Why The wind in the willows by Kenneth Grahame was called The wind in the willows?

  Improve

I always wondered this myself, but I think I have your answer. Despite the anthropomorphic good times, the humor and the warmth of this book, I think The Wind in the Willows is a novel about desire, and the pain associated with wanting something very badly. Grahame writes about physical desire: food and comfort and home. He writes about intellectual desire, the need to travel, to stimulate the senses, to experience life. But most importantly, he writes about spiritual desire; how, in the end, we want something we know not what, some experience somewhere that will complete us, satisfy us and let us rest.

In the first chapter, Kenneth Grahame describes the sounds of the wind blowing through reeds, after the Mole has begun his life on the river:

"This day was only the first of many similar ones for the emancipated Mole, each of them longer and fuller of interest as the ripening summer moved onward. He learned to swim and to row, and entered into the joy of running water; and with his ear to the reed stems he caught, at intervals, something of what the wind went whispering so constantly among them."

Graham brings up this theme again in chapter 7: The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. In this chapter, Mole and Rat meet Pan, the god of the forest, and they experience such profound joy on seeing him, that Pan makes them forget the meeting so they wont torment themselves with the memory later in life.

""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 weeds and rushes and osiers.""

In both references the sound of the wind in the rushes is essentially the voice of the ultimate moving through the world. It is the substance of the animal's desire. Kenneth Grahame called his novel The Wind in the Willows, because really that's what his book is about: the voice of the ultimate, the sound of what we want.

First answer by ID1524450833. Last edit by Kitkit93. Contributor trust: 0 [recommend contributorrecommended]. Question popularity: 2 [recommend question].