Upas

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 sight
  Of 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 depraved
  All 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 heath
  Fell 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-tree
  And, 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 sweeps
  away with death upon its back.
  • Alexander Pushkin, The Upas Tree