In our walks in the Northwest Woods we have encountered quite a number of delightful personages (although we hesitate to anthropomorphize any more than we have already done, and prefer the term, arborescences) but none took us by quite so much surprise as King Edward VII, as pictured above.
Very well, to be precise, the above illustration is not of the King himself, but the flowering shrub named in his honor, Ribes sanguineum, or King Edward VII Flowering Currant, pink variety.
It was a fortuitous encounter since, until that moment, we had believed that the only King of the Forest was the hapless fellow pictured below.
Here is his story.
The King of the Forest had stood at the highest point of the Northwest Woods, tall upon the particular slope of woods of which he was King. He was vastly proud, and partly for good reason. He was the tallest of the many trees in the Northwest Woods, and he was quite old and wide of trunk, though not The Oldest, nor Largest, nor Wisest (this was Ancestor Tree’s distinction). Still, for a while, the King ruled, and took great pleasure in his superiority.
His tree subjects down below him grew and sometimes even flourished in his company. Many of his subjects believed that his tall, strong trunk provided protection against the powerful storms that now and then struck the Northwest Woods, and even though there were trees who grumbled that he took up a disproportionate share of the sun and water and nutrients in their forest, mostly his subjects just hoped to make do themselves and grow to their fullest.
The King, actually, paid very little attention to what his subjects thought, mostly because he didn’t have to. Kings of that sort (and others less blue-blooded) tend to live in their own little worlds, and it usually doesn’t much matter to them what others think.
Time, however, has a mind of its own, and one day, assailed by a Storm unlike any other that had descended upon the Northwest Woods, the King was utterly uprooted and blown over.
As he fell, he crashed upon his tree subjects below, which in turn caused them to fall, and they in turn crashed upon others, until the entire kingdom was uprooted and the slope was nothing but broken, battered trunks, piled atop each other.
We cannot help but wonder if perhaps the King had lived among his subjects, rather than above and apart from them, he would not have destroyed them all when he fell, but that is for those wiser than we to say. Certainly he could have benefited from the example of King Edward VII, after whom the Edwardian period is named and who is pictured most charmingly below as a young boy.
It turns out this Edward VII was quite the dashing figure, having romanced many of the most prominent lovelies of the time, and more importantly, having been (haplessly, as it turns out) so committed to preventing World War I that he was called the "Peacemaker," thereby proving that "Make love, not war" has been espoused much longer than we assumed.
Incidentally, for all of you whose appendix (the non-literary sort) has been removed, it turns out you have none other than Edward VII to thank. The good King was stricken with appendicitis two days before his marriage to the lovely (but evidently insufficient) Princess Alexandra of Denmark (see picture below).
and was among the first beneficiaries of surgery for the condition (the medical one, not the marital). At that time appendicitis was not treated surgically and was frequently fatal, but his surgeon, Sir. Frederick Treves, made a small incision and successfully drained Edward's appendix, forging the way for future treatment.
Now that we think about it, for that bit of trivia we probably have more reason to thank his surgeon than Edward himself (thereby making it a bit of Treve-ia, we wonder?).
As a final tribute to a figure we have otherwise lived a lifetime ignorant of, but whom we now admire considerably, those of us who are musicians of a Marxist bent will appreciate that he was a founder of the Royal College of Music, affirming, "Class can no longer stand apart from class ... I claim for music that it produces that union of feeling which I much desire to promote."
We think our heretofore King of the Forest might have learned wisely from this sentiment, were he so disposed.
No comments:
Post a Comment