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Eglantine
Eglantine is a
form of rose, Rosa rubiginosa,
commonly known as Sweet Briar. Named
after its many hook-shaped prickles, the
shrub bears numerous five-petalled blossoms, white on the inside shading out to
pink, with a central cluster of yellow stamens. According to Wikipedia, it is
the foliage not the flower which produces a “strong apple-like smell.”[1]
Eglantine is
mentioned frequently in British literature. Chaucer’s Prioress, the model of the slightly
over-idealized love object of medieval romance, is named Eglentyne. In Sonnet 26 of his Amoretti, Spenser uses Eglantine as an example of how everything
sweet is tempered with sour: “sweet is the Eglantine, but pricketh
nere.” Perhaps the most famous eglantine is that conjured by Oberon
in Midsummer Night’s Dream:
I
know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where
oxlips and the nodding violet grows
Quite
over-canopied with luscious Wood bine,
With
sweet musk roses and with eglantine (Act II, sc 1)
Like Shakespeare, both Keats and Sir Walter Scott associate
eglantine with embowered violets. In his
“Ode to a Nightingale,” the “embalmed darkness” to which the narrator escapes
is full of fragrant flowers:
White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
Fast-fading
violets cover'd up in leaves;
And
mid-May's eldest child, The coming musk-rose.
And a similar
bouquet is evoked in another bower of escape in The Lady of the Lake:
Here eglantine embalmed the air,
Hawthorn and hazel mingled there;
The primrose pale and violet flower
Found
in each cliff a narrow bower (Stanza 12)
Woolf only uses
eglantine twice, both times in her fiction, and both times in contexts which
emphasize its roots in British literature.
As in Shakespeare, Keats, and Scott, the shrub rose is linked with
violets. In Orlando, it is among a list of landscape features characteristic of
“Surrey and Kent or the towns of London and Tunbridge Wells” which are unknown
in Constantinople: “parsonage there was none, nor manor house, nor cottage, nor
oak, elms, violet, ivy, or wild eglantine (89).” In Between the Acts, the wild rose similarly represents the rise of British civilization; the Age is
Reason is announced emerging along with trade, metals, and pot-making from the
age of the warrior and the heathen when“The violet and the eglantine
over the riven earth their flowers entwine,” bringing a new world of pastoral
safety and fertile agriculture (BTA 85).
The literary heritage of the flower makes it a fitting emblem of
England.
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