The Willows Illustrated

By: Blackwood, Algernon

Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the River Danube. Throughout the story, Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment -river, sun, wind- with powerful and ultimately threatening characteristics. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows, which "moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible."Shortly after landing their canoe for the evening on a sandy island near Bratislava in the Dunajsk luhy Protected Landscape Area of Austria-Hungary, 2] the narrator reflects on the river's potency, human qualities, and his own will: Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.Blackwood also specifically characterizes the silvery, windblown willows as sinister: And, apart quite from the elements, the willows connected themselves subtly with my malaise, attacking the mind insidiously somehow by reason of their vast numbers, and contriving in some way or other to represent to the imagination a new and mighty power, a power, moreover, not altogether friendly to us.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1695043863
• ISBN13: 9781695043862
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 78 Pages
• Weight: 0.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.5" x 8.5"