Christmas Presents II: for La Reine Noire

[tree_and_leaf]

This is for lareinenoire, who asked for McGonagall gen. This plot bunny, if you can call it that, presented itself to me one night, and wouldn't go away. Not sure about the style, but... well, see what you think.

I am neither JK Rowling nor any of the poets I have quoted. I'm not Thomas Cranmer, either.



Vitae Lampada

Her pupils would certainly never have guessed it, but Minerva McGonagall was passionately fond of poetry.

It had, of course, begun in childhood, encouraged and indulged by an otherwise stern father, a pillar of the magical establishment in Dundee, and despite the disgust of her late mother’s brother, Uncle Pollux, who muttered about her father’s disgraceful Squib Uncle Topaz, who even the Muggles had laughed at. Minerva paid him no mind. She had read some of her great-uncle’s efforts, and it didn’t take much to see that their problem was a complete lack of awareness, both of the world at large as it really was, and of the way language sounded. She didn’t have that problem. The words rolled off her tongue, the precise value tasted and savoured, the precisely right image gazed upon.

Tiger, tiger, burning bright…

Quinquerime of Nineveh from distant Ophir

“After all, Pollux,” her father said, ending the argument, “You must admit that there’s an awful lot in knowing how to control sound and vision in spell-making.”

She didn’t like poetry because of that, though. She liked it because it showed her other world, other visions, a wider universe.

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold

And she liked it because of the noise it made.

The only poem her father taught her, oddly, was about a Muggle game called cricket.

A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
Ten to make and the match to win

He took her to watch it, once, at Perth: young men in white flannels playing solemnly on the Inch by the river, apparently not much disturbed by the fact that the crowd consisted of three men, a little girl, and a dog. It wasn’t bad, she supposed, but not a patch on Quidditch. But her father pointed out how they cared about doing their best: they wanted to win, yes, but fairly, by playing the game as it should be played. They didn’t cheat, and they respected their opponents. “Not for the sake of a ribboned coat, or the selfish hope of a season’s fame” her father quoted. “You play for your team, and for your house – but you play for the sake of the game, too. You can’t win by cheating, you can only make people think you have. But it’ll never feel right. Remember that, Minnie.”

The poem wasn’t about cricket, really, but though her father had known that well enough, she didn’t realise it until much later. Sometimes she made her pupils learn it, if she caught them cheating at Quidditch, but she wasn’t sure how much good it did them. Poetry was a bit of a minority interest at Hogwarts, even in her day.

But she still loved it. New poets came over the years. Yeats, who her father wouldn’t have in the house because he was a Godless pagan and a rebel (and, she admitted, what she’d read about his attempts in ‘magic’ were too silly for words – but that didn’t spoil “An Irish Airman Foresees his Death” or “I will arise now and go to Innisfree”, or even “Leda and the Swan”, though she wasn’t sure she liked that one, exactly.) Auden, later, and Eliot eventually, though only after the Four Quartets. And travelling backwards in time, to Donne, and Marvell, and even further, to the Kingis Quair.

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall

Time passed, and the normal business of life went on. Study, and then teaching, the daily round, the common task: homework, and rotas, and tea with friends and holidays in France or Italy and trips to hear lectures at the Scholomance or in Wittenberg. There had been a few men, but none she’d really loved. The Quidditch season, the House Cup. Occasional attempts to take up gardening, defeated by lack of time and, though she’d have died rather than admit it, patience. Two wars and another one coming.

And at the back of it all, the quiet pulsing in the mind of the words she’d read, marked and inwardly digested.

Proud Masie’s in the wood, singing so early

Sometimes she quoted them, almost without noticing. She found it happening more as she got older, though she hadn’t done it in class, yet. Snape had always snorted impatiently, but Albus smiled at it, except once, in the last year of his life, the last year of the cold peace, or was it the first year of the war, when they had been having tea together and she had found herself, unbidden, quoting an old Border Ballad:

I saw a dead man win a fight,
And I dreamed that man was I

And Albus had sighed and said nothing, but she looked over at him and saw, to her dismay, that he looked suddenly ancient and spent. It was almost enough to make one believe in divination…

It was strange, or perhaps not so strange, that it was things she had learned in the school room that lingered, even though, in some cases, they weren’t very good poems. At some of the darkest moments, she found herself repeating, almost like a prayer “But not through eastern windows only…”

But on the very last day of the war, when the battle came to Hogwarts itself, she found herself confronting Voldemort’s army on, of all places the Quidditch pitch, watching as Harry, old beyond his years, rallied them for battle.

“And the voice of a schoolboy steadies the ranks:
Play up, play up, and play the game” she murmured, and drew her wand for the battle she had been preparing for all her life.

Comments

[snorkackcatcher]

Nice to see Minerva fic, and an interesting use of the old cricket poem whose title I can't remember (although I suspect a lot of public schoolboy cricketers of the era wouldn't have been entirely in tune with its sentiments :D). Poignant scene with Dumbledore, and a neatly worked idea all round.

[tree_and_leaf]

Thank you!

The cricket poem is called Vitae Lampada, hence the title of the fic... and no, I don't think that the average cricket playing schoolboy would appreciate the sentiment (and I'm not sure Minerva really believes it about Quidditch, either)

[greenwoodside.livejournal.com]

Battle of Otterburn! The ballad, that is.

I enjoyed the references. Especially to Uncle Topaz!

[tree_and_leaf]

Well spotted!

I couldn't resist Uncle Topaz. In fact, I think that was the germ of the fic.

[zanesfriend.livejournal.com]

The only bad poet of that surname I know of is WILLIAM McG. Is Topaz another name for him, or is there another bad bard I should know about?

[tree_and_leaf]

He adopted Topaz as a middle name - at least, the theory is that he adopted it, but I think it's a grand wizarding name.

[zanesfriend.livejournal.com]

OK, thanks.

[lareinenoire.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, thank you! (however belated)

This was just lovely. It's nice to see another side of McGonagall, and the little segment with Dumbledore was particularly good. And Yeats not knowing about magic. Hee.

[kellychambliss.livejournal.com]

It's very late to be commenting on this story, but I just found it through a McGonagall rec list on the Daily_Snitch. It bids fair to become one of my favorite Minerva stories: the understated style fits her; as do the self-aware, sometimes wry thoughts and memories, offered without self-pity -- very moving, very in-character. The poetry itself is so well-chosen: exactly what I can see McG liking. Of course she knows her Keats, her Tennyson and would appreciate "Leda" without exactly liking it. You've made me completely believe in Minerva the poetry lover, because she does what genuine poetry lovers do: takes in the doggerel as well as the masterpieces, all to be kept and loved, for different reasons and needs. Even Uncle T. And of course she'll never stop quoting. The ending, I think, works particularly well. (Also, I love her father's idea about the links between poetry and spells.)

[tree_and_leaf]

Thanks so much for the lovely feedback! I'm glad you thought the voice was right and the choices worked - McGonagall is such a great character, I shoud write her more often.