Meaning & Analysis
The leek, a vegetable with a white bulbous head and a green leafy tail, serves as a visual metaphor for a person—typically an old man—with white hair and youthful or vigorous passions.
Insights
Aged Lust
Portrays the incongruity of an elderly man with white hair still pursuing youthful sexual appetites—his 'green tail' representing virility or lust that contrasts with his aged appearance.
Appearance vs. Vitality
Suggests a disparity between outer aging and inner liveliness—an individual who appears old but retains youthful drive, energy, or folly.
Hypocrisy of Decay
Critiques the moral inconsistency of aging individuals who should embody wisdom and restraint but instead display behaviors more suited to youth, implying decadence or inappropriateness.
Cultural Satire of Elderly Desire
The proverb reflects early modern mockery of lecherous old men—figures often satirized in literature as foolish, undignified, or grotesque for their attempts to cling to youthful indulgences despite their evident age.
Vegetable Symbolism and Social Shaming
Vegetables like leeks and onions were common in folk speech due to their vivid structure and everyday familiarity. The leek's bifurcated coloring makes it a potent image for exposing duplicity or tension between age and desire.
Moral Judgments on Sexuality and Aging
Underlying the humor is a serious cultural discomfort with aged sexuality—particularly male. The proverb casts such expressions as unnatural or unseemly, reinforcing ageist and moralistic biases.
Rhetorical Devices
Extended Metaphor
The leek is not just a simile for appearance but a rich metaphor for behavioral contradiction—its physical attributes mapping onto psychological and moral traits.
Irony
The proverb exposes the irony of aging bodies animated by youthful urges, generating ridicule from the contrast between expectation (dignity in age) and reality (persistent lust).
Visual Imagery
The phrase paints a striking mental picture, its power resting in the vivid and comic contrast of the leek’s two-toned form, which becomes a memorable emblem of incongruity.
Transcription
Quotations
Septimus liues, and is like garlick seene, For though his head be white, his blade is greene.
Old men were like leekes gray headed, and oft greene tailde.
The maidens mocke, and call him withered leeke, That with a greene tayle hath an hoary head.
Tho my head be like a Leeke, white, may not my heart be like the blade, greene?
Garlick has a white head, and a greene stalke, Then why should not I? Lets bee merry.
Mine head is white, but o mine taile is green.
How I am of the Nature of Leeks, which with a white Head carry a green, fresh streight, and vigorous Tail.
Though a leek have a white head, yet it hath a green tail.
To bear a leek for ones coat, viz. white and green; spoken of lusty old men, that though they have a white head, have a green tail.
Gray and green make the worst medley. . An old lecher is compared to an onyon, or leek, which hath a white head but a green tail.
(You breed of the Leek, you have a white).
Spoken to old grace-less profane Wretches.
Cross References
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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