In the hallucination segments of PHPR, when Miranda is sick and delirious between half-recognized visits from Adam and later the nurse and doctors, I noticed a strong correlation between nature imagery and death, which of course is tied to disease and war in this text. Her first hallucination involves feeling that she is lying down in a deep field of snow high in the mountains. The sensation of lying in a deep field of snow, for me, invokes an image of a body in a morgue's freezer. Also, prominent images of world war I often involve bodies strewn out in frozen European fields. Miranda moves from this image to a dense jungle, which she sees as "a writhing terribly alive and secret place of death," the jungle here is the unknown approach of death (in the forms of war and plague), that grows into a cacophonous refrain of "danger danger danger...war war war." It is as if the war has become so dense with pain and suffering that it has spread an arm out towards Miranda, striking her with influenza, a silent manifestation of its violence.
In her next hallucination, Miranda finds herself in a small green wood (like the woods of France), where she witnesses Adam repeatedly stricken dead by arrows, only to rise again, in a macabre cycle that echoes the pointlessness and repetitious horror of war. Once again, nature holds the key to this death. Next she imagines her fathers well bubbling over with water to staunch a poison brought to it by an image of a german soldier; nature (plague) is drowning out human violence with violence of its own. In her final hallucination, she sees "a landscape of sea and sand, of soft meadow and sky, freshly washed and glittering with transparencies of blue;" this pastoral dreamscape contains the faces of all people she has ever known, whose movements are connected with clouds and waves. She feels herself moving among these faces "as a wave among waves" and she understands each individual as alone but not solitary. Her water is again posited as a cleansing manifestation of nature, which comes in waves that roll up upon humanity and retreat again, leaving humanity scattered as they face their individual deaths, but united in the fact of mortality.
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Great point on the imagery! I love how the hallucinations really take on their own persona, almost as if they form another character all their own. With the bobbing up and down from the mountain top to the valley, I of coarse got the Bible reference to the valley of the shadow of death, and all that, but also I felt a sense of drowning. Like when she was in the valley it was the pressure of the sky that was crushing her, almost lie the pressure form Adam and the Dr.'s to get better.
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