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.

Sourced

• Dear Reader, if you chance to catch a sight
  Of Upas Trees, betake yourself to flight.
  • A Moral Alphabet: U for Upas Tree, Hilaire Belloc.

• 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.
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë.

• 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
  • Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Byron.

• On the blasted heath
  Fell Upas sits, the hydra-tree of death.
  • Loves of the Plants, Erasmus Darwin.

• ‘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...'
  • Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens.
• 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.
  • Martin Chuzzlewit. Charles Dickens.

• 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;
  • Phoenix on the Sword, Robert E. Howard.

• 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.
  • Memory, H.P. Lovecraft

• 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.
  • Mardi. Herman Melville

• "Jerry," said Roger, "You are a upas tree. Your shadow is poisonous!"
  • The Haunted Bookshop. Christopher Morley

the juices of these plants have been mixed with the poisonous pitch of the upas tree. "The Poisonous Garden" [Fyodor Sologub]

• I fear my upas roots have led me out of bounds.
  • The Upas Tree, John Boyle O'Reilly

• 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.
  • Unnatural Death, (1927). Dorothy L. Sayers

• 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."
  • Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1963), P. G. Wodehouse

• 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