Bunnies and Napoleon

What is the world, O soldiers?

It is I

I, this incessant snow,

This northern sky;

Soldiers, this solitude

Though which we go

Is I.

– “Napoleon,” Walter de la Mare

One of the many things I enjoyed about Richard Adams’s Watership Down is that each of the 50 chapters is prefaced with a short quote from some other literary piece.  Some come from works of fiction, others from encyclopaedic tomes.  Shakespeare shows up a few times (such as “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war” from Julius Caesar …) , and there may be one or two snippets from other plays.  Folk songs, philosophy, and scripture.  A few poems, like the one above.  Every preface has something someway to do with thematic elements in the upcoming chapter.

As a forty-something re-reading Adams’s book, I find myself familiar with perhaps a third of them in other reading (both primary and secondary sources).  But as a child of ten or so, reading Watership Down for the first time, I remember being both mystically puzzled and incredibly curious as to the meaning behind these prefaces.  A feeling which ultimately left me feeling quite inadequate.  Similar to in tone to my first baffling struggles, tongue poking out and face scrunched up, to solve an adult crossword puzzle.  But through twenty or thirty years of reading – and other literary explorations – the knowledge of these authors and their works has, by some strange form of osmosis, become part of me.

There were perhaps a dozen or so of these prefaces I liked; this was one I read last night so it is still fresh in my mind.