See the brown mice bob round and round the oatmeal chest

I woke up from a brief nap this afternoon with the Yeats poem “The Stolen Child” running through my head. It’s a poem I know well, and it has many associations for me. Despite the title, the child in the poem is not forcibly abducted by the Other People but chooses to go away with them. The final stanza enumerates some of the things he will be abandoning as he leaves the human world behind:

Away with us he’s going,

The solemn-eyed:

He'll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

For he comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping

Than he can understand.

Why do the brown mice bob round and round the oatmeal chest? I have a vivid mental image that accompanies that line, and it always reminds me of the army of Joshua marching round and round the walls of Jericho. Are the mice perhaps attempting some magical working which will result in the chest bursting open and disgorging its oatmeal?

The word chest is closely associated with treasure, but this chest contains cereal — yet another link to the Hidden Treasures cereal sync theme. In the William Alizio story, Patrick has to eat all the Hidden Treasures before he and Tim can abduct Alizio, and as in the Yeats poem the abductee goes with his captors more or less willingly.

“Brown mice bob” made me think of the Dark Mice, one of whom is named Bob, in my 2021 post “ Mr. Icthus-oress, the Dark Mice, and why I do this.” Looking that post up just now, I was surprised to find that it begins with a reference to spontaneous human combustion. Just yesterday I was helping a student through a listening comprehension exercise (not created by me) in which we hear two college students discussing various proposed scientific explanations for the SHC phenomenon.