In the secular sense, we sometimes call an unsolved poem a mystery but there is an older, more terrible, sense to this word. In the religious or metaphysical sense, a mystery is something logically unknowable, that we can, at best, only vaguely apprehend through experience. “This is My body and this is My blood.” This raises the question of whether there is a higher mystical level of reality or whether this is simply a glitch in our cognition.
Interestingly enough, certain gifted authors can simulate this sense of mystery. Today, we will talk about Kenneth Grahame’s children’s novel The Wind in the Willows. Specifically, we will look at Chapter 7: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.
Then a change began slowly to declare itself. The horizon became clearer, field and tree came more into sight, and somehow with a different look; the mystery began to drop away from them. A bird piped suddenly, and was still; and a light breeze sprang up and set the reeds and bulrushes rustling. Rat, who was in the stern of the boat, while Mole sculled, sat up suddenly and listened with a passionate intentness. Mole, who with gentle strokes was just keeping the boat moving while he scanned the banks with care, looked at him with curiosity.
“It’s gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again. “So beautiful and strange and new. Since it was to end so soon, I almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever. No! There it is again!” he cried, alert once more. Entranced, he was silent for a long space, spellbound.
Affording ourselves a slight distraction, we note the richness of the elaborate Edwardian prose. How smoothly, how beautifully, it flows—word to word, sentence to sentence, image to image, vision unto imperious vision! How it seizes and compels the reader who dares enter in. And this is but an excerpt—sundered from the strength of the whole text. There is, of course, a right way and a wrong way to write such dense prose. Compare the baroque monstrosity that is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart. Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep. At length lassitude succeeded to the tumult I had before endured, and I threw myself on the bed in my clothes, endeavouring to seek a few moments of forgetfulness. But it was in vain; I slept, indeed, but I was disturbed by the wildest dreams.
Intolerable.
Returning to The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, let us note the Rat’s lament:
It has roused a longing in me that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that sound once more and go on listening to it for ever.
Here, like C.S. Lewis, we can only say that anyone who has experienced this will know exactly what the passage means: a keen piercing, a thunderbolt on the heart, a religious ecstasy; whether or not any formal religion is involved, an agonizing and irresistible upturning of the soul to the heavenly things.
Yeats knew it too:
O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
But what a queer thing to put in a children’s book! What a fellow Kenneth Grahame must have been to feel that he could and he should convey the mystery to his son. The chapter continues:
“Now it passes on and I begin to lose it,” he said presently. “O Mole! the beauty of it! The merry bubble and joy, the thin, clear, happy call of the distant piping! Such music I never dreamed of, and the call in it is stronger even than the music is sweet! Row on, Mole, row! For the music and the call must be for us.”
The Mole, greatly wondering, obeyed. “I hear nothing myself,” he said, “but the wind playing in the reeds and rushes and osiers.”
The Rat never answered, if indeed he heard. Rapt, transported, trembling, he was possessed in all his senses by this new divine thing that caught up his helpless soul and swung and dandled it, a powerless but happy infant in a strong sustaining grasp.
Here we detect an imperious element. There is a call in the music, irresistible. It takes up the Rat, paternally, entirely overpowering him. From the merriness and the sweetness of the music alone, he draws faith in this new force, though it is strange to him.
“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.
People take drugs to chase the mere illusion of such an experience. For the actual experience, people gladly submit to being stoned, sawn asunder, put to the sword, wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitution, affliction, torments, etc. For this is the awe of transcendence, to receive within oneself the fire of divinity; if, indeed, the mystical reality of the world is more than a fantasy.