This is not a poem I come to blind. I first read it when I was a teenager, and it changed what I thought poems were. They were not staid, formal, dead words on a page. They were words with life, meant to be read aloud.
So I’m doing this one differently and diving straight into my impressions.
The poem
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 the tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?
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 twirl and the swirl
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.
Rereading it now
It is lively and rhythmic, and you almost can’t help but clap your hands to its beat. Of course, the twist at the end is unexpected and all the more devastating because of the upbeat tone of everything before it.
The images of the dancing and then the empty dance hall, with the distant sound of the waterfall of Doom, left a mark on me when I first read the poem. Rereading it now doesn’t change that at all.
Hearing it
I listened to this recording, thinking it was Belloc. I don’t think it was.
The inn I had always wondered about
The history and context I found were fairly sparse, and I didn’t learn much that wasn’t already in the poem. I’ve known the poem for a long time, though, and have occasionally wondered what inn—or what evening—would inspire him to write it.
A little research suggests, the inn may have been the Hotel Sisas in Canfranc, below the Somport Pass. Belloc mentions it in The Pyrenees, where he describes the cooking as “doubtful” and the wine as “so-so.” The Aragón, the inn and the bad wine all fit. He never says that this was the place behind the poem, though.
That is as close as I could get. I still do not know anything about the evening itself, or who Miranda was.
Neither the reading nor the context changed my sense of the poem. I still read it much as I did when I was a teenager.
The sound or image I kept thinking about
The image and sound I keep thinking about are, of course, the ghostly steps of non-existent dancers and the distant, dreaded boom of the waterfall.