Honeysuckle
 |
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonicera_periclymenum#/media/File:European_honeysuckle_800.jpg |
Honeysuckle or Lonicera is a member of the Caprifoliacae
or woodbine family. A climbing vine with
many twisting, recursive, self-knotting tendrils, its highly scented flowers
are “tubular at the base but divide at the mouth into 5 petals frequently
arranged in 2 lips, an upper lip of 4 fused petals and a lower lip of a single
petal” (Hogan 834). The Woodlands Trust in UK describes the delicate blossoms
as “a yellow/cream colour” which “when pollinated may develop an orange
colouration, with a touch of crimson/red,” noting that they bloom from June
through September and are pollinated “by either moths or long tongued bees.”[1] Rendall specifies that hawkmoths are
especially common fertilizers of honeysuckle (197). He maintains that “Lonicera Periclymenum is the “loveliest
of our wood climbers and twiners” and that the flowers bloom “freely as late as
October” (192). The derivation of the
name is obvious; coming from the Old English honi and sucan, it refers to sucking honey or nectar from
the tube of the flower (Ward 203). Some sources, such as Ward, assume that
honeysuckle is the same as woodbine, using as evidence the interchangeability
of the two names in a long history of British literature (Ward 202 and passim), but Rendall points out that the
term “woodbine” is more generic and can also refer to other climbers such as
clematis and convolvulus (193), making the helpful suggestion that “Woodbine
was applied to the plant generally and honeysuckle to the flower” (194).
Symbolically,
honeysuckle is often associated with the bonds of love. In Greek mythology the honeysuckle
was entwined with the story of Daphne and Chloe who could stay together in
their scented arbor “for as long as the honeysuckle blooms” and so the goddess
of love made it “last and last” (Hielmeyer 36). In his comprehensive study of
plant lore, Watts describes the “evil-averting powers” of honeysuckle,
particularly its use as a barrier to witches, probably because of the
complexity of its “interwoven braided cords” which were thought to “confuse
evil eyes” which became fixated on its clockwise patterns (198). He also
chronicles its use as a courtship charm.
In the Victorian language of flowers it was associated with “generous
and devoted affection” (Greenaway 22).
In the British literary tradition,
honeysuckle is as “familiar and well-loved” as in folklore (Watts 198), with
references appearing in everyone from Chaucer to Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson,
Jane Austen, and Dickens. The two favored contexts are scenic, where the vine
provides the shelter of an entwined bower, and romantic, in which the twining
habit serves as a metaphor for love’s usually happy co-dependency. For example,
in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseydei the lovers wind around each other like
“wode-binde” “aboute a tree, with many a twiste” (qtd by Ward 203).
Shakespeare’s Titania in A Midsummer
Night’s Dream is of course, the locus
classicus for honeysuckle/ woodbine: in Oberon’s monologue the bank where
his wife sleeps among the wild thyme, oxslips, and nodding violets is another bower: “Quite
over-canopied with luscious woodbine” (II. i. l 639); and in
the comic mix-up of Act IV an enchanted Titania promises to wind the ass-headed
Bottom in her arms as “the woodbine the sweet honeysickle/ Gentle entwist” (IV,
I, l. 1586). This line in particular has caused concern amongst scholars of
flowers in Shakespeare for it could seem to suggest that woodbine and
honeysuckle are two different or plants; though some sources, such as the Royal
Gardens at Kew, maintain that this is a distinction without a difference as
Shakespeare “seems to
be describing honeysuckle as the flowers of the woodbine plant.” [2] At
any rate, the first instance describes a bower and the second is an evocation
of romantic devotion.
Other British greats display similar uses for the flowering
vine. Ward points out that winding woodbine “round the arbor” is one of
the gardening tasks listed for Adam by Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost (204), but Rendall suggests the appearance of
“well-attired woodbine” in the call for “every flower that sad embroidery wears” in Milton’s Lycidas (ll. 146 and 148) is more or
less random since it was substituted for “the garish Columbine” in an earlier
draft (Rendall 195). Samuel Johnson is the odd man out in this catalogue of rustic
bliss as Mrs. Thrale reports that the great man once referred to “honeysuckle
wives” who wind so tightly about their husband that they destroy them (Rendall
193).
Rendall suggests that by the eighteenth-century woodbines
had become something of a poetic cliché; saying “they appear in every
hedge and bower” (195), he
cites numerous appearances in the poems of Lady Winchilsea, while Ward notes
occurrences in Burns, Keats, and Wordsworth where another “rustic shed” is hung
with woodbine (205). Jane Austen makes
fun of their fashionable prevalence in Sense
and Sensibility when the cottage loaned to the Dashwoods is deemed “defective,”
that is, not romantic enough because “the roof was tiled, the window shutters
were not painted green, nor were the walls covered with honeysuckles” (qtd by
Ward 207 and Rendall 195). Dickens,
however, perpetuates the sentimental cliché, as well as the Shakespearean
muddle, as he twice envisions honeysuckle entwining with woodbine (in The Old Curiosity Shop and Our Mutual Friend) -- both times
describing latticework around a porch (noted by Rendall 194).
Considering their extensive lineage
in British literature, honeysuckle and woodbine have rather disappointing
manifestations in Woolf’s writing. We
know honeysuckle existed at Monk’s house; there is an August 1929 entry in
Leonard’s Garden Account book for purchasing 132 Lonicera (if I am reading
Leonard’s handwriting correctly), which were used to screen the vegetable
garden in the back. However, honeysuckle makes only three appearances in
Woolf’s prose, twice in essays and once in fiction -- all three after she is
fifty years old and largely representative of an idyllic past, now long gone. In
her 1934 essay on Oliver Goldsmith, honeysuckle is evoked as an emblem of a romanticized
bucolic setting. Speaking of Boswell’s even-handed portrayal of Goldsmith,
Woolf remarks that Boswell showed “that the silver-tongued writer was no simple
soul, gently floating through life from the honeysuckle to the hawthorn hedge”
and was instead “a complex man, full of troubles” (E6 26). An account of
Roger Fry’s honeymoon in her biography of her friend features a random sighting
of the plant: “In blazing heat they visited Faenza and found it deserted; the
courtyards ‘all grown over with vine and honeysuckle’” (RF 99). By the time honeysuckle shows up in Woolf’s
last novel, Between the Acts, it is
nothing but the stamped trace of a lost convention. During the Victorian segment of the village
pageant, a matron with four daughters in want of husbands asks whether the new
clergyman has a wife, the question being raised by the appearance of a tea cosy
amongst his belongings as he was moving into his residence. The chorus
amplifies her query, singing: “did he also display the connubial respectable
tea-table token, a cosy with honeysuckle embossed” (BTA 115). Here honeysuckle retains its associations
with romance but dwindled down into domestic decorative respectability.
Appearing four times (once in an
essay, once in a play, and twice in a single diary entry), woodbine has a
similarly casual presence. In Woolf’s
1920 review of an overly fanciful biography of Miss Mary Russell Mitford, she
highlights Mitford’s delight in glow-worms, creating her own fancy of a
glow-worm having been carried into Mitford’s bedroom “with the wild woodbine”
(E3 222). In an essay concentrating on the ways in which Miss Mitford’s freedom
of movement and even to write in her preferred genre were constrained by her
devotion to her father, the woodbine does seem like a particularly appropriate
import. Although it is not clear whether this woodbine is actually honeysuckle,
the emphasis on scent in the next reference, a quotation from Tennyson’s “Maud”
in the 1923 version of Woolf’s comic play Freshwater
about the artistic circle of her great-aunt, Margaret Cameron, insures the
botanical provenance. Reading to Mrs. C. from his lengthy poem, Tennyson
declaims: “Come into the garden, Nell, . . . I am here at the gate alone; And
the woodbine spices are wafted abroad, And the musk of the rose is blown” (69).
Eliminating the black bat of night and changing Maud’s name to the nickname of
Ellen Terry, the wife of Sir George Frederick Watts, Woolf once again evokes
honeysuckle in the context of a bye-gone era, although this time the wild
twists of the plot -- as Tennyson speaks, Ellen Terry is dressed as a man and
kissing her new lover amongst the raspberry canes -- suggest an even more
sardonic attitude towards this sentimental remnant.
Woolf’s last two mentions of
woodbine, in a November 8, 1930 diary entry, are a provocative look back at
honeysuckle’s place in the canon of British Literature. Describing a lively
conversation about poetic favorites with Water De la Mere and W. B. Yeats,
Woolf reports that in discussing “what poems we could come back to unsated,”
she nominated Milton’s Lycidas, but
both poets disagreed: “De la M. said no. Not Milton for him: he could never
recognise his own emotions there. Milton’s woodbine was not his woodbine, nor
M.’s Eve his Eve. Yeats said he could not get satisfaction from Milton” (D3
330). Milton had been much on Woolf’s
mind while she was writing A Room of One’s
Own, which had been published the year before. Considering that the
narrator of Woolf’s essay goes on a thwarted journey to locate the manuscript
of Milton’s pastoral elegy in search of “which word it could have been that
Milton had altered” (AROOO 7), it is ironic that the honeysuckle which De la
Mere rejects was actually a revision. Is it presuming too much on Woolf’s
knowledge of Milton to suggest that she shares De la Mere’s rejection of
Milton’s Eve and by association, the bondage of the bower on her honey-do list
of Adam’s gardening tasks?
 |
|
|
[1] https://www.woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-flowers/multi-coloured-or-variable/honeysuckle-or-woodbine/ (accessed June 11, 2020)
No comments:
Post a Comment