From a medieval design. After Cahier CHAPTER XLVII THE PELICAN Pie Pelicane, Jesu Domine, Me immundum munda tuo sanguine Cuius una stilla salvum facere Totum quit ab omni mundum scelere!1 THUS in a hymn St. Thomas Aquinas not only embodies a fable once believed by all, but offers an example of a fashion common in the devout literature of the 1 Cited by HIPPEAU, Bestiaire d'Amour, p. 128. Translation, 'Pious Pelican, Lord Jesus, unclean as I am, cleanse me with thy blood, one drop of which can redeem me and wash away every sin.' Middle Ages. What, then, is the nature of this fable? The pelican, in order to regurgitate the food which it brings to its young, presses its beak against the foodcarrying pouch, and the pouch against its breast. Thus the food is squeezed up and out for the clamouring little pelicans, which, in their hunger, might easily seem to a careless observer to be using their great clumsy beaks against the parent bird. On the basis of this natural occurrence arose a legend believed everywhere and by probably all for fully fifteen hundred years.1 Alexander Neckam's version will serve as a type containing all that is essential to understand the lines in Dante. 'Now the nature and the customs of that bird,' says Neckam, 'are wont to be referred to Christ Himself. This bird slays its young, and the transgression of the command given by our Lord to our first parents caused them to incur death. Verily all the posterity of Adam were slain; for they were given over to punishment and to death. Three days the pelican mourns for its young, and for three days of His passion, in a certain way, the Lord mourned for His own. This bird opened its side and sprinkled its young with blood. too, from the opened side of our Lord flowed out the sacrament of our redemption.' Vita æterna, Deus, mortem gustavit ad horam, Ut miser æternum vivere possit homo.? So, 1 In almost every version of the Physiologus both in Latin and in the vulgar tongues, by Brunetto Latini, p. 217 ff., by St. Epiphanus, Isidor of Seville, Vincent of Beauvais, Hugo of St. Victor, and a thousand others, clerics and laymen, poets and encyclopedists. 2 Wright's ed., pp. 118-119. Beatrice says of St. John the Evangelist: Questi è colui che giacque sopra il petto This is the one who lay upon the breast To the great office from the cross elected. Is Dante following tradition when he takes the Pelican as a symbol of Jesus Christ? The answer may be given by Didron.2 'Christ,' writes Didron, 'is symbolised by the lion, better still by the lamb; but He is only figured by the pelican. The pelican opening his heart to feed his young with his blood is the figure of Jesus who shed in death all the blood in His veins to redeem men. But never does the pelican bear a nimbus, much less a cruciferous nimbus. Never in the court of heaven does the pelican represent Jesus Christ, nor attend in that quality on the events which there come to pass.' 1 Parad. XXV, 112-114. 2 Iconographie Chrétienne, p. 350. The fabulous pelican may be seen in hundreds of medieval illuminations and was often carved on churches. A lectern composed chiefly of a pelican rending its breast may be seen in a church at Haarlem and in that of Ste. Anne at Douai. CHAPTER XLVIII THE SWAN IN an eclogue addressed to the pedant Giovanni del Virgilio, Dante models his style after Virgil, but he introduces an allusion obviously borrowed from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Necessarily our poet's thoughts were forced into the channels suggested by the vocabulary and literary traditions of the old Latin tongue. If, then, Dante introduces a touch of animal life, there is no occasion for seeking an observation of his own, but we should expect only what we get, the faint, far echo of a few verses read in Ovid, and as barren of originality or life in Ovid's lines as in those of Dante. Alphesibæus, a mouth-piece borrowed from Virgil (Ecl. V, 73; VIII, 1), expresses his wonder that Mopsus likes a certain spot, though he can quite understand 'why the snowy birds, joyful in the mildness of heaven and in the marshy valley, like to make Cayster resound.' Quod libeat niveis avibus resonare Caystrum Temperie cali lætis, et valle palustri. - Oxford Dante, p. 189, vss. 18-19. Obviously the idea is based on these verses (with a change of application due to some allegory no longer clear): Estuat Alpheus, ripa Spercheides ardent, Quodque suo Tagus amne vehit, fluit ignibus aurum ; Et quæ Mæonia celebrabant carmine ripas And on these: - Met. II, 250-253. Haud procul Hennæis lacus est a mænibus altæ, -Met. V, 385-387. The swans are snowy white; so they are in Valerius Flaccus (6, 102) olores nivei; and Silvius (13, 116) says: Quæ candore nivem, candore anteirit olores. She who in whiteness surpasses the snow, ness would surpass the swans.' in white No epithet was ever more obvious or oftener used than 'snow-white' of the swan. 'The swan,' declares Isidor of Seville, 'is so called because his feathers are '8 — and all white, for no one remembers a black swan,' Brunetto Latini1 copies him. Of the old poets, Horace 1The Alpheus seethes, the banks of Spercheos glow, and the gold that the Tagus bears in its torrent rolls in flames; and the river birds that had been wont to throng singing on the Mæonian banks were scorched in mid Cayster.' 2 Not far from Henna's walls is a deep lake, called Pergus. More songs of swans the Caystros never hears on its gliding waves.' 3 Etymol. XII, vii, 18, 'Olor autem dictus, quod sit totus plumis albis; nullus enim meminit cygnum nigrum.' ▲ Tresor, p. 213. Brunetto mentions also the beauty of its death song, a myth accepted by Horace (Od. IV, 2, 25), Ovid (Heroid. VII, 1-2), and by the Physiologus,' but doubted by Pliny ('Olorum morte narratur flebilis cantus, falso ut arbitror, aliquot experimentis.' Nat. Hist. 10, 32). |