A second picnic in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is a stark contrast to the Spring picnic on the riverbank. Water Rat is restless as the fall season is ending, and as he wanders about rather aimlessly, he comes upon Sea Rat and invites him to lunch. Instead of the hamper bursting with mounds of food, Ratty’s menu is limited to a simple meal of sausage, bread, and wine that he supposes will be appropriate to Sea Rat’s taste. Instead of the pleasant grass along the stream, the rats sit on a patch of grass beside the road. They appear to eat in silence, and only when finished does Sea Rat continue his tale with such authority that Ratty is mesmerized and fixated on following Sea Rat wherever the road may lead, somewhere in the south. The episode bears an unmistakable allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the Ancient Mariner with Sea Rat acting the part of the Mariner who accosts a wedding guest and mesmerizes him with tales of a doomed sea voyage. In the poem, the wedding guest never gets to the wedding; in “Wayfarers All,” the spellbound is saved by luck, when Mole happens by and holds him until this fit of madness subsides.
Featured Image: Detail. Paul Bransom. “It’s a Hard Life by all Accounts, Murmured the Rat,” The Wind in the Willows (1913). Bransom’s “It’s a Hard Life” suggests the encounter with Ratty and Sea Rat is benign.
See: Kenneth Graham in The Wind in the Willows (1908). Illustrations by Paul Bransom (1913)