This morning I read elsewhere in Virgil’s Aeneid – obviously I can’t keep away from it – Aeneas’ story of coming to that country to which his fellow Trojan Polydorus had earlier journeyed during Troy’s siege, in order to place in care of the King of Thrace a store of gold. Aeneas found, near where he was preparing a sacrifice to the Deities, a mound of earth with thickets of cornel and a cluster of myrtle-stems crowning it. Attempting to wrench some of this green growth out to make a leafy altar-covering, Aeneas to his horror saw dark blood oozing from the broken roots. Praying to avert this omen’s power, he tried again, and now heard a piteous human voice which revealed itself as that of Polydorus. He had been murdered and buried here by the avaricious and savage King to whom he had come in good faith. He begged Aeneas to cease rending his transformed corpse further.
My first, careless thought was that this does take some shine off Dante Alighieri’s originality. Something I’ve never forgotten from the Inferno in his C14th Commedia is the Wood of the Suicides. The shades of the poor self-slayers have been turned into bare trees, and when Dante breaks off a twig it bleeds and he hears the sufferer speak from the tree. Dante as poet indeed owes a great deal to Virgil as poet, gaining from him the essential notion of journeying to the Underworld and speaking to the dead, though Virgil himself gained it from the far more ancient Homer. Yet, though the notion of Homer and Virgil chiding Dante in Hell for stealing their ideas has another kind of comedy to it, in fact Dante’s world was one where learning was a living stream in which all shared. Almost certainly he was alluding, displaying his classical knowledge.
But the coincidence! My old friend the painter David Wilson, who died seventeen years ago and far too young, came up last week in a conversation I was having with a former student of his, out in the central west of the state. It was a sentimental conversation and I diverted from my route back home to the little bush cemetery where David is buried, near Rockley. Only once, long ago, had I revisited it after the interment.
Land sakes, but I couldn’t find him. Before a watchful magpie family I checked every plaque and headstone across those couple of acres of dry but well-tended grass, amid scattered shadeless box eucalypts in a hot sun, but nothing identified him. I left perplexed.
On the phone to another friend, I learned the remarkable truth.
Dear David has become a tree.
There is a metal-spoke enclosure around him, though with no identification, and in fact I had stood right beside it. But the space within is almost entirely occupied by a large and spreading shrubby tree, shady and green. As with Rupert Brooke, there is in that rich earth a richer dust concealed.
David, the best and kindest of men, has no affinity with Polydorus or Dante’s Wood. Yet I’m sure I’d now have a primitive inhibition, when next I visit, about breaking off any of his twigs.