“Sylli. If you forsake me,
Send me word, that I may provide a willow garland
To wear when I drown myself.”
Massinger’s Maid of Honour, a. iv. s. 5, 1631.
And in the same play Sylli, who thinks himself the preferred lover, says to his rival:—
“You may cry willow, willow!”—Ibid., a. v. s. 1.
Shakespeare uses the same emblem frequently, particularly in Desdemona’s famous willow song. There is a quaint ballad which an old Northumberland woman used to sing, but which we have never seen in print: it begins as follows:—
“Young men are false, and they are so deceitful:
Young men are false, and they seldom will prove true;
For wi’ wrangling and jangling, their minds are always changing,
They’re always seeking for some pretty girl that’s new.
It’s all round my hat, I will wear a green willow,
It’s all round my hat for a twelvemonth and a day;
If any one should ask you the reason why I wear it,
Oh! tell them I have been slighted by my own true love.”
Douce, in his “Illustrations to Shakespeare,” says:—This tree might have been chosen as the symbol of sadness from the verse in Psalm cxxxvii.: “We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof;” or else from a coincidence between the weeping willow and falling tears. Another reason has been assigned: the Agnus castus or vitex was supposed by the ancients to promote chastity, “and the willow being of a much like nature,” says an old writer, “it is yet a custom that he which is deprived of his love must wear a willow garland.”—Swan’s Speculum Mundi, ch. vi. sec. 4. 1635.
The frequency of the sign of the Yew Tree is not to be attributed to its association with the churchyard, but to its being the wood from which those famous bows were made that did such execution at Agincourt and Poictiers, and wherever the English armies trod the field before the invention of gunpowder. So great was the patronage our early kings granted to the practice of the bow, that the patten-makers, by an Act of Parliament of 4 Henry V., were forbidden, under a penalty of £5, to use in their craft any kind of wood fit to make arrows of.
The Cotton Tree is a sign generally put up in the neighbourhood of cotton factories, as at Manchester. The Palm Tree is one of the oldest symbols known: it was used as such by the Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, and by them transmitted to the early Christians. St Ambrosius, in a very forcible image, compares the life of an early and faithful Christian to the palm tree, rough and rugged below, like its stem, but increasing in beauty upwards, where it bears heavenly fruit. It might also illustrate a more homely truth, namely, that business cannot flourish without patronage and custom; thus, Camerarius says:—