The Frog in Cyprus:

M. R. James, Archaeology, and Homesick Verse

In the winter of 1887–88, Montague Rhodes James, not yet twenty-five, embarked on what ought to have been the adventure of a budding classical scholar’s lifetime. He was lured in part by familiar faces—Ernest A. Gardner was leading the expedition; Gardner had once played Basileia to James’s Peithetairos in the 1883 Cambridge production of Aristophanes’ The Birds; and Rev. J.T. Bent, a fellow classicist with whom James was acquainted from Cambridge, had also signed on. With that collegiate camaraderie in place, Monty likely imagined the trip would blend scholarly pursuit with friendly familiarity and perhaps even some recalled university hi-jinx.

It did not.

The Bents were not, as James would later recall with exquisite understatement, ideal companions. The Reverend had all the evangelical zeal of a man seeking lost temples and the patience of one denied pudding. His wife was a late addition and, though a capable record-keeper, was prone to complain and possessed what James delicately called a "combative disposition." The Bents’ constant bickering, coupled with unrelenting bad food and the occasional bout of intestinal horror, rendered the trip less a scholarly triumph than a comic ordeal. “Wretched,” James would later call it, with a scholar’s gift for compression.

Yet even in this bleak outpost of classical ambition, James managed to hold on to his sense of the spectral and the literary. During a stretch of particular misery, he composed for his sister Gracie a poem entitled “William Frog,” a curious and quietly eerie verse reflecting both his longing for home and his enduring sensitivity to the uncanny, which can almost (but not quite) be called his first ghost story.

The poem is written in ballad form and opens with a whimsical invocation of a frog perched on a log, singing beneath the moonlight. At first, the tone seems comic, even dainty. But quickly the lines darken: unseen creatures slip through the rushes, owls sweep over the park, and ghostly sounds ripple out from behind trees and over the mere. A chill sets in. Eyes burn from a hollow oak, the head of a man long dead rises from the water, and black, flame-eyed creatures stalk up on a sleeping fawn.

Despite these terrors, however, salvation comes—not from valor, but from nature itself. Elves and owls, the protective spirits of Livermere, gather and drive the horrors back. A dawn chill crosses Troston Heath, the Ampton bell tolls, and the final image is deeply Jamesian: “a pool of blood in the old Broom wood / Looks up at the morning star.”

The poem is an idyll of haunted nature, neither wholly sincere nor entirely ironic. It prefigures James’s narrative strategy that he will employ in his ghost stories: conjure a familiar world, invest it with unease, and allow the natural world to carry supernatural freight. Cyprus may have been sunlit and dry, but “William Frog” is mist-wreathed and haunted—a poem written by a man yearning for place, to be sure, but moreover for the imaginative possibilities it suggests.

Next month, I will give you the unusual and disheartening background informing M.R. James’ least favourite tale, “Lost Hearts”.

Ever, your fellow spirit,

Brian Jay Corrigan