The Elm and the Vine

In the version by the work's first English translator, Arthur Golding: The subject was commonly painted in Europe between the 16th–18th centuries, and there are examples which feature a vine trained up an elm from Italy, the Netherlands, France and England (see the Gallery below).

[4] This interpretation had been influenced by a first-century CE poem by Antipater of Thessalonica in which a withered plane tree (rather than an elm) recounts how the vine trained about it keeps it green.

[7] Other emblem writers who took up this theme include Otto Vaenius in his Amorum emblemata (1608), where it is interpreted as love continuing after the death of a partner;[8] by Jean Jacques Boissard in his Emblemes latins (1588), where he takes it as a sign of undying friendship;[9] and by Daniel Heinsius in his Emblemata Amatoria (1607), where he makes the tree a plane, following the Greek epigram, and interprets it as the sign of undying love.

[10] Similarly Konstantin Batyushkov, with a history of borrowings from foreign sources, will later speak of receiving a beloved's last embrace "as the tendrils of the vine around the slender elm go winding" in his Russian poem "Elysium" of 1810.

There a scholar picks grapes from the vine trained round the tree, on the other side of which is the Latin device Non Solus (not alone), pointing to the alliance between learning and literature.

[16] Much the same story was versified in the 19th century by the Mexican fabulist Jose Rosas Moreno, then in turn translated in a condensed version by the American poet William Cullen Bryant.