That Same Chamomile Crushed Underfoot

Shakespeare, John Lyly, Dean Young, my nonna, and the ancients

There’s the book I’m contracted to write and then there’s this, a continuing series dedicated to interesting, generally unusable tidbits of research, memory, and discovery that I come across as I write a book on herbal support for emotional health. What I love about all of this plant research—perhaps more than the clinical aspects of plant medicine (ssh! don’t tell anyone that)—are the literary and cultural histories I’m uncovering through following human interaction with plants across time and space. It’s like I can be the Magnum PI or Hercules Poirot of the plant world.

Chamomile at 9 o’clock. [Photo by Alice Pasqual on Unsplash]

1.

When I was small, there were always large glass jars of finely ground chamomile flowers in my nonna’s kitchen cabinets. The chamomile was from Italy where Nonna would buy it on visits, or maybe some cousin would occasionally send it to her, too.

I don’t know what made this Italian chamomile so special, though in the 1980’s, maybe it was harder to find in American grocery stores than it is now. Maybe lugging it across the ocean in plastic bags alongside wheels of cheese wrapped in aluminum foil was the way to go. Can we even lug cheese across the ocean anymore?

Nonna would make this precious tea anytime I had stomach upset. Which was, well, a lot. Basically every holiday we visited Connecticut. I’d get a migraine and throw up for a whole day—those visits were tense between the grown ups. Real tense. (Chamomile never helped once I started throwing up, but nothing ever has except a visit to the ER and an IV full of knock-me-out.)

Nonna called it cup-o-mee-lay. Not Italian, not English. Just her own creation. It didn’t work for my migraine vomiting, but chamomile—aka ground apple, maythen, mayweed—has been used for centuries to calm the nerves and settle the stomach. In fact, it’s best used for upset stomach and other GI problems caused by anxiety or nerves.

I can still hear Nonna say in her thick accent, “Drink some cup-o-mee-lay. It will settle your stomach.”

Nowadays, I use it all the time as a before-bed calmer. Add a mild sedative like passionflower or California poppy, and we’re in business.

And there is nothing like growing your own chamomile and squeezing the flowers between your fingers to release the scent of apple. Apple!

Photo by Michael Held on Unsplash

2.

You might remember when I was obsessing on finding a species of Plantago in the Papyrus Ebers. Here are a couple of posts about that: Egyptology and Research Interlude.

Well, I’m reading everywhere that chamomile is in the Papyrus Ebers too. But I swear it’s not. I have two definitive annotated translations plus a text about the Ebers that catalogs the plants in it. Nada.

I think there’s sufficient evidence that the ancient Egyptians did use chamomile for all sorts of medicinal and cosmetic purposes, from embalming oil to skincare (is that the same thing?), but I can’t find it in the Ebers.

This is an interesting phenomenon. I see it a lot. A “factoid” that gets stuck and becomes so ubiquitous that it must be true. People reuse it without going to the source. Then you have this whole mythology that seems true but isn’t.

Photo by Ellie Ellien on Unsplash

3.

Finally, a little bit of obscure poetic telescoping involving chamomile. In Shakespeare’s play Henry IV Part I, Falstaff, playing King Henry in a mock conversation in a pub with Prince Hal, says this:

“For though the camomile, the more it is trodden on, the faster it grows, so youth, the more it is wasted, the sooner it wears.”—Shakespeare, 1590s

Which is kind of scrap of nothing. The more you step on chamomile the faster it grows—just like youth, the more it is wasted (stepped on), the sooner it’s gone (faster it grows)?

Almost a false equivalency. At best, a stretch gilded to sound like wisdom.

Turns out, at least according to Robert Nares in his work A glossary; or, Collection of words, phrases, names, and allusions to customs, proverbs, &c., which have been thought to require illustration, in the works of English authors, particularly Shakespeare and his contemporaries, otherwise known as A Glossary (1822), that Shakespeare was making fun of popular literature of the day. He was parodying John Lyly who wrote,

"Though the camomile, the more it is trodden and pressed down, the more it spreadeth; yet the violet, the oftener it is handled and touched, the sooner it withereth and decayeth.”—Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, 1578

You know, just some good ol’ Elizabethan mockery. I imagine Shakespeare was not so subtly saying that the fashionable literature didn’t have a whole lot of substance. These days, Wikipedia calls Euphues “didactic romance,” so it seems as though Shakespeare was onto something. As per usual. That dude.

So, finally, and I hope this isn’t too much of a stretch, I ran across this Dean Young poem, “Dear Bob,” and look at line 5: “same chamomile crushed underfoot...”

Dear Bob,

The mountain thinks it’s the same
without you but it’s wrong. Maybe
the same stars whisking themselves
further off, the darker the brighter,
same chamomile crushed underfoot
but the little, wiry dog we loved
has preceded us into paradise, not
that I expect to join her even though
my own crappy heart’s worse, running’s
out but I may be finally learning how
to sit in a chair. I still don’t know
what to call the good morning bird
although whatever word’d be no truer
than manzanita. I think namelessness
has a crush on me, on how clean
I keep my room, the usual stunned
ruckus of wake up. But it’s a different
moon, different woman on the hotel balcony
yet the same kinda scary, vacant stare,
caryatid foreseeing what? Before
turning back to the customary, immaculate
vacation squalor inside. The cash machine
still says “enter to exit” but there’s
more water in the creek than I’ve ever seen,
the brighter the darker, in that first dream
there was none. —Dean Young

Poetry Foundation

Look, this could be a total coincidence. But I knew Dean—not well, but enough to know that he would have stumbled across this little Shakespearean in-joke and used it. And I’d like to think he did. Because he is talking about time passing and what stays the same, and death—and we know that in every one of Shakespeare’s jokes and in-jokes, like all great humorists and comedians, there are big truths about time passing and aging and death, and how nobody learns anything and how people like easy answers and cute sayings, and how someone will always say something that sounds smart, but is it?

All this because of chamomile. 💚

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