So that some rich person of those lands might, if he pleased, have a tower overlaid with plates of ivory. To Tharsis every three years with the servants of Hiram, king of Tyre, and brought thence gold, silver, and ivory. "there was not such a throne in any kingdom." And a little later on in the same chapter we are told how the king's ships went We read in the 9th chapter of the Second Book of Paralipomenon of a great throne of ivory, overlaid with pure gold: In Sacred Scripture we have the text in the Canticle of Canticles, "Thy neck is as a tower of ivory," which probably suggested So ivory may also have suggested foolishness or naivety.Īll these ideas together suggest a tower of adamantine unworldliness, against whose base the waves of the world may break without effect.Tower of Ivory Titles of Our Lady from the Litany of Loreto Tower of Ivory Saint-Beuve may also have had in mind a famous sentence from the Greek epic The Odyssey: “Those that come through the gate of ivory are fatuous, but those from the gate of horn mean something to those that see them”. Ivory has also been a symbol for hardness: unbreakable and incorruptible. That’s the colour also of purity and chastity, perhaps suggesting an innocence and lack of exposure to worldly cares. The Song of Solomon was obviously referring to the whiteness of ivory. It became very popular and was used in the next two decades by H G Wells, Hart Crane, Aldous Huxley, Ezra Pound and others, ensuring it a lasting place in the language.īut why ivory? I’m far from sure that I’ve got to the bottom of Saint-Beuve’s allusion. Saint-Beuve’s allusion was picked up by Henry James, who used it as the title of a book in 1916. That’s how we use the idiom today: someone living in an ivory tower is - by accident or design - sheltered from the realities of existence, out of touch with the real world. He was suggesting that Alfred de Vigny was aloof from the cares and practicalities of daily life. He still holds it and Vigny, more discreet,Īs if in his ivory tower, retired before noon. fought in armour,Īnd held high his banner in the middle of the tumult I’ll spare you the whole thing, but in English the third stanza goes roughly like this: He wrote a poem in October 1837 called Pensés d’Août ( Thoughts of August) in which he refers to two fellow poets, Victor Hugo and Alfred de Vigny. He was a French literary critic and poet of the early part of the nineteenth century. Not quite the thing today - few young women would want their eyes compared with fishponds (or their noses with towers) - but it struck a chord with Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve. The origin is the Bible, specifically Chapter 7, Verse 4 of the Song of Solomon, in which Solomon is extolling the beauty of his beloved: “Thy neck is as a tower of ivory thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus”. In this instance, I can give you literal chapter and verse on its origin, but the first half of your question is still causing me to scratch my head a bit. Q From Cecil A Oberbeck, New York: Why is the tower in ivory tower ivory? What are the origins of this expression?Ī Usually I can explain the meaning of an expression well enough, but have a lot of trouble finding out where it came from.