The other picnic in The Wind in the Willows is”Wayfarers All,” a somber conversation between Ratty and Sea Rat that alert readers will guess is an allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. Here Sea Rat portrays the Ancient Mariner, whose glittering eye casts a spell on Ratty, who plays the Wedding Guest. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the Wedding Guest is dazed and never gets to the wedding. In “Wayfarers All,” after eating by the side of the road, Ratty is “spellbound and quivering with excitement” and returns home to pack a suitcase. He is saved by Mole, who realizes that Ratty is not right and holds him until his madness subsides.
Arthur Rackham’s “The Wayfarer saluted with a gesture of courtesy that had something foreign about it” shows two small rats in an immense landscape. The Wind in the Willows. New York. Ltd. Editions Club, 1940.
Contrasted the “Riverbank” picnic that promises the happiness of spring, “Wayfarers All” is a fall picnic in which a sense of seasonal change makes Water Rat restless and edgy. At the Riverbank, Ratty happily entertains Mole, but in the “Wayfarers” picnic, he considers Sea Rat “lean and keen-featured and somewhat bowed at the shoulders” with long thin paws, wrinkled eyes, and wearing small gold earrings.
For his picnic at the Riverbank, Ratty prepares a feast ofcoldchicken…coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefpickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscressandwidgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonsodawater. The wicker luncheon basket is so heavy he can hardly lift it. But for his picnic with Sea Rat, Ratty’s fall picnic wicker is meager, just “a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.” [“The River Bank” is posted elsewhere on PicnicWit.]
Featured Image: Detail. Paul Bransom. “It’s a Hard Life by all Accounts, Murmured the Rat,” s. 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. The Wind in the Willows. London: Metheun and Co., 1908