeed, the gourd and tree are found in important Persian

Persian literature

Persian literature spans two-and-a-half millennia, though much of the pre-Islamic material has been lost. Its sources have been within historical Persia including present-day Iran as well as regions of Central Asia where the Persian language has historically been the national language...

 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

Cypress

Cypress is the name applied to many plants in the cypress family Cupressaceae, which is a conifer of northern temperate regions. Most cypress species are trees, while a few are shrubs...

, calling his enemy Darius an old willow

Willow

Willows, sallows, and osiers form the genus Salix, around 400 species of deciduous trees and shrubs, found primarily on moist soils in cold and temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere...

. 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

Henry Wilberforce-Clarke

Henry Wilberforce Clarke was the translator of Persian works by Saadi, Hafez and Suhrawardi, as well as writing some works himself. He was an officer in the British India corps and the grandson of William Stanley Clarke, Director and Chairman of the East India Company.-Hafez:Wilberforce Clarke...

's very literal 1881 translation has it:

When the pumpkin, becoming sated of the water of the water-wheel, reaches the top of the plane-tree and finds no support for ascending further, it first hangs head downwards from the tree-top with the cord of its own stem about its neck; and secondly, when the cord of vegetable matter rots, it falls to the earth and becomes despicable.

While Nizami uses the figure of the gourd and the tree in a political sense, Rumi's 13th century Persian classic the Masnavi

Masnavi

The Masnavi, Masnavi-I Ma'navi or Mesnevi , also written Mathnawi, Ma'navi, or Mathnavi, is an extensive poem written in Persian by Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, the celebrated Persian Sufi saint and poet. It is one of the best known and most influential works of both Sufism and Persian literature...

employs it to picture the imitative person hasty for spiritual growth:

You run up like a gourd higher than all plants,

But where is your power of resistance or combat?

You have leant on trees or on walls,

And so mounted up like a gourd, O little dog rose;

Even though your prop may be a lofty cypress,

At last you are seen to be dry and hollow.

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. 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

Charles Mackay

Charles Mackay was a Scottish poet, journalist, and song writer.-Life:Charles Mackay was born in Perth, Scotland. His father was by turns a naval officer and a foot soldier; his mother died shortly after his birth. Charles was educated at the Caledonian Asylum, London, and at Brussels, but spent...

, nowhere credits it with an Eastern origin in the collection in which it first appeared.

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

John Trotter Brockett

John Trotter Brockett , was a British attorney, antiquarian, numismatist, and philologist.Brockett was born at Witton Gilbert, co. Durham. In his early youth his parents removed to Gateshead, and he was educated under the care of the Rev. William Turner of Newcastle...

's Select Fables (Newcastle 1820):

A Rose Tree grew beside an Oak, and being not a little elevated by the first warm days of spring, began to shoot forth and to despise the naked Oak for insensibility and want of spirit. The Oak, conscious of his superior nature, made this philosophical reply. "Be not, my friend, so much delighted with the first precarious address of every fickle zephyr: consider, the frosts may yet return; and if thou covetest an equal share with me in all the glories of the rising year, do not afford to them an opportunity to nip thy beauties in the bud. As for myself, I only wait to see this genial warmth a little confirmed: and, whenever that is the case, I shall perhaps display a majesty that will not easily be shaken. But the tree that appears too forward to exult in the first favourable glance of spring, will ever be the readiest to droop beneath the frowns of winter.

Brockett's book reuses woodcuts by Thomas Bewick

Thomas Bewick

Thomas Bewick was an English wood engraver and ornithologist.- Early life and apprenticeship :Bewick was born at Cherryburn House in the village of Mickley, in the parish of Ovingham, Northumberland, England, near Newcastle upon Tyne on 12 August 1753...

 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

The Young Man and the Swallow

The young man and the swallow is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 169 in the Perry Index...

. 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

Zen

Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...

 poem from China which involves a pine tree and unspecified flowers:

Good deeds stand tall like a green pine, evil deeds bloom like flowers;

The pine is not as brilliant as the flowers, it seems.

When the frost comes, the pine will still stand tall,

While the flowers, withered, can be seen no more.

The pine is traditionally known as one of the 'Three Friends of Winter

Three Friends of Winter

The Three Friends of Winter, also known as Suihan Sanyou, are the pine, bamboo, and plum. Every year, as the cold days deepen into the winter season, many plants begin to wither. That the pine, bamboo and plum do not was noted by the Chinese. Known by them as Three Friends of Winter, they entered...

' in China. 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.