One for Sorrow (3 page)

Dog Days bright and clear

indicate a happy year.

But when accompanied by rain, for

better times our hopes are vain.

The Old Farmer's Almanack
, which has been published in the United States since 1792, describes the dog days as the forty days beginning, in the Northern Hemisphere, on 3 July and ending 11 August . (The dates vary according to latitude and climate.) They were named ‘dog days' by the ancient Greeks after the dog star Sirius, the brightest in the constellation Canis Major (Big Dog), and coincided with the days on which Sirius rose with the sun. The Greeks and Romans believed that the hot, sultry weather of midsummer was created by Sirius and it was seen as an evil time, when the high temperatures turned people mad.
    Bright, clear days at this time of year mean that cereal crops will be in prime condition by harvest time, which occurs between August and October, and that fruit crops will be perfectly ripened. In the fourteenth century, wet weather in midsummer was an ill omen for the year ahead for similarly practical reasons. Warmth and moisture in combination create a perfect breeding ground for bacteria and in the days before antibiotics, infectious diseases were killers. Damp air in the dog days also meant that preserving meat became impossible: before refrigeration, meat was cured using salt to make it last into the lean winter months, but to obtain salt sea water had to be evaporated slowly in warm, dry conditions; without it meat rotted and people went hungry. In 1315, rains that began in the spring lasted throughout the summer and caused crop failures and salt shortages that resulted in Europe's Great Famine, which caused the deaths of millions of people.
    These days we still use the phrase to refer to the long, sultry summer months. We also now use the term ‘dog days' to describe any period of stagnation.

   

In the modern world of global travel the literal meaning of this proverb remains just as true as it was in our maritime past, and the deeper allusion to the journey of life and the relief or satisfaction we feel when we reach the end of a difficult task or period of time chimes with modern experience. Once made, the journey can be viewed in accordance with the French saying, ‘What was hard to endure is sweet to recall.'
    The nautical English adage, which broadly means the greater the trouble the more appreciated the reward, was recorded by Thomas Fuller, a scholar, writer and doctor who studied at Queens' College Cambridge and who practised medicine as well as compiling
Gnomologia: Adagies and Proverbs, Wise Sentences and Witty Sayings,
published in London in 1732. In the preface he writes,
    ‘. . . all I dare undertake is to give you a collection of such remarkable sentences and sayings as are usual and useful in conversation and business . . . it has been my constant custom to note down and record whatever I thought of myself, or received from men or books worth preserving.'
    ‘The worse the passage the more welcome the port' would have rung true for eighteenth-century seafarers, who faced cramped conditions and voyages that took months, but it also succinctly expresses something we recognize from our own hard-won experience.

When the peacock loudly bawls

Soon we'll have both rain and squalls.

Peacocks feature frequently in folklore: in Islamic legend a peacock stands guard at the gates of paradise; in the Middle East they were viewed as the messengers of God, and in pagan mythology they are a symbol of rebirth. In many cultures the eyes at the ends of their feathers were thought to represent the all-seeing eye, which led to the belief that the bird was a powerful prophet.
    This saying blends such mythological wisdom with the countryman's careful observation of the reactions of birds and animals to changes in the weather. Peacocks are said to dance and sing when they see rain clouds, though this behaviour occurs frequently throughout the mating season, which begins in spring and ends in early autumn. The key to understanding the origin of this phrase may be the word ‘loudly'. Sound travels better through air that is dense with moisture than it does through dry air so before rain the peacock's cry seems louder and travels further than usual.
    A squall or short windstorm is also usually preceded by a drop in atmospheric pressure, to which animals are more sensitive than humans. Low pressure of the sort that heralds the arrival of a sudden squall may also be responsible for a bit of extra posturing from peacocks, as they sense the imminent arrival of gusty weather.

   

The allegorical symbolism of the rose, with its blend of beauty and spikiness, has earned it mythical status in almost every civilization. Rose petals, rose oil and rose water all feature in Greek, Roman and early European legend; depictions of roses can be found in Egyptian tombs and in Persia, one of the countries where the flower is thought to have first been cultivated, Sufi poetry records that the rose represented life itself. This saying may in fact have its roots in the ancient Persian proverb ‘He who wants a rose must respect the thorn'.
    Our version of the phrase was in use in England by the first half of the fifteenth century, when the poet and Benedictine monk John Lydgate, a pupil of Chaucer, wrote a translation of the work of Italian poet Boccaccio which included the line:

There is no rose . . . in garden,
but there be sum thorne.

The Italian proverb
‘non c'e
 rosa senza spine'
is therefore a likely source, though Lydgate is thought to have made his translation from a French paraphrasing of Boccaccio's work, so our proverb may come from the French ‘
pas de rose sans épine'
. There are subtle variations in interpretations of the phrase; religious readings take from it a lesson that hardship and sacrifice must be endured in order to achieve perfection, while in modern secular usage it is generally read as warning that all good things have a downside. You may land a dream job – to find that your immediate superior is a vindictive bully; you may move into a beautiful house – to find that you have the proverbial ‘neighbours from hell', and so on.

This famous saying is often credited to the first-century
bc
Roman aphorist Publilius Syrus as his maxim 524 –
Saxum volutum non obducitur musco
– though there is in fact no written record to confirm its provenance. A similar adage appears in one version of
Piers Plowman
(
c.
1360-1387): ‘selden Moseþ þe  Marbelston  þat men ofte treden' (‘seldom does the marble-stone that is often trodden on become mossy'), and
Queen Elizabeth's Academy
, by Sir Humphrey Gilbert (a proposal he presented to the Queen in 1573 for an academy in London, which still exists today as Gresham College) cites 1460 as a date for ‘Syldon mossyth the stone þat oftyn ys tornnyd & wende' – ‘Seldom does the stone become mossy that is often turned and rolled'.)
    It first appeared in the form we recognize today in Erasmus's  
Adagia
, published around 1500, which has the line: ‘
Musco lapis volutus haud obducitur'
, meaning ‘A stone set rolling is not covered with moss.' The English translation was included in the Tudor playwright John Heywood's 1546 collection of proverbs,
A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the Englishe tongue
, as ‘The rollyng stone neuer gatherth mosse'.
    For hundreds of years the proverbial meaning was straightforward. Moss grows very slowly from spores which need time to anchor themselves, so a still, undisturbed stone makes a good foundation for moss to flourish; similarly, a fruitful, productive life can only come from putting down roots and establishing yourself in one place, if you're a rolling stone, you'll have nothing to show for yourself.
    By the early sixteenth century the term ‘rolling stone' had become synonymous with vagabond or wastrel and this interpretation still holds. But when legendary Blues musician Muddy Waters labelled himself a Rollin' Stone, there was a section of society that thought it sounded like a good thing to be. By the time the Rolling Stones used Waters's song as their band name, the phrase was associated with being free-spirited and unencumbered by responsibility. Today the phrase is often used as a justification for constant change and chimes with a modern notion that it's preferable not to tie yourself down.

   

A modern rendition might be: Vows made in extreme circumstances are forgotten when the situation normalizes, a sentence which illustrates, by contrast, the lyrical merit of traditional sayings. In his
Works
(published 1629), the puritan Thomas Adams (1583-1652) wrote: ‘God had need to take what deuotion he can get at our hands in our misery; for when prosperity returnes, wee forget our vowes.' And Thomas Fuller, the churchman and historian (1608–1661), used the proverb in his
Historie of the Holy Warre
(1647), when he remarked of some cardinals, who had vowed never more to take bribes or live ‘so viciously' while the Holy Land was under Turkish rule, that ‘these mariners' vows ended with the tempest' .
    The saying expresses a universal sentiment found in many cultures. The Japanese have a phrase, ‘Nodo-moto sugureba asusa wo wasureru': ‘After it has passed the throat the hotness of it is forgotten'.
    A biblical source for the idea of vows made with a view to ensure a prospective advantage and vows occasioned by fear of some dreaded calamity was noted in the dramatically illustrated publication,
The Sunday at Home: a Family Magazine for Sabbath Reading
:
‘
The sailors of the ship in which Jonah attempted to flee from God and his duty, we are told “feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the Lord, and made vows” (Jonah i. 16, Authorized King James Bible, 1611). Ever since the days of Jonah, it has been characteristic of this class [sailors] to make sudden vows; for living much on a treacherous element, which is ever liable to be agitated by quick and dangerous storms, when these arise and destruction is imminent the frightened mariner bethinks himself of his neglected duty and makes vows to his god. But alas, how often are the vows made in storms forgotten in calms.'

This well known aphorism dates back to the twelfth century or earlier, and its moral message was already well established by the time it appeared in a collection of Old English Homilies in 1175 as:

Hwa is thet mei thet hors wettrien the him self nule drinken.
(Who is it that can give water to a horse that won't drink of his own will?)

Unlike most other proverbs in use that early this one appears to have its origins in Old English rather than Latin or Greek, which has led some sources to cite it as the oldest truly English proverb still in use today.
    Though not directly biblical, it did have religious significance and was originally used to convey the point that while believers or preachers can do everything in their power to persuade ‘sinners' to accept the word of God, the final decision on how to live will always be determined by the will of the individual. These days we still use the phrase in contexts where one person is trying to influence another for their own good, usually by offering advice or providing the circumstances they need in order to do the right thing. In recent years the phrase has even found its way into the modern workplace, where it's employed to convey the frustration of trying to effect change where people or organizations are stuck in their ways.