Seeing the tree through its nymph
the old Greeks could not see the trees for the dryads
The joke turns the familiar complaint about missing the wood for the trees into a claim that mythical beings can intensify attention to nature. A concrete ancient comparison is the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, lines 256–273: the mountain nymphs who will rear Aphrodite's child have lives joined to particular trees. Trees grow when they are born; human beings treat the groves as sacred and refrain from cutting them; tree and nymph eventually die together. The mythical presence therefore carries an attention to growth, vulnerability and restraint, rather than simply obscuring the vegetation. Hymn V, Evelyn-White translation, p. 425. This illustrates Chesterton's point without establishing his generalization about all ancient or modern poets. The inspected witness is the 1920 reprint of Hugh G. Evelyn-White's translation, first printed in 1914; it is evidence for the ancient story, not a source available to Orthodoxy in 1908.
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