The Rabbit Hole of a Wandering Mind

Wikipedia's list of events for 6 May includes this entry:
"6 MAY 1940 – John Steinbeck is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Grapes of Wrath". That novel's title has always impressed me. Delving further into Wiki's store of knowledge I find that:

While writing the novel at his home.... Steinbeck had unusual difficulty devising a title. The Grapes of Wrath, suggested by his wife Carol Steinbeck, was deemed more suitable than anything by the author. The title is a reference to lyrics from "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", by Julia Ward Howe:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored......

These lyrics refer, in turn, to the biblical passage Revelation 14:19–20, an apocalyptic appeal to divine justice and deliverance from oppression in the final judgment. This and other biblical passages had inspired a long tradition of imagery of Christ in the winepress in various media.

My mind wandered on, to other similar descriptive phrases from another book, a much older one: The Pilgrim's Progress: by John Bunyan

...the allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, written during Bunyan’s twelve-year imprisonment although not published until 1678 six years after his release, that made Bunyan’s name as an author with its immediate success. It remains the book for which Bunyan is best remembered. The images Bunyan uses in The Pilgrim's Progress are reflections of images from his own world; the strait gate is a version of the wicket gate at Elstow Abbey church, the Slough of Despond is a reflection of Squitch Fen, a wet and mossy area near his cottage in Harrowden, the Delectable Mountains are an image of the Chiltern Hills surrounding Bedfordshire. Even his characters, like the Evangelist as influenced by John Gifford, are reflections of real people.

There's a post in the archives expanding on such descriptive phrases...
.. Stops on a Mythical Journey.

While reading The White Monkey, one of John Galsworthy's continuation novels from his Forsyte Saga I noticed this lovely pair of descriptive phrases and jotted them down for an occasion such as this:

"The chrysalis of faint misgiving becomes so readily the butterfly of panic."

And ain't that the truth!

The mind wandered still further, into allegory and its history...the path became murky - too tangled for a simple blogger's blog post. Enough to say that allegory, as a concept, has been around since at least the days and philosophers of ancient Greece, and quite likely, undocumented, long before that. Its use and appreciation in matters religious, moral, political and general, seems to be another of our innate human characteristics.

One of the 20th century's most popular authors, J.R.R. Tolkien wasn't a fan of allegory (or so he said):

“I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”

Personally, I don't care what an author intended as allegory. If I read a novel I see in it what I see in it, and if it's something different from the author's allegorical intention - tough! I'll be doing applicability.