Just got this backchannel -- it doesn't directly illuminate The Dilly Song,
but I think it's relevant.
Made my jaw drop, but ...
Robin
*****
CB to RH:
"
As the book's title suggests, Causley's major theme in Survivor's Leave once
again is war, though here the conflict has been universalized beyond World
War II into a tragic view of life as a doomed struggle between the evil and
the innocent. The book bristles with images of violence and deception. In
"Recruiting Drive," a butcher-bird lures young men to their deaths in
battle. (A few months after the appearance of Survivor's Leave, Auden first
published a similar poem "The Willow-wren and the Stare," in Encounter.
Perhaps Causley had some slight influence on his own mentor.)
Under the willow the willow
I heard the butcher-bird sing,
Come out you fine young fellow
From under your mother's wing.
I'll show you the magic garden
That hangs in the beamy air,
The way of the lynx and the angry Sphinx
And the fun of the freezing fair.
Lie down lie down with my daughter
Beneath the Arabian tree,
"Gaze on your face in the water
Forget the scribbling sea.
Your pillow the nine bright shiners
Your bed the spilling sand,
But the terrible toy of my lily-white boy
Is the gun in his innocent hand.
"
http://www.danagioia.net/essays/ecausley.htm
RH to CB:
Magic!!! +That+ I hadn't come on. And it's peculiarly loopy. Dana Gioia
promoting Causley makes all too much sense (on a good Wednesday, Gioia's own
least-bad pomes tend to be Auden rips, anyway), but Auden's "The Willow Wren
and the Stare" draws on yet ANOTHER poem in _Light Verse_. Deeply
involuted. But this is drifting off The Dilly Song and into Auden and _The
Oxford Book of Light Verse_.
The last eight lines lines of the Causley poem are a mush of The Dilly Song
and ("Gaze on your face in the water"/"Look, look in the water") Auden's "As
I walked out one morning". But Causley has to have got " the nine bright
shiners" direct from The Dilly Song as it doesn't occur in Auden's poem.
Bloody weird.
|