When next I went to Caledonia

[shewhomust]

Last month I wrote about the song When first I came to Caledonia, with its hauntingly surreal lyrics; I was particularly taken with the quatrain:

If I had pen from Pennsylvania
and I had paper so snowy white
and I had ink of rosy morning
a true love letter to you I'd write

which I found characteristically idiosyncratic - where else would you find the idea of writing in the rosy colours of the dawn sky?

Well, you live and learn. My brother burned some of his band's music onto a CD for me, so I could make a couple of tracks available on their web site. But there was a third song, Green Grows the Laurel, which includes the verse:

I wrote him a letter in red rosy lines,
He wrote back an answer all twisted and twined,
Saying keep your love letters and I'll keep mine,
You write to your love and I'll write to mine.

A quick Google reveals that not every version of the song contains those words (I found them in the version sung by Cara Dillon). So I'm not the only one to be a little nonplussed by the notion. Yet this version has its own coherence, in the idea that the writing reflects the nature of the writer: the true lover writes in the the red heat of passion, the red of the roses associated with love, and the false deceiver replies in writing as twisted as his/her own nature.

It's so tempting to wander off down the byways of red letter days here...

Comments

[sovay]

Looking for the lyrics to Dave Van Ronk's "Fair and Tender Ladies," I ran across the following verse in someone else's version:

I wish I was on some tall mountain
Where the ivy rocks were black as ink
I'd write a letter to my false true lover
Whose cheeks are like the morning pink

Even if the morning-image has been transposed to the lover, I thought it fascinating that in a stanza about letter-writing, the rocks are still "black as ink."