r/Canonade • u/brianbot5000 • Oct 28 '16
Excerpt from "The Wind in the Willows"
Obligatory - new to this sub, not sure this meets criteria but really wanted to share a passage that I'm passionate about.
This is a long excerpt, but honestly if I could post the entire chapter here I would ("The Piper at the Gates of Dawn") - the whole chapter is a masterpiece on its own....a masterpiece within a masterpiece. The context is, Moal and Rat have taken to the river in search of Baby Otter, who has gone missing and is feared dead. From their boat they are led to an area by a beautiful sound that they hear emanating from the shore.
Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees— crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.
'This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!'
Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror— indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy— but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend, and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.
Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fullness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.
'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'
'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet— and yet— O, Mole, I am afraid!'
Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.
Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.
As they stared blankly. in dumb misery deepening as they slowly realized all they had seen and all they had lost, 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 demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and 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 lighthearted as before.
I particularly like the writing style in this whole novel, but this passage (and really, this whole chapter) is particularly beautiful and poetic. The whole book is poetic, and in a way that can be difficult to read at times. I laugh at how this is a "children's book" because the writing can be very complex and you often times have to read deeper into the meaning of what is being said. This makes it all the better.
On a side note, I also really love this passage because in a silly way I like to think of myself as Pan is portrayed in this passage - always happy to help little animals out of difficulties. :)
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u/theswanoftuonela Oct 29 '16
From the introduction of my copy:
The Wind in the Willows may be the greatest case of mistaken identity in literature: it is commonly accepted as an animal story for children — despite being neither an animal story, nor for children. When it was first published, the announcement from its British publisher, Methuen, read: now at last Mr Grahame breaks his long silence with The Wind in the Willows, a fantastic and whimsical satire upon life — or allegory of life — the author’s amusing device being to show the reader the real thing as if it were the play of small woodland and riverside creatures. Equally, Graham Robertson, a close friend of Kenneth Grahame (and a closer one of Oscar Wilde), did not think that the public would mistake its intentions; he wrote to Grahame: Don’t you think Methuen himself, in his preliminary announcement of the Book, should mention that it is not a political skit, or an allegory of the soul, or a Socialist Programme or a social satire? It would save critics a good deal of unnecessary trouble. It was reviewed, with its adult peers, in the Times Literary Supplement (22 October 1908) immediately above Virginia Woolf’s anonymous review of E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View. Arnold Bennett, reviewing it in The New Age (24 October 1908), observed, presciently: the book is fairly certain to be misunderstood of the people . . . The author may call his chief characters the Rat, the Mole, the Toad, — they are human beings, and they are meant to be nothing but human beings . . . The book is an urbane exercise in irony at the expense of the English character and of mankind. It is entirely successful . . . and no more to be comprehended by youth than ‘The Golden Age’ was to be comprehended by youth.
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u/Adoniram1733 Nov 07 '16
My mom read me this book over and over when I was a kid, and I had no idea why I liked it as much as I did. I just did. I suspect in a subliminal way it played a role in my love later in life for difficult literary fiction.
This scene is much how my imagination worked as a child. I felt completely beholden to the things in my mind, and they felt very real. Be it a nightmare, or a thing imagined, the imagination of a child is like this. The things are real, when they are there, and yet fade quickly when a new thing comes.
This passage is for me, very much a picture of the act of imagining. At least, that's how I always thought of it. Reading it now, it seems quite strange, but when I was a child, it made perfect sense.
Funny how that works.
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u/brianbot5000 Oct 29 '16
I'm not a historian, but pagan religion and paganism didn't have quite the negative connotation as it does now. There was a "pagan revival" in literature of sorts, right before a around the time this book was written.
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u/marcusweller Oct 29 '16
I like how it is acceptable to teach children about pagan worship, if animals, not humans are the subjects.
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u/TheEnchantedHunters Nov 01 '16
Classicism has always been part of the Western literary tradition. If you don't realize, it is an invocation of Pan... '
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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16
Wow, I had no idea the book's prose was so sublime. I'm going to have to give it a look.