I’m bad at poetry.

I bought Lissa Schneckenburger’s CD of the same name and began playing it frequently. One of the songs, “The Irish Girl,” has the chorus

Let the wind blow high and low my boys let the seas run mountains high
It is the seamen’s duty the helm to stand by

After a month or two–maybe three–I realized that the narrator need not be any kind of sailor. In fact, the chorus can be understood as a straightforward analogy: that the lover should not abandon his love no matter what treatment he gets. All that time I had taken the chorus to be merely some phrases to conjure a general sense of lonely, desolate resolution. I’m sure this connotation is entirely appropriate, but I don’t know why I missed the more direct bearing the chorus had on the whole point of the song.

I’ll also confess that I had trouble at first with “The first time that I saw my love I was sick and feeling bad,” because, clearly, the first time that he saw his love he was out roving, not lying on his death bed. I got over that a little quicker, though.

Hey–maybe she wasn’t really wearing a golden dress!