Mojo, The Bard, & Me

Thus yields the cedar to the axe's edge,

Whose arms gave shelter to the princely eagle,
Under whose shade the ramping lion slept,
Whose top-branch overpeer'd Jove's spreading tree
And kept low shrubs from winter's powerful wind.

Earl of Warwick

King Henry The Sixth Part III                                       Act V, scene ii    Line 15

Warwick is, of course, talking about dying. And he is dying. He’s lying on the battlefield and he’ll be speaking his last words a few lines down. In today’s Totally Random passage he’s comparing himself to a cedar tree. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me he’s painting a pretty noble picture of himself. And why cedar? There must be a reason that Will picked the cedar. Just because it fit into the Iambic pentameter scheme (it does). But there must have been other choices. Maple? That would work. Oak, birch, those don’t work with the meter. But anyway.

I’m pretty sure that the princely eagle and the ramping lion refer to someone in this play, but I’m also pretty sure I don’t know who. And he’s saying he was taller than Jove’s spreading tree? That’s going out on a limb, if you’ll excuse the pun. And he protected the low shrubs from the powerful wind. I’m guessing the powerful wind and the low shrubs refer to someone or something. Again, dunno what. I’ll look it up and see if I can find anything on this. In the meantime, it’s all very nice sounding, don’t you think?

Well I tried to find a picture of the cedar tree in the front yard of the house I grew up in, but no luck. So I give you this pic of a sequoia. Now if Warwick really wanted to compare himself to something, he should have gone for this, not some scraggly cedar. Of course, they didn't have sequoias in England back then, and they still don't. But just the same, this is a real tree.