Blueberry Hill and the Golden Age

My last post, "Blueberries, divine daughters, and a neverbird," twice described blueberries as "round and plump" -- i.e., fat. This reminded Debbie of the song "Blueberry Hill," the most famous version of which was recorded by Fats Domino. I looked up the lyrics and was struck by these lines:

The wind in the willow played

Love's sweet melody

But all of those vows we made

Were never to be

This reminded me of "Scarlet Begonias" by the Grateful Dead:

Wind in the willow's playin' "Tea For Two"

The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue

The blueberries in my dream, and in the subsequent real-life sync, were on a cake. The Doris Day song "Tea For Two" -- presumably what the Dead are alluding to -- includes these lines:

Day will break, and I'm gonna wake

And start to bake a sugar cake

For you to take, for all the boys to see

I quoted part of that Grateful Dead line -- just "and the Sun was blue" -- in my 2020 post "Under a blue sun," in which I first introduced the idea that the Sun was blue in Homeric times. I revisited this idea last September with the poem "The Golden Age," so called because it adds to the blue Sun a yellow sky and sea. The first verse reads:

How few now know! In days of old,

The sun was blue, the sky was gold,

And Homer’s fabled “wine-dark sea”

In truth was more like Pinot gris,

A shade of yellow full as fair

As blond Poseidon’s flaxen hair.

The immediate inspiration for that poem had been the yellow sky and sea on the Three of Wands, which I had posted about four days previous in "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Resurrectionists, and merchant ships." "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" is the title of a chapter in The Wind in the Willows. I noted this connection in a comment on "The Golden Age":

The Three of Wands post prominently features The Wind in the Willows. The Blue Sun post quotes a line from the Grateful Dead song "Scarlet Begonias." Looking up the lyrics to that song just now, I was surprised to find this:

Wind in the willow's playin' "Tea For Two"

The sky was yellow, and the Sun was blue

I don't really know "Scarlet Begonias" and had completely forgotten that it, like the Three of Wands post, juxtaposed a yellow sky with The Wind in the Willows.

A further coincidence is that Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in the Willows, also wrote a book called The Golden Age. I knew this (I've read it) but didn't make the connection when I chose a title for my poem. What I didn't know until I searched for it just now is that the cover of the first edition of The Golden Age shows a scene with a golden sky and golden water.

But Barrie's vision, like Homer's, was misunderstood by his successors. The book was later reissued with the original cover art, except that the sky and water were changed to a more respectable blue.

Interestingly, the golden fruit on the bushes on the hill has also been changed to blue, for a pretty direct link to "Blueberry Hill."

In The Wind in the Willows, the piper at the gates of dawn is the god Pan. My blueberry post, which led Debbie to Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill," mentioned Peter Pan. Peter Pan was, as the name suggests, inspired by the god Pan. In Debbie's comment on my blueberry post, she connected the word berry with the name Barry. The author of Peter Pan was, of course, J. M. Barrie. (Barrie appears in "With?" under the name Dinbad the Kailer. See "Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.") Incidentally, the surname Barrie comes from the town of that name in Angus, Scotland, and its etymological meaning is "high hill."

Grahame (1859-1932) and Barrie (1860-1937) were almost exact contemporaries, were both born in Scotland and moved to London, are both known for writing classics of children's literature, and even had similar tastes in facial hair.

Given all these links to the blue Sun and yellow sky, I thought it interesting that Amazon is currently selling "Blueberry Hill" on CD with this cover art:

Yes, it's the more conventional yellow Sun in a blue sky, but I think it's still something of a coincidence that the cover art is the Sun in the sky at all.

Note added: Thinking about fat and hill made me think of the country singer Faith Hill, whose first name is similar to the word fat. The only Faith Hill song I know is "Breathe" (1999). I looked up the music video on YouTube and found that it opens with this shot of a yellow sky reflected in yellow water: