Their Songs Wake Singing Echoes in My Land

Platypuss here again. It's probably just as well we don't have weddings very often in Big Bed Land. What a riot of images and emotions! It's not easy to sort through all the Animal Minds around here, but I started looking around... and guess who I found in the imagination of the Best Man? Christina Rosetti! Here's a photo of the lovely singing bird who showed up - so fortuitously! - on the day of the Christmas wedding.

And here's Best Man Piggles herself in the Wedding Gazebo. And this is the poem she chose as a wedding poem, called A Birthday by Christina Rosetti:

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love has come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

(Goat is forced to groan here because Monster E. is having sweet thoughts about Monster J. - weddings are hard on Goat!) Bink mentions that it makes sense to find Christina R. in the mind of Piggles, because she wrote a wonderful book of poetry for children (this is the kind of poetry that Animals often like best.) The book is called Sing-Song and it's a BBL favorite because of the philosophy that lies encoded in lines such as these:


When fishes set umbrellas up
If the rain-drops run,
Lizards will want their parasols
To shade them from the sun.


This drawing, according to BBL historians (whose sources are not found in Monster Dictionaries, Bink points out) depicts the moment when Christina Rosetti, with her Goblin Market sister, sketches out a vision of Big Bed Land and writes her immortal words:

Their songs wake singing echoes in my land.