The Wind in the Willows
7 (p. 104) Wayfarers All: Like chapter 7, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” this chapter contains numerous echoes of the Romantic poets. John Keats’s “Ode to Autumn” (1819), with its imagery of autumnal change and mutability, informs the opening of Grahame’s chapter, with its “air of change and departure” (p. 104) . The chapter’s structure recalls Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798). As the Wayfarer Rat holds Ratty spellbound with his “shining eyes” (p. 110) and stories of the south, so Coleridge’s Mariner with “glittering” eyes and tales of the sea hypnotizes the Wedding-Guest.
8 (p. 110) “You will have heard of Constantinople, friend?”: The seafaring rat’s historical musings on Constantinople are lifted from William Morris’s Sigurd the Volsung (1876). Morris influenced Grahame to the extent that he dreamed, as did Grahame, of a “rural non-industrial Earthly Paradise: the return of a lost Golden Age” (Green, pp. 259, 262).
9 (p. 111) “we rode into Venice down a path of gold”: Grahame’s romance with the south, particularly Italy, began in 1886, when he traveled to Florence and Rome. In 1890 he visited Venice and in 1895 Alassio on the Italian Riviera, to which he returned several times. He gives the seafaring rat some of his own experiences and impressions of Italy.
10 (p. 127) Near him stood a dingy gipsy caravan: Toad’s encounter with the gipsy is a parody of Lavengro: The Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest (1851), a novel by George Borrow (Green, p. 259), about the son of a soldier traveling through the British Isles, having adventures and befriending, among others, gipsies, and encountering murderers and thieves.