Whimsy in Granite: Hope Cemetery
THERE IS NO ROOM
FOR SECOND PLACE.
THERE'S ONLY ONE PLACE,
AND THAT'S FIRST PLACE.
-- Inscription on Davis soccer ball gravestone, Hope Cemetery, Barre VT.
Linnet, as in Linnet Muir, by Linda Leith
6 March 2014A woman who identified herself to me only as Linnet came up to me at the end of my talk about Mavis Gallant's Linnet Muir stories, and asked me if I knew why Mavis had called the character Linnet. I told her what I knew -- that the mavis, like the linnet, is a songbird -- to which she added that the linnet had been brought over to North America in cages, and the linnets that are here now are those who escaped. A nice coda. Thank you, Linnet.
And here is what I now find online from "The Siren," a ballad, by J. Augustine Wade, in the Victorian magazine The Literary Garland, Montreal:
Come hither, come hither, sweet linnet ;
Look here, what a nice golden cage ;
Twere better by far to dwell in it
Than bear with the rude tempest's rage.
Mavis clearly preferred the rude tempest's rage.
© Linda Leith 2014
|
|
