Literary notes about sap (AI summary)
Writers have long exploited the polysemous nature of “sap,” employing it both in a literal botanical sense and as a rich metaphor for life, energy, or its depletion. In naturalistic and scientific works, “sap” refers to the nourishing fluid coursing through a tree’s veins, evoking images of renewal and growth as seen when it is described as ascending in the trees [1], or when its yield indicates a tree’s quality [2]. In architectural treatises and botanical texts, the substance serves as a marker of usefulness and vitality ([3], [4]), while in poetic and metaphorical passages, it symbolizes youthful vigor and even the draining of one’s inner force, as when living energy is described as being “sapped” by dissipation or worry ([5], [6]). The versatile term is thus intertwined with both the physical world and the human condition, bridging concrete descriptions with abstract, emotive qualities ([7], [8]).
- The feel of spring was in the air, the feel of growing life under the snow, of sap ascending in the trees, of buds bursting the shackles of the frost.
— from White Fang by Jack London - The yield of sap varies with the quality of the tree and the season of the year.
— from Castes and Tribes of Southern India. Vol. 7 of 7 by Edgar Thurston - Then and not till then, the tree being drained dry and the sap no longer dripping, let it be felled and it will be in the highest state of usefulness.
— from The Ten Books on Architecture by Vitruvius Pollio - Botanical Description .—A tree, 20° or more in height, with abundant milky sap.
— from The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines by T. H. Pardo de Tavera - He was too young, too strong, too full of the sap of living, to submit so easily to the destruction of his hopes.
— from Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton - Nothing will sap one's vitality and blight one's ambition or detract from one's real power in the world more than the worrying habit.
— from Pushing to the Front by Orison Swett Marden - The press, that giant machine, which incessantly pumps all the intellectual sap of society, belches forth without pause fresh materials for its work.
— from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo - Into the world of strife, Out of this lonely life That of senses and sap has betrayed thee, They would persuade thee.
— from Faust [part 1]. Translated Into English in the Original Metres by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
