The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

 

E.H. Shepard, illustration from Wind in the Willows

E.H. Shepard, illustration from Wind in the Willows

I promised to post one of these days on Wind in the Willows, and all this talk of intimations of immortality has put me in mind of two remarkable chapters in that book.  What does Wordsworth mean by our “obstinate questionings of sense and outward things,” of our feelings that we are “moving about in worlds not realized”?  Kenneth Graham provides us a story version in the chapters “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and “Wayfarers All.”

In the first story, Rat and Mole are transfixed by the god Pan playing his pipes.  Suddenly the world is hushed.  “Never,” the book reads, “had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading.”

“Here is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,” Rat says.  “Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!”

And they do find him and worship him.  Only they cannot keep him.  The encounter is brief and then he is gone.

Pan causes them to forget everything which Graham, in one of his most beautiful passages, says is a gift.  Otherwise they would live in agony over the loss:

“. . . a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses, and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces, and with its soft touch came instant oblivion.  For this is the last best gift that the kindly demigod is careful to bestow on those to whomhe has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness.  Lest the awful remembrance would remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and light-hearted as before.”

Only they are not light hearted, at least as first.  Mole is described as one who is wakened suddenly from a beautiful dream, who struggles to recall it, and can recapture nothing but a dim sense of the beauty of it, the beauty!  Till that, too, fades away in its turn, and the dreamer bitterly accepts the hard, cold waking and all its penalties.”


If much is lost, however, something remains.  Rat, the poet, can hear something, the sound of the wind playing in the reeds.”  He describes it as “dance-music—the lilting sort that runs on without a stop—but with words in it, too—it passes into words and out of them again—I catch them at intervals—then it is dance-music once more, and then nothing but the reeds’ soft thin whispering.”  Mole, who is not a poet, cannot hear them, but Rat is able to catch some enigmatic but suggestive phrases.  Neither knows what they mean, and Rat says that he simply “passed them on to you as they reached me.”  Just as Wordsworth did in “Intimations of Immortality.”  And in his way, Stephen King in It.

The other passage deals with the “call of the South” as experienced by migrating birds: “its songs, its hues, its radiant air.”  The call is also given expression by a seafaring rat, who tells spellbinding stories of southbound voyages. Rat feels this restless longing and is all prepared to pack up and leave, so that Mole has to lock him up until the fever resides.  Mole tries to talk him back down by mentioning the beauties to be found in their own landscape.  This begins to pull Rat out of his lethargy, and at the end of the chapter we see Rat turning once again to poetry, his backdoor means of access.

In the most recent issue of the magazine Shift, which purports to explore “the frontiers of consciousness,” Michael Meade talks about how much of the world is caught in the grip of literalism, which manifests is one of two factions (“Mythic Visions for Uncertain Times, 23: Summer 2009, 18-23).  One side, he says, “champions positivism and a tyranny of scientism that obsesses over facts and figures and relies solely upon a statistical worldview.”  The other, meanwhile, “insists upon fundamental religious beliefs that reject facts or alter them to conform to literalized stories.”  People tend to seek these literalisms out, Meade says, when the world feels unstable.  What gets lost is a sense of mystery.

Poems like “Intimations of Immortality” and stories like It and Wind in the Willows put us back in touch with mystery.  When we are in the grip of their images and their stories, mystery feels substantial.  Then, when we put down the pages and return to everyday life, mystery seems increasingly remote and distant, as though we have awoken from a dream.  Meanwhile, those poets who deal in mystery become seen as “idlers” by “the noisy set of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen the martyrs call the world” (to quote William Butler Yeats in “Adam’s Curse”).   Poetry won’t get you a job, my students are told.  It seems to become a self-evident fact that literature is frivolous.

It is frivolous, however, only if renewing our faith and restoring our spiritual energies is frivolous.

 

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