SEXUAL SYMBOLISM IN LITERATURE

I

The repression of the libido includes the damming and clogging up of all the emotional concomitants that go with sexual attraction and make up the feeling called love. Whenever then sex or libido is referred to in psychoanalysis the word has the widest meaning. The man who loves a woman with the greatest affection and passion, without gratifying these, suffers a repression of the libido, as well as the man who satisfies certain proclivities without feeling any tenderness or love for the woman. In the emotion felt towards the other sex called love, in which admiration, respect, self-sacrifice, tenderness and other finer feelings play a great part, there is consciously or unconsciously, however, the physical attraction. If this is totally absent the emotion cannot be called "love." What differentiates our feelings towards one of the opposite sex from those felt for one of the same sex (assuming there are no homosexual leanings) is the presence of this sexual interest. Love then must satisfy a man physically as well as psychically. It is a concentration of the libido upon a person of the opposite sex, accompanied by tender feelings.

Hence when we read the most chaste love poem, we see what is the underlying motive in the poet's unconscious. He may write with utter devotion to the loved one and express a wish to die for her, and though he says nothing about physical attraction, we all know that it is there in his unconscious. It is taken for granted that a man who writes a real love poem to a girl wants to enjoy her love. And when the poet complains because he is rejected or deceived, or of something interfering with the course of his love, we are aware also that his unconscious is grieved because his union is impeded or entirely precluded. The suffering is greater the more he loves, for his finer instincts, as well as his passion, are prevented from being fulfilled.

Let us take at random a few innocent poems and test the theory. There is Ben Jonson's well known toast, "Drink to me only with thine eyes." He tells how he sent Celia a rose wreath, that she breathed on it and sent it back to him.

Odour is an important feature, it is well known, in sexual attraction. In this poem the poet, after having received the returned rose breathed upon by Celia, smells her perfume, which now submerges the natural fragrance of the rose. In other words the poet's unconscious says that he wishes to possess Celia physically. He is talking symbolically in the poem.

There is the song in Tennyson's "The Miller's Daughter," beginning "It is the miller's daughter." The poet says naÏvely enough that he would like to be the jewel in her ear in order to touch her neck, the girdle about her waist ("I'd clasp it round so close and tight"), and the necklace upon her balmy bosom to fall and rise; "I would lie so light, so light." The unconscious sexual feelings here are only too apparent. The symbols of the earring, girdle and necklace are unmistakable. The poet is saying in a symbolical manner that he would possess the miller's daughter.

Moreover one may see the sex motive in poems where it does not seem to appear. If certain facts in an author's life are known, we may discern the unconscious love sentiments in poems where no mention seems to be made of them. Let me illustrate with a fine poem by Longfellow, the familiar "The Bridge." Take the lines

To the student of Longfellow, this poem speaks of the time he found it difficult to win the love of his second wife, Frances Appleton, love for whom he confessed in his novel Hyperion, where he drew her and himself. This story was published before she had as yet reciprocated his love. He married her July 13, 1843. He finished the poem October 9, 1845. At the end of this year he wrote in his diary that now he had love fulfilled and his soul was enriched with affection. He is therefore thinking of the time when he had no love and longed for it, and now that he has it, he is thinking of the love troubles of others. In the olden days he wanted to be carried away by the river Charles, for his long courtship, seemingly hopeless, made his heart hot and restless and his life full of care. So we see that in this poem the poet was thinking of something definite, relating to love (and hence also sex), though there is no mention of either in the poem.

It is well known that all love complaints are the cries of the Jack who cannot get his Jill; or who has lost the possibility of love happiness by desertion, deception or death.

Read that fine and pathetic Scotch ballad, beginning "O waly, waly up the bank." The girl (or woman) has been forsaken by her lover and expects to become a mother. She longs for death. She complains about the cruelty of love grown cold; she recalls the happy days. Her unconscious sentiment is that her lover will never give her spiritual happiness or satisfy her craving. Her life is empty. The poem was based on an actual occurrence. It contains all the despair of love that was once given and then withdrawn.

She does not want to dress herself gorgeously now as she has no lover. Among other great love wails by a woman are the old Saxon elegy "A Woman's Complaint" and the second Idyl of Theocritus.

All the pain of frustrated love is due to the repressing of the tender as well as of the physical emotions, to the damming up of the libido, which is love in its broadest sense.

Sometimes the poets tell us almost plainly their real loss, or suggest it in such a manner that we feel the thought has become conscious in the poem. Read in Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" the fifteen lines beginning, "Is it well to wish thee happy," and one can see that the victim is suffering because Amy is in another's embrace rather than in that of the singer's. He thinks with maddening thoughts of the clown she married.

He calls sarcastically upon Amy to kiss her husband and take his hand. "He will answer to the purpose." The singer clearly shows his pain because he has been cheated out of physical pleasure.

When we come to the decadent poets, the loss is sung plainly. One of the most beautiful poems of this kind is Dowson's Cynara. The poem is frankly sexual. The poet, who was rejected by a restaurant keeper's daughter, tries to console himself with another woman for his loss. The words "I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fashion" mean he loves her in others. He tries to satisfy himself partly by thinking he is with her while he is with another. It is a poem showing how a sexual repression seeks an outlet with some one who did not arouse it and how the poet forces himself to imagine that he is with the one who created it. The poem makes this clear, that a love poem is always a complaint that the libido is being dammed.

It is therefore true to say that even in the tenderest and sweetest love lyrics, like those of Burns and Shelley for instance, one sees the play of unconscious sexual forces. This fact does not make the poem any the less moral or the poet any the less pure.

II

Probably the greatest objection to the application of psychoanalytic methods to literature will be made to the transference of the sexual interpretation of symbols from the realm of dreams to that of art. But if the interpretation is correct in one sphere it is also true in the other. Civilisation has made it necessary to refer in actual speech to sexual matters in hidden ways, by symbolic representations; our faculty of wit, due to the exercise of the censorship, also uses various devices of symbolisation. Dreams and literature both make use of the same symbols.

When Freud attributed sexual significance to certain typical dreams like those of riding, flying, swimming, climbing, and to certain objects, like rooms, boxes, snakes, trees, burglars, etc., he made no artificial interpretations. He merely pointed out the natural and concrete language of the unconscious.

Now the same interpretation must inevitably follow in literature, much as authors and readers may object. If flying in dreams is symbolic of sex, then an author who is occupied considerably with wishes to be a bird and fly or with descriptions of birds flying—I do not mean an isolated instance—is like the man who is always dreaming he is flying; he is unconsciously expressing a symbolical wish. Many poems written to birds in literature show unconscious sexual manifestations. Shelley's "To A Skylark," Keats's "To A Nightingale" and Poe's "Raven" are poems where the authors sang of repressed love; there is unconscious sex symbolism in them.

Wordsworth, one of the poets who rarely mentioned sex, has in his "To a Skylark" unconsciously given us a poem of sexual significance. The motive of the poem is the intense longing to fly. But beneath the wish to fly in the poem, as in the imaginary flying in the dream, a sexual meaning is concealed. The poet is sad when he writes the poem "I have walked through wildernesses dreary, and to-day my heart is weary." He also thinks of the fact that the bird is satisfied in love. "Thou hast a nest for thy love and thy rest."

Very few of the poems addressed to birds harp on the wish to fly to the extent that Wordsworth does in this poem. Nearly half of the poem is taken up with this wish, and for this reason the sexual interpretation is unmistakable.

The first two stanzas are as follows:

The wish in literature corresponds to the fulfilment in the dream, and the psychology of the poet who wishes to fly is like that of the dreamer who does fly. Unconscious sex symbolism is voiced in poems where the poet expresses a desire to be a bird, or fly like one, such as those by Bernard de Ventadorn, the great Troubadour of the twelfth century, "The Cuckoo," by Michael Bruce, the Scotch poet who died young from consumption, and others.

I quote from memory the chorus of a poem sung in my school days:

The author here tells us most plainly why he or she wants to fly like a bird—for the satisfaction of love. He says practically that merely by flying like the bird, he would have the embrace of the loved one. The opening lines of the chorus show that it is no far-fetched idea, that of seeing sex or love symbolism in birds flying or singing.

We recall Burns's famous poem to the bonny bird that sings happily and reminds him of the time when his love was true. "Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird," he sings in despair. A false lover stole the rose and left the thorn with him. The entire poem is full of sex symbolism. That he too would like to have love, is what he says when he speaks of the bird singing.

"The more one is occupied with the solution of dreams," says Freud, "the more willingly one must become to acknowledge that the majority of the dreams of adults treat of sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes.... No other impulse has had to undergo as much suppression from the time of childhood as the sex impulses in its numerous components; from no other impulse has survived so many and such intense unconscious wishes, which now act in the sleeping state in such a manner as to produce dreams."

This, to my mind, can not be contested, and these wishes appear largely in the form of symbols. In early times sex was given great significance, and we know that in early myths and literature many events and things were sex symbols. When we dream symbolically, we go back to a method of picturing events that in early history had value, but of which the significance has been forgotten. The law of symbol formation is in dreams not an arbitrary one; it is based on forms of speech in the past and on witty conceptions of to-day. Folklore and wit are full of sexual symbols corresponding to those in dreams. All doubt has been removed of sexual symbolism in dreams by an experiment made by means of hypnotism, where a patient was told to dream some sexual situation. Instead of doing so directly she dreamed a situation in symbolic form corresponding to that in ordinary dream life. Rank and Sachs in their The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences have given us an excellent study of the nature of symbol formation. Freud has furnished us a list of objects and actions that are of sexual significance. W. Stekel has made an exhaustive study of the subject in his Sprache des Traumes (1911). Freud recognises R. A. Scherner as the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams in his book Das Leben des Traumes (1896), but he admits that Artemidorus in the second century A.D. also interpreted dreams symbolically.

Freud ventures the opinion that dreams about complicated machinery and landscapes and trees have a definite sexual significance. If this is so, and he gives his reason therefor, it would mean that all those authors who have a partiality for describing landscapes and machinery in their works continually, are unconsciously revealing a personal trait they never intended to convey. Ruskin for example is rich in landscapes in his works. Is there any connection between his propensity for such description and his attachment to his mamma, his youthful love disappointment, his unsuccessful marriage and his sad love for Rose La Touche? Is it not likely that many of the painters who made a specialty of landscape painting were driven to this special choice by an unconscious cause that the world has not fathomed, a sexual one? No doubt there is a connection between paintings of female nudes and the sex life of the author in his unconscious; why should not the same be true of the landscape painters and all the writers who abound in landscape descriptions? Is it not possible that Turgenev, who has given us so many landscapes, was unconsciously thinking of his first love disappointment and also of his love for Madame Viardot? We find landscapes in every literary work that deals with the country, but Freud's theory can have applicability only to the author who has a mania for them.

Why does Kipling have a keen interest in bringing descriptions of machinery into his works? If dreams of machinery relate to sex, then we must follow the logical conclusion that an undue interest in machinery must evince a sexual meaning. We are also aware that a large number of popular sexual terms are taken from instruments in the machine-shop.

I do not maintain that objects do not have a literal significance, free from any symbolic intent.

There can be no doubt about the significance of the phallic worship of old times, in which the serpent was symbolic. Dreams where the serpent figures and folk tales telling of dragons who are symbolic of the lustful side of man both have a sexually symbolic meaning.

Again, if Freud is right in claiming that the dream of a woman throwing herself in the water is a parturition dream, then one would have to conclude that a woman occupied constantly with stories about herself swimming was probably absorbed with thoughts about child-bearing. That this significance for such a dream is not absurd may be seen from the following statement by Freud: "In dreams, as in mythology, the delivery of a child from the uterine waters is commonly presented by distortion as the entry of the child into water; among many others, the births of Adonis, Osiris, Moses and Bacchus are well known illustrations of this."

III

Freud was not the first one to interpret dreams symbolically. There have been excellent symbolical interpretations in literature. I will mention one in Chaucer and another in Ovid.

In Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, one of the greatest love poems ever written and probably a greater work of art than any of the Canterbury Tales, there is a true symbolic interpretation of an anxiety dream. Troilus was pining for his love, Criseyde, who had been led back by Diomede to the Greeks in exchange for Antenor. Troilus dreamt that he saw a boar asleep in the sun and that Criseyde was embracing and kissing it. His suspicions as to her faithfulness were confirmed by the interpretation given by his sister Cassandra, who told him that Criseyde now loved Diomede; Diomede was descended from Meleager the slayer of the boar, which, according to the myth, once ravaged among the Greeks.

Chaucer throughout his works attacks the theory that dreams may be interpreted, but he gives us a true symbolical interpretation in this poem. He also here recorded unconsciously some of his own past griefs in love. Freud taught that anxiety dreams were due to the repression of the libido being converted into fear. We also know from anthropology that the boar was a sexual symbol. In the poem Diomede appears to Troilus as a boar, also, because Troilus had heard the story of Meleager and the boar and of the ancestry of Diomede. Even though he had forgotten the tale, if he did, since he was reminded of it by his sister, it was still present in his unconscious. His anxiety was due to the fear that Diomede had really won Criseyde. The fear that he experienced at day, that his sweetheart would be lost to him—the anxiety that his libido would be repressed, become an anxiety dream in which the boar is the symbol of his rival.

In the fifth elegy of the third book of Ovid's Amores, the author reports a symbolical dream of the loss of his love. It is correctly interpreted, in a Freudian manner, by an interpreter of dreams. The poet dreamed that he took shelter from the heat in a grove under a tree. He saw a very white cow standing before him, and her mate, a horned bull, near her chewing his cud. A crow pecked at the breast of the cow and took away the white hair. The cow left the spot; black envy was in her breast as she went over to some other bulls. The interpreter told Ovid that the heat which the poet was seeking to avoid was love, that the cow was his white-complexioned mistress and that he was the bull. The crow was a procuress who would tempt his mistress to desert him. The sexual symbolic interpretation shows that Freud's most unpopular idea was known among the Romans. It happened that Ovid's mistress did prove unfaithful to him and he complained of the fact. His dream arose, however, from his day fears, and he had previously written a poem in the Amores against a procuress.

Ovid is one of the greatest love poets in all literature, and his Epistle of Sappho to Phaon in his Heroides translated by Pope records some of his own love griefs, though these are recorded in his Amores directly.

The symbolism that psychoanalysis deals with is that of the unconscious. Symbols may have the most significance when the dreamer or writer least suspects it. And it is only by the study of folk-lore, wit and the neuroses that one gets to see their meaning.

No doubt the critic who examines literary masterpieces to find sexual symbols will not be a popular one; but that does not alter the fact that the sexual meaning is there. The field will no doubt be taken up in the future by some critic who will not fear to brave public wrath.

It will be seen that many writers who were deemed respectable and pure because they never dealt with sexual problems are full of sex symbolism. They consciously strove to conceal their sex interest, but their unconscious use of sex symbolism shows that they were not as indifferent to the problems as they would lead us to imagine.

Browning rarely wrote directly of sex. He is admired justly by all lovers of literature; and women are among his most enthusiastic lovers. It is true one of his poems, the "Statue and the Bust," has puzzled his women admirers. Adultery seems to be defended here. Now there are some innocent poems of the poet rich in sex symbolism. It is well known that dreams of riding on horse-back, rocking, or any form of rhythmic motion through which the dreamer goes, are sexually symbolical. In older literature and in colloquial language the word to ride is used in a sexual sense. Browning is especially addicted to writing poems describing the pleasure of riding, or poems in rhythmic verse which suggest the riding process. It has never dawned on critics to suggest that there may be a cause for this that is to be found in the unconscious of the author.

Take his "The Last Ride Together." The speaker who is rejected asks his love to give him the pleasure of a last ride with her. Not being able to get the pleasures of love from her, he seeks them in another form, a symbolic one. He will now imagine that he receives them; he is prompted to his strange request by unconscious causes. He wants a substitute for the actuality. "We ride and I see her bosom heave," he says. Every stanza says something about the riding. "I ride," "We ride," "I and she ride" are repeated throughout the poem. He addresses the poet, the sculptor and the musician and tells them that he is riding instead of creating art; by this he means that they express their longing to love in art; he does so by riding. "Riding's a joy." He also lies to himself and pretends he is not angry at his mistress and that perhaps it was best he didn't win her love; he pretends he has no regrets for the past and that he is satisfied with the ride instead of her love. The poem is an excellent example of the unconscious use of symbolism in literature. The meaning is clear.

Two other poems of Browning where sexual symbolism may be present though there is nothing of love in the poems are the famous "How They Brought the Good News from Aix to Ghent" and "Through the Metidja to Abd-El-Kadr." The sexual significance can be seen in the rhythmic swing, for both poems suggest the motion of the horse rider. The effect in the latter poem is produced by the use of the words "I ride" twice in the first, third and eighth lines of each of the five stanzas, thirty times, and by having each of the forty lines end with "ride" or a rhyme to "ride."

IV

I do not believe that nature worship idea in literature has been yet fully analysed. Critics have refused to see the exact meaning of the expression "love of nature." The poets themselves have told us that they saw in nature lessons of moral improvement and inspirations for humanitarianism. Granting that this is so, the fact still remains that there is much left unsaid by the poets. Some of them recognised the real significance of their love for nature when they told us how they were inspired by her to love, or were reminded of their lack of love.

Wordsworth, who is one of the greatest nature poets the world has ever had, appears singularly free from the voicing of the love passion in his work. Except for the Lucy poems and a few others, he has given us little love poetry. Hazlitt complained that he found no marriages or giving in marriage in Wordsworth's poetry. But nevertheless the sex element is there though never directly expressed. There is nothing, it is well known, calculated to make a man long for the love of woman or to miss her more than when he is in the presence of nature. Anthropology teaches us the close connection between love and nature. When Wordsworth sang of the beauties of nature he was voicing a cry for satisfied love which he did not have up to his thirtieth year, when he married. He was also pining for love of the girl he met in France in his twenty-third year, the mother of his illegitimate daughter. The poet was using symbols, such as trees and daisies, whose glory he sang when he meant he wished he had love. Some things can be enjoyed alone, though not altogether, such as food, plays, pictures, reading, music, lectures, etc. It is the great distinction of nature that she inspires human love and also provokes sadness.

Most of the old bucolic poets frankly associated their Corydons and Amaryllises with enjoyment of nature. Wordsworth, who had much of the English Puritanism, was reserved. Any reader who takes up the nature poetry of Wordsworth lays it down after a while with the feeling that the poet is not telling the whole truth. It does not follow that Wordsworth was deliberately concealing it, for he may have been unaware of what was in his unconscious. After he married and had love he continued for a while to give us great nature poetry, for the most part a reflection of his early mood. For it must not be assumed that because a man has love he therefore loses his love for nature. Wordsworth's greatest nature poem, "Lines on Tintern Abbey," was written before his marriage; the nature poetry of the last thirty or forty years of his life was rather poor.

The secret of Wordsworth's great nature poetry is this: it was a sublimation of his unsatisfied love cravings and a symbolic means of expressing them. Instead of singing directly of his longing for love, or creating imaginary love scenes for himself, or voicing despair, as other poets did, he expressed his passion for nature and thus vented himself unconsciously of his feelings. True, the impulse of the vernal wood interested him because it taught him much about moral evil and good; it made him also think of love and he sang of his love indirectly by praising that impulse.

This theory which seems so inevitable is one to which we are forced from so many human experiences with nature and yet critics have not dared to advance it. The psychology of nature worship will no doubt be more completely studied by psychoanalysts some day, and we will understand our nature poets better. The interpretation may offend those who want to persuade themselves that nature has only sermons for us, but let the reader take up some of the sensuous nature descriptions in Keats and Spenser and he will realise more clearly the underlying meaning of nature worship.

It is significant that much sexual symbolism has been found in two poets who were deemed most reticent on the subject of sex—Wordsworth and Browning.

V

There is no better proof that common objects, when possible, were formerly assigned sexual associations, than the obscene riddles of the Exeter Book. This work is largely attributed to the second great English poet Cynewulf in the eighth century. Certain riddles are propounded which reek with lewd suggestions, and the answer is supposed to be some object innocent in itself; it is apparent, however, from the questions and descriptions given that the interest in this object is because it is sexually symbolical. Thus the answers meant for the 26th, 45th, 46th, 55th, 63rd and 64th riddles of the Exeter Book are leek, key, dough, churn, poker and beaker, respectively. The reader will note thus how these objects had a sexual symbolic meaning for our ancestors.

Professor Frederic Tupper in his scholarly work The Riddles of the Exeter Book says: "By far the most numerous of all riddles of lapsing or varying solutions are those distinctly popular and unrefined problems whose sole excuse for being (or lack of excuse) lies in double meaning and coarse suggestion, and the reason for this uncertainty of answer is at once apparent. The formally stated solution is so overshadowed by the obscene subject implicitly presented in each limited motive of the riddle, that little attention is paid to the aptness of this. It is after all only a pretence, not the chief concern of the jest." He quotes from another scholar, Wossidlo, a number of other objects than those suggested in the Exeter Book, which in other riddle books were invested with sexual symbolism. These are spinning wheel, kettle and pike, yarn and weaver, frying-pan and hare, soot-pole, butcher, bosom, fish on the hook, trunk-key, beer-keg, stocking, mower in grass, butter-cask and bread-scoop.

Freud is apparently correct when he stated that familiar objects of our day like umbrellas and machinery are given a sexual significance by our dreams unconsciously.

That man early expressed his interest in love in symbolical terms is conceded by most anthropologists and philologists. They have traced the origins of many of our customs and institutions, our words and figures of rhetoric, to the veiled eroticism of former times. In our speech are many terms which now have a distinct sexual significance, though they originally had a symbolic one. The word for seed in Hebrew is zera, the Latin word is semen (from sero, to sow). Both words are also used for spermatozoa. Man formerly sought analogies just as he does to-day; he often feared to violate a taboo, or aimed at a delicacy of expression. He saw the life producing principle at work everywhere, and he found symbols for it in the phenomena of nature, in the sun, moon, water, forest, garden, field, trees, roses; in animals like the serpent, the horse, the bull, the fish, the goat, the dove; in implements like the arrow, the sword, the plough. Common objects assumed for him suggestive meanings. He saw a means of coining new expressions for generative acts and objects; he found associations when he used the fire-drill drilling in the hollow of the wood, or when he threw wood upon the fire. In later time he coined new symbolical terms suggested by such acts of his as stuffing a cork in a bottle, or putting bread in the oven, or inserting a key in the lock.

Man speaks in symbolic language especially when it comes to sex matters. This symbolism appears hence in his dreams and his literature. The language of the unconscious is symbolic, and literature is often expressing the author's unconscious in symbolic terms without his being aware of this.

When poets celebrate the ceremonies about the May pole they may not know that this celebration is related to early phallic worship. When Æschylus wrote his play of Prometheus stealing the fire, or Milton used the Biblical material of Eve tempted by the serpent, they were probably ignorant of the sexual associations of fire and the serpent in ancient times. But their own works thus become symbolical. Shelley, for example, used the metaphor of the snake quite often, and one of the best known passages in his works is the description of the fight of the eagle and the serpent in The Revolt of Islam. He often referred to himself also, as the snake. Yet he may not have been aware there was an unconscious connection between his interest in free love and the symbol of the serpent.

The part played by symbolism in love poetry is seen especially in The Song of Songs. To us moderns and occidentals many of the comparisons and symbolical representations seem very strange, but they had their origin not in the poet's own conceits but in a historic use of the language. This most celebrated of all love poems fairly swarms with sensuous symbolic images. It proves that early man saw lascivious suggestions everywhere in the landscapes, in flowers, rocks, trees, country, city, animals. The speech of our ancestors was sexualised.

The beloved in the poem, which is a dialogue between her and her lover, is like a wall with towers (the breasts); she is a vineyard; she is in the clefts of the rock and the hidden hollow of the cliff. She has eyes like doves, her hair is like a flock of straying goats, her teeth like a flock of washed ewes, her lips like a scarlet thread, her temples like pomegranate, her neck like the tower of David builded with turrets and hung with shields, her breasts like twin fawns feeding among the lilies. She is a closed garden, a shut up spring, a sealed fountain. The roundings of her thighs are like the link of a chain, her navel is like a round empty goblet, her belly like a heap of wheat set among lilies, her eyes like the pools of Heshbon, her nose like the tower of Lebanon.

The lover is like an apple tree among the trees of the wood; he is a young hart. His head is as fine gold, his eyes are like doves, his cheeks are a bed of spices, as a bank of sweet herbs; his lips are lilies dropping myrrh, his hands are as rods of gold set with beryl, his body is polished ivory overlaid with sapphires, his legs are pillars of marble set in sockets of gold; his aspect like Lebanon, chosen like the cedar.

The embrace of the lovers is described symbolically by means of the tree symbol. It is known that the tree was formerly used to represent both sexes. "The bisexual symbolic character of the tree," says Jung in his Psychology of the Unconscious (P. 248), "is intimated by the fact that in Latin trees have a masculine termination and a feminine gender." The lover in the Song of Songs calls his beloved a tree and says he will climb up to the palm tree and take hold of the branches; his beloved's breasts will be as clusters of the vine and the smell of her countenance like apples.

Students of anthropology will recognise all the sex symbols in this poem and will find analogies in other literatures. This great love poem is regarded by many, curiously enough, as a religious allegory. The chapter headings in the King James version of the Bible represent Christ and the Church as symbols of the lovers. Higher criticism has recognised the fact that the poem is a love poem. This is also proved by the fact that from time immemorial it has been the practice of orthodox Hebrews to read it on the Sabbath eve, which is the time for love embrace among them.

VI

Psychoanalysis has gone far, indeed, in seeing sex symbolism in many objects and ceremonies and allegories where it was least expected to exist. Freud and Jung, though they differ in their views here, see in many symbols concealed incestuous wishes. They have dealt with the subject in Totem and Taboo and The Psychology of the Unconscious, respectively. I have no intention of going into the differences between their theories.

Artists in the mediÆval ages, who always drew and painted the Virgin Mary, showed also unconsciously in a symbolic form the infantile incestuous wishes for their own mothers. By this I simply imply that having failed to find love in real life, they took shelter in their love for their mothers. A modern critic has divined the significance of the worship of the Virgin in so fine a poet as Verlaine, who, while he embraced Catholicism, was not a churchman in the strict acceptance of the word. In his French Literary Studies, Professor T. B. Rudmose-Brown says of Verlaine: "It is his intense need of a love that will not return upon itself that makes Verlaine turn to Christ's Virgin Mother—the Rosa Mystica in whom he found all the qualities he looked for in vain in his cruelly divine child-wife and his many 'amies' of later life—and crouch like a weary child beneath her wondrous mantle." Verlaine used the Virgin as a symbolic emblem. He unconsciously craved for the love of his mother since in later life he was divorced by his wife.

The symbol then often becomes under our new science the means of recovering the love one felt as a child for one's own mother. The author may not be aware that this use of the symbol is being made by him. He uses the earth to-day, as man from time immemorial has used it, as a symbol of the mother, when he exclaims he wants to die and go back to mother earth.

The researches of scholars have established, then, the connection between love and symbolic expressions thereof, and it will be the task of future critics to discover the author's unconscious expression of his love life by symbols. Just as the horse shoe, the mandrake and the four-leafed clover, which are signs of good luck among superstitious people, were originally symbols of fruitfulness, so other objects described in books will be seen to have a sexual origin through a study of anthropology.