67:, was the first to adapt the fable as a polemic against atheism, giving her poem the new title "The Atheist and the Acorn". In place of La Fontaine's introductory reassurance that "God's creation is well made", the poem begins with the opposite proposition, "Methinks this world is oddly made, And every thing’s amiss," as uttered by "a dull presuming atheist". A combative stance replaces genial irony and the piece ends with the grotesque image of a smashed skull letting out its false suppositions.
17:
83:. The piece preserves Anne Finch's title of "The atheist and the acorn" but is otherwise made a light hearted anecdote. It is "one of those refined reasoners, otherwise called Minute Philosophers," who speculates at his ease beneath an oak tree. But he finds, with the circumstance of the falling acorn, "how small a trifle may overturn the systems of mighty philosophers!"
56:. It has been surmised, however, that the ironical author's real target is the weakness of such moral reasoning. This appears to be substantiated by the fact that the argument employed is based on a joke in a farce that was not meant to be taken seriously. In the East, the same joke recommended itself to the compilers of similarly ambivalent stories about
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of which only Norman R. Shapiro tries to give an idea, although at the expense of often paraphrasing the sense and lacking his original's lightness of touch. Paraphrase without the excuse of reproducing the original style is also the approach of the very first translation of the poem into
English by
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earlier in the 17th century. Beginning with the statement that "God's creation is well made", it recounts how a country bumpkin questions intelligent design in the creation by supposing that it would be better if oaks bore pumpkins and feeble vines supported acorns. He falls asleep beneath the tree
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too makes of her adult version more of a recreation than an exact translation. An admirer of her work places this fable among her more successful interpretations, which he judges as “worth putting up as running mates or rivals of the original...that delight without halting to instruct explicitly”.
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in 1797. Two gardeners debate the wisdom of creation and the free thinker becomes convinced that "God is wiser far than me" at the thought of the harm that a shower of "pompions" might have done to his head. Charles Linley the younger (1834–69) was later to rewrite the story of "The acorn and the
167:'s classic illustration of La Fontaine's fable, dating originally from the 1730s, showed the peasant lying face upward asleep beneath an oak. It was this interpretation that was later followed in the 18th century Portuguese tiles illustrating the fables that line the cloisters of the
99:(London 1864), with the same moral purpose. His conclusion is, "With rev'rent glance Creation scan, And learn thy littleness, O Man!" The same solemnity underlies the unascribed prose retelling at the head of the section on creation in yet another work of popular theology,
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of 1754, Charles Denis returns to the title "The acorn and the pumpkin" and a more lightly nuanced spirit. "Whatever is, is right" is its opening proposition, and the repentant "bumpkin" is finally brought to "give
Providence its due". In the same year of 1754,
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and tries to give a sense of La
Fontaine's light heartedness. Its resulting colloquiality makes the protagonist a little too rustic, replacing as it does the original's simple exclamation “Oh! Oh!” with “Gosh!” and having him refer to himself as “Clever me".
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Less programmatic translations of the fable show the various strategies employed by fellow poets to give a sense of La
Fontaine's graceful wit. The French is written in an approximation of irregularly rhyming
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whose aim is to characterise the "Self conceited
Country Bumkin” of the fable. La Fontaine's starting point is deferred by his interpreter to the six-line moral drawn at the end, beginning
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In
England, however, the fable was taken much more seriously as support for the teleological argument being put forward by theologians and philosophers at about that time.
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The fable is one of the few by La
Fontaine without a certain origin, although it is generally acknowledged that it owes something to a piece of street farce by
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preferred to show the rustic philosopher pondering the acorn that has just fallen on his head as he lies beside a pumpkin. On the other hand, in his 1881
103:, published in New York in 1904. The anecdote illustrates the proposition with which it begins, that "The wisdom of God is displayed in creation."
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35:, published in his second volume (IX.4) in 1679. In English especially, new versions of the story were written to support the
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and is awakened by the fall of an acorn, taking the comparative lack of injury he suffers as sufficient evidence of
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90:. She made her poem "The two gardeners" a completely new treatment of the subject and published it as one of her
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William
Trowbridge Larned's version for children is written in four regularly rhymed six-lined stanzas in
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By the end of the 18th century the story was again returned to the sphere of popular theology by
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Jules
Sebastien-Lepage's illustration of La Fontaine's fable, 1881. Art Institute of Chicago
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for creation favoured by
English thinkers from the end of the 17th century onwards.
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in Lisbon. In his line engraving for a 1931 English edition of the fables,
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Aesop Dress'd, or a collection of fables writ in familiar verse,
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Fables in Rhyme for Little Folks from the French of La Fontaine
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included a prose version in the modern fables section of his
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Anecdotes and Examples illustrating the Catholic catechism
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The English Fable: Aesop and Literary Culture, 1651-1740
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212:Poetry in France: metamorphoses of a muse
210:Peter France, “The poet as a teacher” in
81:Select fables of Esop and other fabulists
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140:There's nothing in't, but what is good.
70:In his version of La Fontaine in the
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134:The World's vast Fabrick is so well
442:Arguments for the existence of God
382:Marianne Moore: The Poet's Advance
65:Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea
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292:University of Oxford text archive
137:Contrived by its Creator's Skill;
200:Elizur Wright translation online
169:Monastery of SĂŁo Vicente de Fora
339:, University of Illinois 1997,
236:Specimens of British Poetesses
179:, the French Realist painter,
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384:, Princeton University 1978,
255:, Cambridge University 1996,
95:pumpkin" for children in his
121:in 1704. This is written in
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337:50 Fables of La Fontaine
224:"Walnuts and watermelons"
214:, Edinburgh U 1992, p.138
29:Le gland et la citrouille
25:The Acorn and the Pumpkin
173:Stephen Frederick Gooden
160:Artistic interpretations
251:Jayne Elizabeth Lewis,
92:Cheap Repository Tracts
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452:Squashes and pumpkins
119:Bernard de Mandeville
37:teleological argument
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437:La Fontaine's Fables
380:Laurence Stapleton,
181:Jules Bastien-Lepage
33:La Fontaine's Fables
165:Jean-Baptiste Oudry
107:Wit in translation
97:Old Saws Newly Set
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397:Joconde catalogue
368:, New York 1918,
54:divine providence
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447:Fictional plants
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58:Nasreddin Hodja
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72:Select Fables
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123:octosyllabic
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31:, is one of
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27:, in French
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419:View online
326:Online text
177:watercolour
88:Hannah More
431:Categories
279:Fable 15,
187:References
114:vers libre
370:Gutenberg
267:Fable 3,
257:pp.139-40
315:pp.39-40
303:pp.12-13
269:pp.16-18
241:pp.134-6
126:couplets
281:pp.93-4
49:Tabarin
386:p.178
341:p.93
355:p.4
433::
60:.
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