Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens Imagery

Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens Imagery

The Lady with the Balloons

At one of the gates which lead to Kensington Gardens sits a lady with balloons. She is forced to sit still because if she lets go her hold of the railings “the balloons would lift her up, and she would be flown away”. Once the lady was another one, and David supposed that the old one must have flown away by the balloon. He really loved the old lady and used to stop to talk with her, but he was sad more because have not seen her flying away. The image of the lady with balloons, as well as the idea of her flying away with these balloons, help better understand how child’s brain works, what imageries it might create.

Magic in mind

The image of how children’s brain work is vividly described by how a boy imagines his boat sailing in the pond. He literally sees “little men running about the deck” and the boat “glide over buried cities, and have brushes with pirates, and cast anchor on coral isles”. A child’s imagination has no boundaries, and the image, along with many others, shows this fact.

Peter Pan’s playing

Peter Pan was very fond of singing, and could have sung all day long as a bird, but as he was not a bird he needed an instrument, so a pipe of reeds was an instrument of his with which “he used to sit by the shore of the island of an evening, practising the sough of the wind and the ripple of the water, and catching handfuls of the shine of the moon and put them all in his pipe”. His playing the pipe was very beautiful, and all the birds were not sure when heard leaping of a fish – or was it Peter Pan’s playing. The image adds to the magic atmosphere of the narration.

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