Bassoon players grow understandably weary of hearing Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner quoted:
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.
The quotation is usually taken out of context, to indicate that the quoter thinks the player has been practicing too long. The Wedding-Guest's anguish was the result of not getting to hear the rest of "The merry minstrelsy," rather than any objection to the bassoon. (It seems odd that the bassoon carried so far. In open-air concerts, low wind tones are among the first to be lost.)
The young man in Tennyson's Maud who invites her "Come into the garden, Maud," finds an equivocal invitation in the music playing indoors:
All night have the roses heard
The flute, violin, bassoon;
All night has the casement Jessamine stirr'd
To the dancers dancing in tune;
Till a silence fell with the waking bird,
And a hush with the setting moon.
Surely the most pleasant bassoon in literature is that played by Dickens' Matthew Bagnet, in Bleak House. "Mat blows away at his bassoon, and you're respectable civilians one and all," says the not-so-respectable George Rouncewell wistfully, while Mr. Bagnet explains that his good fortune is his wife's doing: "It was the old girl that brought out my musical abilities. I should have been in the artillery now but for the old girl. Six years I hammered at the fiddle. Ten at the flute. The old girl said it wouldn't do; intention good, but want of flexibility; try the bassoon. The old girl borrowed a bassoon from the bandmaster of the Rifle Regiment. I practiced in the trenches. Got on, got another, get a living by it!" And Dickens remarks that Mr. Bagnet's voice, "short, deep, and resonant, is not at all unlike the tones of the instrument to which he is devoted. Indeed, there may be generally observed in him an unbending, unyielding, brass-bound air, as if he were himself the bassoon of the human orchestra. " (Bleak House, Chapter 271 "More Old Soldiers Than One.")
His technique may not be quite all it should, but his devotion is without flaw.