Mockingjay Discussion 16: Katniss’ Meadow Song

There are two songs that Katniss Everdeen sings for us in Mockingjay. The first, ‘The Hanging Tree,’ is new to us but is the heart and focus of the series finale. If you wondered why Finnick, then Katniss, and finally Peeta spent a good part of the book tying nooses with remnant pieces of rope, the answer is in the haunting call of the hanged man that they are heeding.

I wrote about ‘The Hanging Tree’ at some length yesterday and I hope you will read that post before this one on the other song in Mockingjay. That song isn’t named but we have heard it in each of the series’ three books and always at a critical juncture. For lack of a proper name, I’ll call it ‘The Meadow Song.’ Let’s review its appearances in each Hunger Games novel before attempting to explain why it is the theme of the series and how it relates to Mockingjays’ ‘Hanging Tree.’

We first hear the song at Rue’s death scene (Games, chapter 18, pp. 234-235). She asks Katniss to sing, and, in obedience to this deathbed request, Miss Everdeen does her best:

Sing. My throat is tight with tears, hoarse from smoke and fatigue. But if this is Prim’s, I mean Rue’s last request, I have to at least try. The song that comes to me is a simple lullaby, one we sing fretful, hungry babies to sleep with. It’s old, very old I think. Made up long ago in our hills. What my music teacher calls a mountain air. But the words are easy and soothing, promising tomorrow will be more hopeful than this awful piece of time we call today.

I give a small cough, swallow hard and begin.

Deep in the meadow, under the willow

A bed of grass, a soft green pillow

Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes

And when again they open, the sun will rise.

Here it’s safe, here it’s warm

Here the daisies guard you from every harm

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true

Here is the place where I love you.

Rue’s eyes have fluttered shut. Her chest moves but only slightly. My throat releases the tears and they slide down my cheeks. But I have to finish the song for her.

Deep in the meadow, hidden far away

A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray

Forget your woes and let your troubles lay

And when again it’s morning, they’ll wash away.

Here it’s safe, here it’s warm

Here the daisies guard you from every harm

The final lines are barely audible.

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true

Here is the place where I love you.

Everything’s still and quiet. Then, almost eerily, the mockingjays take up my song.

After bedecking her in wild flowers when she understands what Peeta told her on the roof, Katniss steps back “and [I] take a long look at Rue. She could really be asleep in that meadow after all” (Games, chapter 18, p. 237).

The next time we visit the meadow is in Catching Fire‘s arena. Katniss and Finnick are recovering from the Jabberjay segment of the Gamesmaker’s sadistic clock. Peeta has talked Katniss out of the panic and the worst of the shock consequent to hearing Prim’s tortured screams and pleas for help. The two have taken the first watch by the lake and, as their fellow Victor-tributes fall to sleep, Peeta gives Katniss the gold locket-disk and makes his case that she should be the one that lives.

She realizes “only one person will be damaged beyond repair if Peeta dies. Me.” Her response, consequent to this realization is to kiss Peeta, and, this time, she is transformed by love “to the tips of her being” (Fire, chapter 24, p. 362-363):

The sensation inside me grows warmer and spreads out from my chest, down through my body, out along my arms and legs, to the tips of my being. Instead of satisfying me, the kisses have the opposite effect, of making my need greater. I thought I was something of an expert on hunger, but this is an entirely new kind.

Finnick relieves Katniss from her watch duties when the lightning tree is struck at midnight and Katniss goes to sleep (pp.364-5).

As I drift off, I try to imagine that world, somewhere in the future, with no Games, no Capitol. A place like the meadow in the song I sang to Rue as she died. Where Peeta’s child could be safe.

When I wake, I have a brief, delicious feeling of happiness that is somehow connected with Peeta.

To Katniss and every other citizen of District 12, “the Meadow” is a specific place as well as the Eden of lullabies. She describes it in the first chapter of Games (chapter 1, p. 4):

Our house is almost at the edge of the Seam. I only have to pass a few gates to reach the scruffy field called the Meadow. Separating the Meadow from the woods, in fact enclosing all of District 12, is a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire loops.

This Meadow, always capitalized in the books, is where Katniss prefers to crawl under the fence because its bushes offer some concealment. The few other District 12 adventurers that enter the woods to harvest apples in the fall never leave sight of the Meadow (p. 6).

It is something of a safe-place or touchstone for Katniss, too. We learn in Mockingjay that she “had exactly one hiding spot [as a little girl] — in the Meadow under a honeysuckle bush” (chapter 9, p.125). This is where she runs and where her father finds her when she was frightened by her usually placid mother having “snatched the rope necklaces away and was yelling at my father.” Katniss had been singing ‘The Hanging Tree’ to Prim and “making us necklaces out of scraps of old rope like it said in the song, not knowing the real meaning of the words” (p. 124).

We come full circle back to the Meadow in the last chapter of the last book. Katniss has been sent back to District 12 in something like “internal exile” after her advocates in court successfully made an insanity defense for her execution of President Coin. When she rises from her stupor and heads to the Meadow with a thought of hunting in the woods, she meets people with death carts gathering the remains of those who died during the fire bombing. The Meadow is no longer a “scruffy field” with “honeysuckle bushes.”

I nod [to Thom and his death cart] and keep moving, careful not to look in the back of the cart. All through the town and the Seam, it’s the same. The reaping of the dead. As I near the ruins of my old house, the road becomes thick with carts. The Meadow’s gone, or at least dramatically altered. A deep pit has been dug, and they’re lining it with bones, a mass grave for my people. I skirt around the hole and enter the woods in my usual place.

She is so tired when she returns that “Thom has to give me a ride home in the dead people’s cart” (p.385). Time passes and eventually District 12 comes back to life (pp. 387-388).

We’re not alone. A few hundred others return because, whatever has happened, this is our home. With the mines closed, they plow the ashes into the earth and plant food. Machines from the Capitol break ground for a new factory where we will make medicines. Although no one seeds it, the Meadow turns green again.

And Peeta is there as well (ibid).

Peeta and I grow back together. There are still moments when he clutches the back of a chair and hangs on until the flashbacks are over. I wake screaming from nightmares of mutts and lost children. But his arms are there to comfort me. And eventually his lips. On the night I feel that thing again, the hunger that overtook me on the beach, I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that.

Katniss tells us in the Mockingjay epilogue about the children she has with Peeta, the ones she hoped in Fire “would be safe” playing in the meadow of Rue’s lullaby, the Meadow Song. Their boy and girl “play in the Meadow” and “take the words of the song for granted,” the Meadow Song which Katniss sings again.  She notes, though, that her children “don’t know they play on a graveyard” (pp. 389-390).

The Meaning of the Meadow Song

I argued in ‘The Pearl Plot’ that the foundation of everything in Hunger Games is to be found in the Meadow and a large part of that argument is the place the song sung at Rue’s death in the story.

Rue’s death and Katniss’ bedecking her corpse with flowers are scenes that echo throughout the rest of Hunger Games and Catching Fire — think of the District 11 salute she receives on the Victory tour, Peeta’s confronting the Games Makers with Rue’s icon, and its prequel echo in Haymitch’s farewell to Maysilee Donner in his Quell — but this song, a lullaby that infants trust as truth, is, because of its age and meaning, the primordial aspect of life transcending Panem that Katniss taps into as her core strength and surety. As we’ve just read above, she returns to this forgotten meadow paradise in her Quell on the beach when she commits herself to serving Peeta even at the cost of her life.

This happiness associated with Peeta and the meadow where his baby lives, I think, is the unconditional, selfless, and sacrificial love Katniss has just experienced in his kiss, a love that extends to the “tips of [her] being” (Fire, chapter 24, page 352). Peeta’s Christ-like love is this absolute and transcendent point that is the center or origin of the Hunger Games trilogy circle.

Her real-world meadow near the Seam serves this function because it is her place of retreat as a child, her only hiding place, a golden bush and place of light the darkness cannot enter. It eventually becomes her way of escaping or transcending the nightmare of District 12 existence in being her point of transition to the forest, freedom, food, and fellowship.

But this Meadow at the surface of things is just a “scruffy field” and nothing like the paradise of the song, in which

Here it’s safe, here it’s warm

Here the daisies guard you from every harm

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true

Here is the place where I love you.

That Meadow, the Eden the Everdeen-Mellark children “take for granted,” grows green though no one seeds it because it is so well fertilized by the bodies and bones of the thousands who died in the fire-bombing. A greater life, even paradise, grows out of death. Which brings us back to ‘The Hanging Tree.’

As I explained yesterday, ‘The Hanging Tree’ is the Tree of Life and the Cross of Calvary, the hanged man is Christ, and his call is for us to “flee” the world and join Him in the death to self that promises eternal life and love. Katniss as a child hears this song, has the words “branded into her mind” and makes “rope necklaces” (nooses) for her and her baby sister “just as the song said.” In Mockingjay, Finnick, Katniss, and Peeta all work through their issues with these ropes which nooses become, in light of the meaning of ‘Hanging Tree,’ something like prayer ropes or rosaries.

Katniss, the Mockingjay and ‘Girl on Fire,’ becomes a “fire-mutt” in the explosion that kills Prim and burns Peeta badly as well. The description of her experience is telling (Mockingjay, chapter 25, p. 348):

Real or not real? I am on fire. The balls of flame that erupted from the parachutes shot over the barricades, through the snowy air, and landed in the crowd. I was just turning away when one caught me, ran its tongue up the back of my body, and transformed me into something new. A creature as unquenchable as the sun.

In one word, Katniss at last becomes a phoenix, the resurrection bird. It is not a pretty or painless process, but agony she survives to execute President Snow, whom President Coin has assured her “I’ve saved him for you.” Her father appears in her hallucinations and “sings all four stanzas of ‘The Hanging Tree’ and reminds me that my mother — who sleeps in a chair between shifts — isn’t to know about it” (p. 360).

Having killed Coin instead of Snow with her arrow after learning that it was the District 13 President who ordered the killing of the children and rescue workers, Katniss is confined to her former Training Session room where she enters the near catatonic state her mother did after the death of her husband in the mine explosion. She accepts, even embraces death — and in this death to self, she is acquitted of her crime, taken up into the sky, and returned to the Meadow, soon to reveal itself as the Meadow of the song, and to Peeta, her beloved, and, in preventing her taking the nightlock tablet in the Mansion, her savior.

To return to the Meadow, then, an other worldly paradise, Mockingjay tells us, requires a psychological purification by fire akin to Purgatory and a renunciation of the world’s principalities and powers and of ego self and individual persona amounting to sacrificial death. Katniss does this metaphorically in slaying the woman who has ascended to the peak of political power and who is named for money and by her leaving to God the revenge she craved in being able to kill Snow.

The two songs in Mockingjay, ‘The Hanging Tree’ and ‘The Meadow Song,’ work in conjunction to create a picture of the way to transcend the world. In brief, we must be willing to hear and heed the call of the man hanging from the tree and flee the world. Our death to selves in love for him will bring us to the Eden Meadow, the field containing the Pearl of Great Price,  where “here is the place that I love you.”

Your comments and corrections are coveted.