A Rose a Day No. 7
Persian painting of a rose bush and nightingale. Nineteenth Century.
The association between the rose and the nightingle in Persian literature is very ancient. But it was especially popular during the Safavid [1501-1722] and Qajar [1785-1925] eras.The rose is the beloved and the nightingale the lover, and this could be understood on scared or profane levels. In relation to the former, when Islam became the dominant religion in the region the rose became known as Gol Mohammadi – Muhammed’s Rose, and was a staple especially of Sufi literature (as we will see in a future post) Symbolically, the relationship pits the beautiful and proud, but often cruel rose (it has thorns) against the nightingale which sings perpetually of its amorous longing and devotion. A famous version of the story tells of how the rose became red: the nightigale pricks its breast and the blood stains the rose’s petals.
In this painting, as is usually the case in Persian art, the rose is very clearly a Damask. This rose is one of the most important of the ‘Western’ (as opposed to ‘Eastern’ or Chinese) roses. It is a large, straggly bush, and the flowers of the different varieties in the family can be single or semi-double. They have a delicate pink hue, and tend to nod downwards (although not here). But most importantly, as far as its practial usefulness is concerned, the Damask has a strong, pleasantly sweet fragrance, and was from ancient times much sought after for the production of rose-water, rose oil, and cosmetics, and especially cultivated profusely as a cash-crop in what are now Iran and Syria. It perhaps takes its familiar European name from the city of Damascus.
Recent DNA analysis has revealed that the Damask is the result of the union not of two but of three species roses, and two distinct stages of pollination, involving Rosa moschata, Rosa gallica, and Rosa fedtschenkoana. In the first stage, a Rosa moschata was pollinated by a Gallica, and this mutation was then pollinated by a Fedtschenkoana, bringing into existence at some unknown time and region the rose we now call the Damask.
Oscar Wilde published a short story entitled ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (1888), in which retells the old Persian story. But in his version the poor nightingale sacrifices itself for the sake of a lovelorn but overly intellectual student who is pinning for the delightful but superficial daughter of his professor. All she needs to make her happy, the student overhears the young lady say, is one red rose. But as there are only white ones available, the student feels he cannot court her. The nightingale listens and sees him weeping, and filled with compassion decides to help by piecing its own heart with the thorn of a white rose, thereby willingly sacrificing its own life. The red rose is created. The student plucks it, and then hastens to give it to his love interest. But she just laughs at him, and scoffs that the chamberlain’s nephew has already given her something much more to her taste: real jewels. “Why, I don't believe you have even got silver buckles to your shoes as the Chamberlain's nephew has”, she mocks. As a result of this rebuff Wilde’s student is led to lament:
What a silly thing Love is…… It is not half as useful as Logic, for it does not prove anything, and it is always telling one of things that are not going to happen, and making one believe things that are not true. In fact, it is quite unpractical, and, as in this age to be practical is everything, I shall go back to Philosophy and study Metaphysics.
The purpose of Wilde’s story is to stress that the nightingale has risen above the young people’s sentimental failings through useless sacrifice. Wilde casts it as an allegory of the struggle between crass materialism and the transcendent power of art-for-art’s-sake, equating beauty with a higher universal truth lying above a material world soiled by petty dreams and selfish vices.