Tarantella – Poem by Hilaire Belloc,
with comments by Ira Maine, Esq
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark veranda)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
Who hadn’t got a penny,
And who weren’t paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the din?
And the hip! hop! hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the swirl and the twirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in–
And the ting, tong, tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar;
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground,
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far waterfall like doom.
Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)
Hilaire Belloc was born just outside Paris to an English mother and a French father. Belloc’s father died early and the young boy was brought back to and educated in England. As a teenager in England, yet still a French citizen, Belloc was required to do military service in the French army. Having completed this he returned to England and was accepted as a student at Oxford from whence he graduated with distinction.
He was a lifelong friend of both GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw and was constantly at odds, in a literary criticism sense, with HG Wells, with whom he profoundly disagreed. Belloc was a convinced and committed Roman Catholic and almost everything he has ever written tends to be coloured by his religious beliefs. He was hugely prolific, wrote children’s’ books, histories, essays and poetry and contributed an enormous amount to the literary an intellectual life of the early twentieth century.
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‘Tarantella ‘ is a mysterious poem which, on the surface seems to be simply the author reminiscing about a romantic time spent with a romantic partner in the ‘High Pyrenees’, perhaps a long time ago. The stamp of the dancer’s staccato feet, the precise turning, the swirling, the hand clapping, insistent, rackety-clack, still bright and fresh in the author”s eye, as if it had just happened.
‘Remember, Miranda?’
And then that return to ice-cold reality. The man’s mind has created this warm, flamenco laced memory, with its heat, its wine, its drunken muleteers. It is a flash, a split second of the mind mysteriously chock full of of hours, of times past precisely rendered, but lost now, like the snow that fell yesterday.
The woman has gone, the time is fled, and age creeps implacably on. A bleak enough future, do you think, to justify that last verse?.I wonder…There are indeed mysteries here…
Why are the muleteers not paying? Why the crashing on the door? Why (apparently) has the Inn itself ceased to exist?
Mules pull guns in the high Pyrenees.Guns are for killing people. Soldiers were also muleteers and when the day was over, in a conquered town, they looted. Doors crashed open, houses were robbed and women raped..They paid for nothing and if the locals did not do their bidding, they were shot. So the ladies danced and stamped their feet because they had no choice in the matter. And when the soldiery finally left they burnt the place to the ground lest it prove an advantage to the enemy.
Perhaps this is a bleak place now and abandoned because for the locals, the grief was simply too much to bear.What do you think?
