Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?

Subject: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: JHW
Date: 26 Oct 12 - 06:54 AM

We (Darlington Mummers) were looking at The Coventry Carol and could not understand the last verse.

Then woe is me, poor Child, for Thee,
And ever mourn and say; (some versions sigh or pray instead of say)
For Thy parting, nor say nor sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.

Any ideas please?

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: AllisonA(Animaterra)
Date: 26 Oct 12 - 08:49 AM

The best explanation for the origins of the Coventry Carol can be found Here.

As for the last verse, if it is "dialogue" from a play as described in the link, it seems like Mary is saying, "oh, woe is me, poor child! And I'll keep mourning and saying 'woe is me'until your departure, but I won't sing, 'Bye bye.... Etc."
Of course, trying to parse it with that much detail takes all the poetry and beauty out of it.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: JHW
Date: 26 Oct 12 - 04:57 PM

Thanks very much for that, lots of interest as well as the explanation

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: GUEST,Jack Sprocket
Date: 26 Oct 12 - 08:14 PM

Try this for an origin

Then woe is me, poor Child, for Thee,
We'll never mourn nor stay
For Thy parting, nor say nor sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.

In other words:

The women singing to the baby will not be present at his death to sing a lullaby.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: Paul Davenport
Date: 27 Oct 12 - 11:47 AM

You don't sing lullabies to dead babies. The song is designed to help a live baby sleep.
The version I know is;
'Then woe is me,
Poor child for thee,
And ever watch and pray.
For thy parting, nor say nor sing
Bye, bye lully lullay.'

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: Haruo
Date: 27 Oct 12 - 12:00 PM

Don't forget that the Christ Child and the Stabat Mater Dolorosa is part of the mental context of the lullaby/carol. There is a cross on the horizon.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: growler
Date: 27 Oct 12 - 03:46 PM

This carol was not about the Christ child, but referred to the slaughter of the inocents by Herod

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: Haruo
Date: 27 Oct 12 - 04:49 PM

I know, but it's part of the same story, and it's all there in the background. And I'm sure the Black Death is in there somewhere, too.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: LadyJean
Date: 27 Oct 12 - 05:10 PM

The song comes from the Coventry Pageant of Shearmen and Tailors, a medieval miracle play that portrays the birth of Christ and the slaugher of the innocents. When Herod, supposedly, ordered all boys under the age of four born in the city of Bethlehem to be killed. This is the lament for those murdered boys.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: Paul Davenport
Date: 27 Oct 12 - 05:25 PM

Haruo has a point here. There are literary resonances here and the implied crucifixion is well observed.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: Haruo
Date: 28 Oct 12 - 12:22 AM

Typologically I think the Innocents are a Type of Christ. Their slaughter is a foreshadowing of his. I don't mean this is necessarily "true", nor that the Evangelist meant it that way, but rather that this way of looking at things was customary in that time and place where the carol was first composed and presented.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: GUEST,Fr. Steven Clark
Date: 25 Dec 23 - 03:18 AM

How do you know that mothers do not sing for their dead babies? Might ask a mother who has buried their child.

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Coventry Carol - last verse meaning?
From: Robert B. Waltz
Date: 25 Dec 23 - 03:45 AM

Happy Holiday Morning, everyone.

It's worth noting that, until this morning, we hadn't seen a post on this thread for eleven years, so perhaps all questions had been answered. :-) But, in light of events in Bethlehem right now, since the thread has been revived... I'll insert some background.

First off, the Coventry Carol is not a traditional song (unless it became one in the twentieth century). The only source is the Coventry Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors. Its exact date of composition cannot be known; a lot of sources argue for a fifteenth century date, but all we can say is that the only copy had a colophon date of 1591 -- which was after Mystery Pageants had mostly been suppressed, so it was either post-dated or it was a copy of an older manuscript.

And that sole copy no longer exists. It was burned in a Birmingham Library Fire of 1879. All we have are bad eighteenth century transcripts. I emphasize bad. And they are transcripts, not facsimiles -- there isn't anything for paleographers to work on. Which explains some of the variations noted here. Other variations arise from conjectures about the spelling -- that is, what Modern English word is meant by the spellings in the two bad transcripts.

For those who actually want to know about the history and context of the song really need to consult the only proper edition of (what is left of) the Coventry cycle, Hardin Craig, editor, Two Coventry Corpus Christi Plays, second edition, Early English Text Society, 1902, 1957, 1967. I suspect the second-best source is probably my own summary, http://balladindex.org/Ballads/OBC022.html.

In trying to understand the song, it's worth noting that the medieval image of the Massacre of the Innocents made it a large-scale tragedy -- a Gaza Massacre scale tragedy, with thousands of infants killed. In reality, if it happened at all... well, Bethlehem probably had about 500 people. If Herod's men killed all of them under two years old, it might have been 30-50 people. By Herodian standards, that's bad but certainly not without precedent. If it actually happened, it was minor enough that no other chronicler recorded it. But let's remember that this story occurs only in the Gospel of Matthew, not in the parallel in the Gospel of Luke, and that Matthew was trying to make the story of Jesus's birth to be parallel to the story of Moses's infancy, and the massacre of Israelite children in Exodus would have been known to every Jew.