Language and Secret Knowledge in At the Back of the North Wind

Abstract

LANGUAGE AND SECRET KNOWLEDGE IN AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND I take as my starting point the rhyme Diamond's mother reads to him on the beach at Sandwich in Chapter 13 of At the Back of the North Wind. The verse is a seemingly endless account of a running river, dipping swallows, bleating sheep, and merry breezes. It is interminable! Diamond's mother — and it is difficult to blame her — stops reading out of sheer exasperation. Diamond asks, "Why don't you go on, Mother dear?" She replies, "It's such nonsense! ... I believe it would go on forever." Diamond isn't consolatory: "That's just what it did," he says referring to the river mentioned in the poem that he associates with the river that he saw at the back of the north wind. Mother and son fail to communicate. She is too concerned with the fact of her son's health and also with a language that deals with a stable reality, as her reaction to the rhyme testifies. Her fear for her son's health is a metonymy for her fear of instability. Diamond, on the other hand, is with Christ in not caring for the morrow. He has befriended the spirit of change, North Wind, and he knows that change and instability are not synonymous. He knows that change is eternal and yet ephemeral, and the poem is merely a way of reminding him of this. It is North Wind's message to him as several indications in the chapter make clear. At the outset Diamond and his mother look eastward while a "sweet little wind blew on their left side, and comforted the mother without letting her know what it was that comforted her." Later the wind flutters some paper, drawing their attention to a book of nursery rhymes half buried in the sand. When Diamond's mother tries to find a more congenial rhyme than the one she first begins to read, "the wind blew the leaves rustling back to the same verses." Two questions occur: What is it about these particular verses that is important, and why does the North Wind choose to communicate to Diamond through poetry instead of, say, through the beauty of the sea and sky? Answers to these questions should allow us to share the secrets Diamond shares with those he will later meet in London. The first question is quickly answered if we refuse to judge the poem as a poem. Although graced with the epithet "nursery rhyme," it is doggerel. The fact, however, that it is supposed to work as nursery rhyme -- and there are later in the story revised versions of "Little Boy Blue," "The Cat and the Fiddle," and "Little Bo Peep" — ought to warn us that form is as important as content. First content: the river metaphor communicates the life cycle (it recurs in the penultimate chapter) as it "flows for ever" through hollows and meadows. Sheep and swallows live and multiply by the singing river, changing as it flows, dependent upon it for nourishment. Sheep, swallows, breeze, grasses, daisies, and growing river are interdependent, continuous, and constantly moving, passing. Second form: this establishes constant movement. There is no reason why this poem cannot go on forever; it has no beginning or ending and no interrupting punctuation. It consists of repeated rhyming that has no pattern other than verbal repetition and the recurring two line, three line, and four line rhymes. The form of the poem intrudes with its insistent repetitions and rhymes; it impedes Diamond's mother. She fails to see "meaning" in a verse that appears endless. Like most readers, she seeks for a point, an end to what she reads. Language drawing attention to itself is nonsense to her, but our answers are clear: it is the metaphors that are important, and North Wind's medium is poetry since through poetry (language parading as metaphor) another world takes shape. Diamond is freed from the tyranny of poverty and nature through language. To Diamond's mother the poem is mere endless cycle; to Diamond the circularity of the verse contains secret knowledge. Diamond "chants" bits of the verse; his...