The Fable
The fable of The Fox and the Grapes is one of a number which feature only a single animal protagonist. (Another example is The Cock and the Jewel.) The Latin version of Phaedrus (IV.3) is terse and to the point.
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- Driven by hunger, a fox tried to reach some grapes hanging high on the vine but was unable to, although he leaped with all his strength. As he went away, the fox remarked, 'Oh, you aren't even ripe yet! I don't need any sour grapes.' People who speak disparagingly of things that they cannot attain would do well to apply this story to themselves.
In her version of La Fontaine's Fables, Marianne Moore underlines his ironical comment on the situation in a final pun, "Better, I think, than an embittered whine".
Although the fable describes purely subjective behaviour, the English idiom sour grapes which develops from the story is now often used also of envious disparagement to others. Similar expressions exist in other languages and there is a similar idiom in the Scandinavian countries, but there the fox makes its comment about rowanberries since grapes are not common in northern latitudes.
Read more about this topic: The Fox And The Grapes
Famous quotes containing the word fable:
“But there’s another knowledge that my heart destroys
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy’s
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company;
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their servant though all are underground.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“In spite of the air of fable ... the public were still not at all disposed to receive it as fable. I thence concluded that the facts of my narrative would prove of such a nature as to carry with them sufficient evidence of their own authenticity.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)