SOURCE: "'A Sadder and a Wiser Rat/He Rose the Morrow Morn': Echoes of the Romantics in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows," in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3, Fall, 1988, pp. 108-11.

[In the following essay, Willis traces the influence of English Romantic literature on The Wind in the Willows.]

The Seafarer, refreshed and strengthened, his voice more vibrant, his eye lit with a brightness that seemed caught from some far-away seabeacon, filled his glass with the red and glowing vintage of the South, and, leaning towards the Water Rat, compelled his gaze and held him, body and soul, while he talked. Those eyes were of the changing foam-streaked grey-green of leaping Northern seas; in the glass shone a hot ruby that seemed the very heart of the South, beating for him who had courage to respond to its pulsation. The twin lights, the shifting grey and the steadfast red, mastered the Water Rat and held him bound, fascinated, powerless. The quiet world outside their rays receded far away and ceased to be.

[Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows]

Through this blend of Coleridge's "The Ancient Mariner" and Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," Kenneth Grahame expresses the central tension of The Wind in the Willows. On the surface, nothing could be clearer than the paramount value of home and community and the merit of accepting (with decent allowance for personal growth) one's own limitations; the movement of the whole book is towards the integration of isolated or unregenerate animals into a well-ordered community bounded by the borders of what was formerly the Wild Wood. Even Toad, who exhibits, to borrow Jane Austen's words, "vanity, extravagance, love of change, [and] restlessness of temper," (Emma) is finally induced to play the role his community requires of him.

Yet beneath the apparently steady development of domestic and social tranquillity—Toad's aberrations are amusing rather than threatening—a conflict exists between the desire for security and the desire for adventure and change which results, not in a decisive victory for the former, but in a contained tension in which the pull for security provides the outer framework. At the root of this conflict is the fear, on the one hand, of the danger inherent in trying to fulfil one's longings, on the other, of the stultifying effect of too much security. The danger inherent in safety itself appears through the pervasive prison motif; the fascination of adventure is reinforced by allusions to Romantic poetry and references to that most changeable aspect of nature, the sea. In the image of the Ancient Mariner, the two last are united.

The arch-adventurer in The Wind in the Willows is Toad, who sums up his philosophy in his encomium on life in the canary-coloured cart:

"Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that's always changing!"

This certainly has a flavour of Baudelaire's "les vrais voyageurs sont ceux … qui partent/Pour partir," but there is precious little of the Ancient Mariner in Toad, in spite of his travels, his anti-social behavior, his punishment and his occasional ventures into poetry. The one possible allusion to Coleridge's Mariner is found when Toad steals the motor-car parked outside the Red Lion; the lines "But swift as dreams, myself I found/Within the pilot's boat" echo in the description of Toad's state of mind, a passage the even, anaphoric structure of which suggests poetic metre:

As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver's seat; as if in a dream he pulled the lever and swung the car round the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed temporarily suspended.

But Toad sees land and water only as thoroughfares. He lacks the respect and love for them which the others feel, and he certainly has none of the passionate awareness of nature which the Ancient Mariner develops in the course of his wanderings. And Peter Green persuasively argues in his book, Kenneth Grahame, that Oscar Wilde is the person to whom the character of Toad owes most.

The Ancient Mariner presents himself in the second of two quasi-mystical chapters—"The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" and "Wayfarers All"—which were apparently the last to be incorporated into the text (Green). He appears as the Sea Rat, a figure whose exotic appeal is undiminished by any of Toad's absurdity. The Sea Rat, or Adventurer, is "lean" to the Ancient Mariner's "lank" and, while he does not have the Mariner's "skinny hand," "his paws were thin and long"—which, again, suggests Coleridge's "thou art long, and lank, and brown." The Ancient Mariner's "glittering eye" becomes an eye "lit with a brightness that seemed caught from some far-away seabeacon," and Ratty finds at the end of the tale that the Adventurer is "still holding him fast with his sea-grey eyes."

There is never any suggestion that the Sea Rat has committed a crime against nature; Grahame, like Jane Austen in Mansfield Park, is content to "let other pens dwell on guilt and misery." The fascination of the Sea Rat, is, however, inseparable from the dangerous instability revealed by his reason for setting out on his previous voyage: "Family troubles, as usual, began it. The domestic storm-cone was hoisted." And he admits, perhaps with more politeness than sincerity, that the life of a "freshwater mariner" is "a goodly life…no doubt the best in the world, if only you are strong enough to lead it." But Ratty is incapable of heeding such hints. His own discontent has predisposed him to listen to the Sea Rat, and he gradually sinks into a hypnotic trance in which he loses control of the situation; he is "held… body and soul," he is "mastered" and "held … bound, fascinated, powerless." Ratty plays a far from reluctant Wedding Guest to the Sea Rat's Ancient Mariner in a passage which shows at once the seductiveness and the danger of the "Life Adventurous"; and the extent of the danger is brought home when we find that "his eyes … were glazed and set and turned a streaked and shifting grey—not [Ratty's] eyes, but the eyes of some other animal."

Allusions to Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" reinforce the sense of Rat's loss of control and the risk he runs of loss of self. The glass, shining with "a hot ruby that seemed the very heart of the South," suggests Keats's "beaker full of the warm south," while Keats's hope that he may "drink, and leave the world unseen,/And with thee fade away into the forest dim" is realized in Ratty's case by the "twin lights" that mesmerise him—a well-known brainwashing technique—so that "the quiet world outside their rays receded far away and ceased to be." The analogy, however, is not complete, for in Grahame's passage the person, not the world, begins to "fade far away" and "dissolve"; and, while Keats, like the Sea Rat, wants to escape conflict and responsibility, the Water Rat is closer to the "thou among the leaves" who has never known disease, decline or the waning of love.

The paradox of the Sea Rat is that he is both Mariner and Anti-Mariner, for Grahame wants to show not only that adventure is dangerous but that, in the long run, it is disappointing. Though the Seafarer, like the Ancient Mariner, is gifted with "strange power of speech," his tale has oddly prosaic touches which his listener is too entranced to notice. When Ratty supposes that the Adventurer must be "months and months out of sight of land, and provisions running short, and allowanced as to water, and your mind communing with the mighty ocean, and all that sort of thing," the Sea Rat replies that he is "in the coasting trade, and rarely out of sight of land." And, while his account of Venice makes the Water Rat "[float] on dream canals and [hear] a phantom song pealing high between vaporous grey wave-lapped walls," the Seafarer seems quite as concerned with the joys of eating in Venice as with its beauty—indeed, the food motif recurs so frequently in his discourse that Ratty finally takes the hint and fetches a well-packed picnic basket.

The greatest paradox of all is that the Sea Rat's call to adventure involves the acceptance of death, not as the ultimate means of escape which Keats envisions, but as the ultimate reality. "Take the Adventure, heed the call, now ere the irrevocable moment passes! 'Tis but a banging of the door behind you," says the Seafarer. But animals such as Ratty and Mole are afraid of "the banging of the door," for it means abandoning the illusion of an eternal present and moving into the relentless sequence of time in which, one day, a point will be reached when "the cup has been drained and the play has been played." Coleridge's Ancient Mariner has passed beyond the reach of time, but the Sea Rat is very conscious that "the days pass, and never return"—and he alone, among all Grahame's characters, can say "I am ageing."

Under the circumstances, we can understand why Ratty behaves "like one that hath been stunned,/And is of sense forlorn"; the crucial question is whether one can also say that, like the wedding guest, "A sadder and a wiser rat,/He rose the morrow morn." Sadness there certainly is after Ratty's encounter with the Seafarer—the sense of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity missed—but such wisdom as accrues to Ratty derives not from the Seafarer but from Mole, who long before learned, by experiencing the fear of death, that "he must be wise, must keep to the pleasant places in which his lines were laid and which held adventure enough, in their way, to last for a lifetime."

Writing about "Wayfarers All," Peter Green comments that "Mole here is the respectable, conformist side of Grahame: conscientious, practical and loyal, he stands for all the domestic and public virtues." But Mole also has Romantic associations, although, his earlier adventures notwithstanding, they have nothing to do with the Romantic journey. The associations of Mole are with scenes of domestic nature of the type that appeal to Wordsworth, and this emerges clearly in the chapter entitled "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," in which Mole and Ratty meet the Pan-like "Friend and Helper" on a willow-fringed island in the river. Although Ratty, as a poet, hears more of the song in the reeds than does his friend, we see the vision through Mole's eyes. And Mole, as a child of the earth, bears some resemblance to the lowlier figures in Blake's "Book of Thel"—which begins with the lines "Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?/Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?" (Thel's Motto). While the allusions to Blake's poem are less direct than the allusions to Coleridge and Keats in the passage already discussed, it does not seem unduly fanciful to think that Mole in this chapter owes something to the Lilly, who "bow'd her modest head," and to the Clod of Clay, who "rais'd her pitying head" and then "fix'd her humble eyes" on the Queen of the vales. The very rhythm of the sentence "Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head" could place it in "The Book of Thel"—and certainly the whole scene is reminiscent of the vale in which Thel wanders by the River of Adona.

Mole is well qualified to reanimate Ratty's interest in "the things that went to make up his daily life," and the exigency of the moment when Ratty is transported by the Sea Rat's vision raises him to unaccustomed eloquence:

Casually… and with seeming indifference, the Mole turned his talk to the harvest that was being gathered in, the towering wagons and their straining teams, the growing ricks, and the large moon rising over bare acres dotted with sheaves. He talked of the reddening apples around, of the browning nuts, of jams and preserves and the distilling of cordials; till by easy stages such as these he reached mid-winter, its hearty joys and its snug home life, and then he became simply lyrical.

This is Mole's only venture into the role of muse, and it differs widely from Toad's earlier "[playing] upon the inexperienced Mole as on a harp" while he describes the "Life Adventurous." Mole wants Ratty to observe, not to speculate, and he is finally gratified by seeing his friend give a proper direction to his imaginative powers through writing poetry.

In Mole and Ratty, the domestic side of Romanticism—rural life—is balanced against its more dangerous exotic appeal, and comes out victorious. But this triumph is tinged with sadness and even with fear of the potentially dulling effect of opting for security. The clear allusions to Coleridge, Keats and Blake find an unequal but perceptible counterpart in the more diffuse motif of the caged bird—an incongruous presentation of a potent Romantic symbol of freedom. Even the canary-coloured cart, that paradoxical compound of home and journey, has its caged inhabitant—a bird within a bird. And the gaoler's daughter keeps not only a canary, "whose cage hung on a nail in the massive wall of the keep by day … and was shrouded in an antimacassar on the parlour table at night," but also "several piebald mice and a restless revolving squirrel." Interestingly, the several varieties of prisoner—Toad is one—are detailed in the chapter which separates "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" from "Wayfarers All."

The fullest treatment of the ambivalent image of the caged bird occurs when Ratty and Mole walk through a human village as they return from (another paradox) a hunting and exploring trip with Otter:

It was from one little window, with its blind drawn down, a mere blank transparency on the night, that the sense of home and the little curtained world within walls—the larger stressful world of outside. Nature shut out and forgotten— most pulsated. Close against the white blind hung a bird-cage, clearly silhouetted, every wire, perch, and appurtenance distinct and recognizable, even to yesterday's dull-edged lump of sugar. On the middle perch the fluffy occupant, head tucked well into feathers, seemed so near to them as to be easily stroked, had they tried; even the delicate tips of his plumped-out plumage pencilled plainly on the illuminated screen. As they looked, the sleepy little fellow stirred uneasily, woke, shook himself, and raised his head. They could see the gape of his tiny beak as he yawned in a bored sort of way, looked round, and then settled his head into his back again, while the ruffled feathers gradually subsided into perfect stillness.

Even the favourable contrast with the situation of Ratty and Mole—"a gust of bitter wind took them in the back of the neck, a small sting of frozen sleet on the skin woke them as from a dream, and they knew their toes to be cold and their legs tired, and their own home distant a weary way"—cannot disguise the fact that the bird is a prisoner.

"A Robin Red breast in a Cage/Puts all Heaven in a Rage," says Blake ("Auguries of Innocence"); and although canaries are bred to captivity, there is something inherently unfitting about the idea of a caged bird. The universal association of birds with freedom is reflected in the fact that Ratty's restless longing to leave home is at least in part a response to their fall migration: "Even as he lay in bed at night he thought he could make out, passing in the darkness overhead, the beat and quiver of impatient pinions, obedient to the peremptory call." The two poems to which Grahame alludes in describing the Adventurer's call—"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and the "Ode to a Nightingale"—are renowned for their powerful bird images, and though Grahame mentions neither the albatross nor the nightingale their connotations of freedom are implicit in the passage.

But animals in The Wind in the Willows must learn that they cannot hope for the freedom of birds, and the whole idea is amusingly deflated when Toad—known for his unrealistic attitude to life—is thrown from a motor-car:

Toad found himself flying through the air with the strong upward rush and delicate curve of a swallow. He liked the motion, and was just beginning to wonder whether it would go on until he developed wings and turned into a Toad-bird when he landed on his back with a thump …

And Toad is not the only one who "land[s] on his back with a thump." Ratty, like Mole before him, "must keep to the pleasant places in which his lines were laid," and Mole is rewarded for his enterprise and heroism before and during the retaking of Toad Hall (not for nothing is there a statue of Garibaldi in his garden) by supervising clean-up operations and filling out a large pile of invitation cards.

Throughout The Wind in the Willows the call to a new experience or an unknown place is seen as appealing. Mole hears it at the very beginning of the book; like the infant Samuel whose statue adorns his garden, he feels that "something up above was calling him imperiously." But never does the call seem more attractive than in "Wayfarers All." The Seafarer's voice is "vibrant," his eyes are "of the changing foam-streaked grey-green of leaping Northern seas" and he "compelled [Ratty's] gaze and held him, body and soul, while he talked." Ratty, for his part, is merely "bound, fascinated, powerless." But the many words connoting agency or motion which Grahame uses in connection with the Seafarer do more than make this animal appear vital and fascinating. They underline the fact that the call is away—away from the safe, the predictable, the familiar, and (in the tradition of the Romantic hero) towards the uncertain, the new, the extraordinary.

The passage quoted at the beginning of this paper brings out the contrast between resignation and desire, for it is full of contrasts—North and South, grey and red, speech and silence, stasis and motion—and they are interrelated in such a manner as to convey that sense of not-quite-resolved tension, of reasonably happy compromise, that underlies the surface calm and playfulness of the novel. For the call—a poignant and disturbing element in an otherwise tranquil life—must sometimes be resisted, but it will always be heard.