Upas

thumb|Leaves from the Antiaria toxicaria )Upas) Upas, from the Javanese word for "poison", refers to an evergreen tree known as Antiaris toxicaria. A native of southeastern Asia with highly poisonous sap. it is the source of the following literary allusions. Quotes Dear Reader, if you chance to catch a sightOf Upas Trees, betake yourself to flight. Hilaire Belloc. A Moral Alphabet: U for Upas Tree Concealing the mad-woman's neighbourhood from you, however, was something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down near an upas-tree: that demon's vicinage is poisoned, and always was. Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre, Chapter XXVII The harmony of things, – this hard decree,This uneradicable taint of sin,This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be Byron. Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto the Fourth, 1126-1134 Look up! the proof is round you written large;Your Faith is in the balance wanting found;Your shipless seas confess it; bridgeless streams;Your wasted wealth of ore, and moor, and bay.Beneath the Upas shade of Faith depravedAll things lie dead -- wealth, comfort, freedom, power. Aubrey Thomas de Vere. "The Sisters; or, Weal in Woe: An Irish Tale" in The Sisters, Inisfail, and Other Poems (1861), pp. 3-42. On the blasted heathFell Upas sits, the hydra-tree of death. Erasmus Darwin, "Loves of the Plants". In E. Cobham Brewer 1810–1897, [Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.] (1898), iii. 233. ‘When you first came upon me, sir, in the Lodge, this day, more as if an Upas tree had been made a capture of than a private defendant, such mingled streams of feelings broke loose again within me, that everything was for the first few minutes swept away before them, and I was going round and round in a vortex...' Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit sun had set upon him; that the billows had rolled over him; that the car of Juggernaut had crushed him, and also that the deadly Upas tree of Java had blighted him. Charles Dickens. Martin Chuzzlewit. Chapter 32. When the world was young and men were weak, and the fiends of the night walked free,I strove with Set by fire and steel and the juice of the upas-tree; Robert E. Howard. The Phoenix on the Sword. Chapter IV In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree. H.P. Lovecraft, Memory, 1919 Farther on, there frowned a grove of blended banian boughs, thick-ranked manchineels, and many a upas; their summits gilded by the sun; but below, deep shadows, darkening night-shade ferns, and mandrakes. Herman Melville, Mardi. Mardi Volume II Chapter III "Jerry," said Roger, "You are a upas tree. Your shadow is poisonous!" Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop. the juices of these plants have been mixed with the poisonous pitch of the upas tree. Fyodor Sologub, "The Poisonous Garden" I fear my upas roots have led me out of bounds. John Boyle O'Reilly, The Upas Tree If you... go on killing everyone you meet till people begin to think you're first cousin to an upas tree, naturally you're found out in the end. Dorothy L. Sayers, Unnatural Death (1927). There Good, a faithless gardener of God,Watered with virtue the world's upas-treeAnd, careful of the outward word and act,Engrafted his hypocrite blooms on native ill. Sri Aurobindo,Savitri (Pg 222) "What's the tree I read about somewhere that does you in if you sit under it?", to which Jeeves replies, "The upas tree, sir." Bertie rejoins, "She's a female upas tree. It's not safe to come near her." P. G. Wodehouse, Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963) No bird flies near, no tiger creeps;alone the whirlwind, wild and black,assails the tree of death and sweepsaway with death upon its back. Alexander Pushkin, The Upas Tree External links Antiaris toxicaria upas Category:Plants