A Rhyme of Robin Puck
"A Rhyme of Robin Puck" by Helen Gray Cone is a lyrical poem that celebrates the enduring, mischievous spirit of Puck, the legendary fairy trickster of English folklore, insisting throughout that despite any rumors to the contrary, he lives on and continues his playful ways. The poem opens with an emphatic declaration that Puck is not dead, dismissing any such reports as unworthy of belief. The columbine flower tossing its scarlet cap and the bobolink bird bubbling with laughter serve as witnesses to this truth, with the bobolink suggesting that any news of Puck's death is itself merely his latest jest. The speaker argues that if only human beings possessed elfin sight and elfin hearing, they would perceive Puck and his fairy companions dancing in the dew-covered fields on summer nights, and would catch the fine, brief pipings of fairy music shrilled through the throats of tiny flowers. The narrator then offers a vivid physical description of Puck, speaking with an intimate familiarity whose source is deliberately kept secret. Puck is portrayed as swift yet clumsy, plump yet tiny, brown as a hazelnut, with hair-like horns at his temples resembling those of a butterfly, glassy wings like those of small green-bodied flies found in birch woods, and eyes set aslant that shine as blackly as the globes of wild blackberries. His voice is naturally piercing and thin, yet he can alter it at will with birdlike skill, a talent befitting his reputation as a mimic and mocker. The description is rendered with affectionate precision and a tone of delighted conspiracy, as though the speaker shares a privileged knowledge of the fairy world that ordinary mortals lack. The poem suggests that the barrier between the human world and the fairy realm is one of perception rather than distance. Puck and his crew are present in the summer dell, in the meadow, in the fields at night, but human senses are too dull and too conditioned by ordinary experience to detect them. The solution the poem proposes is a kind of ritual cleansing or awakening: if eyes that have spent their time reading the book of the everyday world were bathed in moonlit dew, they would regain the capacity to see what is already there. This image implies that poetic or imaginative vision is something recoverable, a return to a more open and receptive state rather than an acquisition of something entirely new. The poem's refrain, repeated in variations throughout, insists on Puck's immortality not in a solemn or mythological sense but in a tone of playful certainty. The repetition itself mimics the circular, teasing quality of fairy logic, circling back to the same cheerful insistence that the trickster endures. The poem does not narrate any specific adventure or prank of Puck's but instead builds its case through accumulation of natural imagery, the bobolink, the columbine, the birch-wood flies, the blackberry, the moonlit dew, all of which belong to a living, sensory world that the poem presents as Puck's natural habitat and ongoing home. In its overall effect, the poem is a defense of the imagination and of the folklore tradition, arguing that figures like Puck survive as long as the natural world endures and as long as there are those with the wit and sensitivity to perceive them. Cone writes in a light, musical register well suited to her subject, using rhyme and rhythm to create an incantatory quality that itself feels faintly magical, as though the poem is less a description of Puck than a small spell designed to make him visible.
By Helen Gray Cone · Genre: Poetry, Fantasy, Whimsy