Colombine — Story, Setting & Ideas

Circles and Layers: The Play's Setting and Structure

The play's setting is not merely decorative; it is a structural device. The fairy ring, the Roman camp, and the beech trees create concentric circles of time—prehistoric, Roman, and contemporary. The prologue's couplets contrast the supernatural ("Pixy-led folk who stray") with the mundane ("here, in Haymarket, the roadway is up"). This juxtaposition of ancient and modern is reinforced by the dialogue: Dan'l's yarn about a box of troubles is framed as something he read "in a story-book years ago," yet he delivers it in Sussex dialect, grounding the myth in local speech.

The play's brevity (a single scene at evening) and its reliance on two characters talking rather than acting make it more a dramatic poem than a conventional play. The fairy ring remains empty; the promised dance never occurs. Instead, the action is entirely verbal, with the past and the supernatural invoked through storytelling rather than spectacle.

Marionettes and the Machinery of Fate

The poem "The Marionette" explicitly states a theme that runs through the volume: "Man is merely a marionette / On invisible wires suspended." The image of the puppet controlled by a showman—"Fate"—recurs in the play's structure, where the characters seem to be reciting predetermined lines. The poem's three stanzas each end with a reminder of human limitation: "Till suddenly he's reminded," "Till suddenly he's reminded," and "On a problematical morrow." This refrain-like repetition mirrors the play's circularity.

Other poems reinforce this sense of mechanical fate. In "Love, Laughter, and After," a sequence of scenes—from a "ruinous cottage" to a "gay Casino" to a "pitiful pageant" and a "river that ends it all"—suggests an inevitable decline. The poem's structure, a list of snapshots, implies that the outcome is fixed from the start.

Dialect, Distance, and the Rural Voice

Arkell uses dialect not merely for local colour but as a marker of perspective. Dan'l and Nathan'l speak in Sussex dialect ("Do ee, lad?", "I sid in a story-book"), while the prologue and the other verses use standard English. This shift creates a distance between the rural characters and the urban reader, a distance that the prologue itself acknowledges: "You're lighting your pipe in the Charing Cross Road."

The dialect poems in the "Other Verses" section—such as "Th' Coortin'" and "The Explanation"—continue this pattern. In "Th' Coortin'," the speaker's dialect ("I axed Kate why ur an' Joe / Was seed together waalking out") contrasts with the poem's sophisticated emotional insight: "Ye'd better wed wi' one ye doan't / Than waalk wi' one ye do, as woan't." The dialect thus becomes a vehicle for expressing complex feelings in a seemingly simple form.

Letters, Memory, and the Fragmentary Self

Several poems are structured as letters or memoranda, emphasizing absence and incompleteness. "A Letter from Home" begins with the mundane ("they're cutting the trees in the Priory Wood") and ends with a devastating postscript: the girl who stayed at the Grange is dead and buried. The poem's power lies in its structure: the news is buried in a postscript, as if the writer cannot bear to state it directly.

"Memoranda" explicitly instructs the reader to "Set aside no page for me" and to scribble only a hurried line: "He was once a friend of mine." The poem's brevity and its focus on a single line of text mirror the volume's own fragmentary nature—a play that is more a sketch, verses that are snapshots rather than narratives. The final image, "a memory sweeter than / Many written pages can," suggests that the unwritten, the incomplete, is more powerful than the finished work.

The volume's movement between the play and the poems, between dialect and standard English, and between the rural and the urban creates a mosaic of voices and perspectives. Readers may find it useful to consider how the play's fairy ring—a circle that is both a stage and a boundary—functions as a metaphor for the entire collection: a space where the past and present, the supernatural and the everyday, are held in suspension. The poems reward attention to their structure, particularly the way they use repetition, lists, and framing devices to suggest forces larger than the individual speaker.

That play about the two men on the Beacon stayed with me for days — something about the old circle in the grass and how effortlessly the past presses against the present. It reminded me of another familiar yet strange world, where grave people speak only in bright, careful nonsense. There's a particular tenderness in that. The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People — Inside the Classic feels like an old friend who already knows what I mean.