The Fox and the Grapes

A hungry fox sees ripe grapes hanging on a vine above a wall of warm stones. He jumps, and misses, and jumps higher, until his legs ache.

Where this fable actually turns

Most tellings treat the jumping as the story. It isn’t. The grapes never moved — that line is the hinge. Nothing in the world changed at all.

What changes is the fox. He sits down, looks up one last time, announces that the grapes were sour anyway, and walks off telling himself he had never wanted them. The fable is not about failing to reach something. It is about the story you tell immediately afterwards, and how quickly that story rewrites what you wanted.

The moral, in plain words

The traditional moral is it is easy to despise what you cannot get. Stated for a child, without the Victorian phrasing:

When we cannot reach a thing, it is easy to decide it was never worth reaching. That is not wisdom. Sour grapes are usually just high ones.

This is where the English phrase sour grapes comes from, and it is worth pointing out that people usually now use it to mean exactly what the fox was doing: talking down a thing they wanted and missed.

Talking about it afterwards

• The grapes never changed. So what did?
• Is it alright to want something you did not get?

The second question matters more than the first. The fox’s mistake is not wanting the grapes, and it is not missing them — it is pretending he never wanted them. Wanting something and not getting it is allowed to simply be disappointing.

Attribution

Aesop, The Fox and the Grapes (Perry 15). The fable is ancient and in the public domain, and every English retelling in general circulation is itself out of copyright. The wording in this video is original — a retelling, not a transcription of any particular translation.

Nothing here is violent, frightening or unsafe: the fox fails and goes home.