It has been said: 'With the exception of the Bible, there is perhaps no other book in all literature that has been more widely current in every cultivated tongue and among every class of people.' Such currency might be illustrated from many English authors. Two passages from Elizabethan literature may serve as specimens — the one from Spenser, the other from Shakespeare. The former is from the Faerie Queene (I.II.34) :
At last she saw, where he upstarted brave
Out of the well, wherein he drenched lay;
As Eagle fresh out of the Ocean wave,
Where he hath left his plumes all hoary gray,
And deckt himselfe with feathers youthly gay,
Like Eyas hauke up mounts unto the skies,
His newly budded pineons to assay,
And marveiles at himselfe, still as he flies:
So new this new-borne knight to battell new did rise.
The other is from Hamlet (Laertes to the King) :
To his good friends thus wide I'll ope my arms;
And like the kind life-rendering pelican,
Repast them with my blood. [1]
However widely diffused, the symbolism exemplified by the Physiologus is peculiarly at home in the East. Thus Egypt symbolized the sun, with his death at night passing into a rebirth, by the phoenix, which, by a natural extension, came to signify the resurrection. And the Bible not only sends the sluggard to the ant, and bids men consider the lilies of the field, but with a large sweep commands (Job 12.7, 8) : 'Ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee ; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee ; or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee ; and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee.'
- ↑ Alfred de Musset, in La Nuit de Mai, develops the image of the pelican through nearly thirty lines.
