Wordsworth and the Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

Since finishing the soul-searching epic of Russian proportions that is ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, I have been tackling some lighter reading this festive season. One book that I’ve delved into is Suzanne Collins’ prequel to the Hunger Games, ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’. I greatly enjoyed the original trilogy as a child, and hoped that it would deliver the same gripping yet thoughtful dystopian commentary. Thankfully I was not disappointed— and to my surprise, the book contains much literary allusion as well.

First, an admission. During my studies of the Romantic poets at university, I somehow never stumbled across William Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy Gray’. Thus, I also did not have the same reaction that those more educated than I would have upon hearing the name of the Hunger Games’ new female lead. Thankfully, Collins makes the connection explicit within her book, going so far as to write the poem out in full itself.

But before we can tackle the significance of Lucy Gray’s literary heritage, and use it to try and grasp the tale’s ambiguous and haunting finale, we need to establish the meaning behind the central conflict between the Covey girl and the Capitol’s protégé.

TBSS is set during the 10^th annual Hunger Games, a method of District suppression still very much in its infancy. As such, much of the book concerns members of the Capitol authority trying to figure out how to best develop their horrific spectacle, in order to achieve as widespread an infamy as they can. The future-President Coriolanus Snow, currently a member of the Academy, plays a large part in devising new methods of audience capture, and frequently comes into direct contact with the nefarious and pernicious ideologies of Dr Gaul.

It is Dr Gaul who fans the flames of the already twisted desire for ultimate order within Snow, who grew up in the chaos of the Capitol-District war, and in whom lies one half of the philosophical struggle within the book. The ideology of the Capitol is one of control— the necessity of dominion over the human spirit, which is naturally inclined towards savagery and destruction. To allow humans to exist within their inherent state would cause bloodthirsty chaos, and thus an iron fist of restraint must keep the population in check, for their own benefit. As the pillar of that necessary control, the Capitol is deemed the bed of true civilisation; the surrounding districts, sub-human beasts who must be curbed by any means.

Interestingly, Snow’s personal experience is comparable to that of real-life philosopher Thomas Hobbes’, whose revolutionary (or, more fittingly, anti-revolutionary) ‘social contract theory’ seems closest to the ideology touted by the menacing Dr Gaul. Indeed, as Snow lived through the war between the Capitol and the Districts, Hobbes himself lived through the English Civil War, thus witnessing the human condition at its most barbaric. Thus, he came to the belief that even the most draconian of government is better than the unrestricted violence of the population. In order to avoid the hellish carnage of civil war, a people should submit themselves to an absolute authority that can provide salvation from the otherwise untenable ‘state of nature’.

For anyone who has read ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’, this should sound familiar. Snow detests anything that exists outside the Capitol’s order, and any sign of a natural state is something hostile to his own prosperity. This is in a way both material and philosophical— his prestigious family name is directly tied to the survival of the existing state, and his own experience of civil war has generated a disgust for the unmanaged. No more so is this represented than in his almost irrational abhorrence of the Mockingjays; a mutant breed between District 12’s native mockingbirds and the Capitol’s genetically engineered Jabberjays, they are a perversion of the authority’s desire to exert control over their subjects, and their unintended proliferation throughout the District is a constant undermining of the Capitol’s supreme omnipotence.

Another reason that Snow could hate Mockingjays, which in turn ties into his disdain towards singing in general (unless the lyrics are specifically about himself or the Capitol) is their haunting presence at the Hanging Tree. Whenever a rebel is executed, their final cries are mirrored and magnified by the nearby birds, echoing up into the distance. As well as being a blood-sickening thing to hear, this could be particularly untenable for Snow, as it is a reminder that there are instances where you are not even really in control of your own body, such as in the terror moments before death. That irrational voice that bursts from within you is then amplified tenfold by the call of nature, which will always overcome the civilised conscious mind in the end. 

(In a fun, subtle foreshadowing of events to come, Snow’s hatred of the Mockingjays is similar to his dismissal of Katniss— a creature from District 12 that, by all intents and purposes, should have died off in the overwhelming face of the authoritarian oppressor.)

Let’s now flip our attentions to the countervailing force within the book, that of Lucy Gray Baird. Lucy Gray originates so far outside the Capitol’s influence, she derives not from any District at all— her Covey people are wanderers, travelling musicians who sing of strange and magical experiences deeply innate to the human constitution. Whereas Snow’s voice rings with ‘real authority’, Lucy Gray sings free and unrestrained— where Snow dresses in the regal colours of royalty, she garbs herself in all the shades of the rainbow. Snow’s infatuation with her feels immediately paradoxical, but we soon realise it is merely due to his lust to shut away a free spirit into the Capitol’s box.

If we were to parallel the Capitol’s philosophy with Thomas Hobbes, then the spirit of the Covey would surely lie within the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More than anything, Rousseau believed that we should strive not to restrain the natural state of man, but to liberate it from the chains of society— whereas Hobbes believed the inherent condition was one of people seeking their own self-interests, Rousseau argued that the impositions of law and authority were exploitative and oppressive. Instead, the natural, united ‘general will’ is all that should be heeded when decisions are to be made, not some artificial autocratic governing monolith.

With that in mind, we can return to Wordsworth. Lucy Gray embodies not just the Rousseauian ideal of the inherent goodness of man, but the ultimate ideal of the Romantic poets as well, that which Snow is most terrified of. As the wheels of industry rolled across Europe, those peers of Wordsworth and Coleridge scribbled frantically of the intangible, omniscient, enlightening power of nature, that could not be exploited by human ambition, and yet contained the full potential of our species. There are many examples of elusive and ethereal representations of that sublime power throughout the Romantic oeuvre, but the most tantamount to this line of inquiry is, of course, the one found in Wordsworth’s own ‘Lucy Gray’.

The short poem tells a tale of the titular child, who is dismissed by her father out into the cold, wintry wilderness, only to vanish seemingly into thin air. It is a tale both of the neglect of a masculine authority figure allowing the innocence of a child to slip through their fingers, and also the eerie influence that the natural world can have on the mundanities of human existence. Whether a ghost or not, Lucy Gray disappears into the snow and ice, her footsteps ceasing mid-flight, the only trace of her existence her lingering song drifting softly over the wind.  

Applying this to the enigmatic ending of Suzanne Collins’ latest book, we see clear parallels. The film version goes one step further, explicitly depicting its Lucy Gray’s footsteps also stopping impossibly abruptly. The girl slips away from Snow’s erratic gunfire into the forest, Snow’s detested Mockingjays singing her final song over and over again, as if the spirits of she and they have merged into a maddening cacophony. For the entire book, Snow attempted to control the subject of Lucy Gray’s song— and just as he seems to have done so it slips away again, doomed to lurk in the sprawling wildernesses beyond the Capitol for the rest of his days, lingering in the corner of his gaze and the recesses of his hearing.

Snow may land on top, but it also smothers the land it touches, and its cold embrace took the physical form of Wordworth’s tragic child. But within Katniss, the girl named after a plant from that same District 12, we perhaps see the eventual return and revenge of that song, a voice of nature that even Snow cannot smother in the end.

Thank you for reading,