Subject: RE: Meaning: Farewell Farewell (Fairport Convention)
From:
GUEST
Date: 30 Jun 12 - 04:31 PM
Well, no, not really, or not completely. My skill and call is to see "folk" songs like this as relating to the spiritual Path, which this song definitely does. It's a dialogue between the Father and the Sons, the principle of spiritual guidance and the "travelers" on the spiritual Path ("travelers" is a Sufi term, but it's of universal application insofar as the spiritual life is conceived of as a pilgrimage or a journey). Here's the dialogue:
[THE VOICE OF THE FATHER]
"Farewell, farewell to you who would hear
You lonely travelers all
The cold north wind will blow again
The winding road does call."
[THE VOICE OF THE SONS, THE VOICE OF THE FATHER]
"And will you never return to see
Your bruised and beaten sons?"
"Oh, I would, I would, if welcome I were
For they love me, every one."
[THE VOICE OF THE SONS]
"And will you never cut the cloth
Or drink the light to be?
And can you never swear a year
To any one of we?"
[THE VOICE OF THE FATHER]
"No, I will never cut the cloth
Or drink the light to be
But I'll swear a year to one who lies
Asleep along side of me.
"Farewell, farewell to you who would hear
You lonely travelers all
The cold north wind will blow again
The winding road does call."
The Father has died and gone to the next world; the principle of spiritual Guidance is hidden behind the door of death. And so the sons lament. (This song could well have been written by the followers of a great spiritual teacher after he had passed on.)
"Cut the cloth and drink the light to be" may well refer to the initiatory rites of the particular esoteric school the dead teacher guided, possibly a school of Christian Hermeticism. "Drink the light to be" would be some act that symbolized and foreshadowed the final goal of the Path, maybe a shared cup of wine or some more powerful intoxicant. As for "cut the cloth", this could indicate an "investiture" with a sacred initiatory robe or a piece of cloth with a similar significance -- perhaps a symbolic funeral shroud as is used in some Sufi orders, indicating "death to the self", or the apron or similar piece of cloth conferred upon the initiate in Freemasonry or in the futuwwah (chivalric) brotherhoods of the Muslim world. The meaning of the song is that the dead master cannot initiate us from the other world; for that a living master is needed. But we can still receive a helpful spiritual influence from him -- possibly in the dream state -- if we are willing, as it were, to sleep on his grave, to die spiritually to the world as he has died both spiritually and physically.
And the North is the direction of the Hyperborean Paradise, the gate to which is the Pole Star, the "still point of the turning world", the visible point of eternity in the temporal order. Those who die uninitiated pass to the West; the initiates, however -- the ones
who have "died before they die" -- pass to the North, along the hard road of purgation, against the full force of the northern cold, the ascetic spiritual power that pacifies the passions and makes the soul ready for Hyperborea, the land of eternal Springtime behind the north wind; as William Blake put it in The Book of Thel, "The Eternal Gates' terrific porter lifted the Northern Bar…." Dante, in the Divine Comedy, places the northern constellations of the Bears above the Terrestrial Paradise at the summit of the Mount of Purgatory.
On a more outer level, this song expresses the lament of the persecuted true sons of a King or Lord whose place has been taken by a bastard or usurper -- which, in terms of Britain, could well represent the plight of persecuted Catholics after Henry XVII usurped the powers of the Roman hierarchy and bombarded and shut down the monasteries, including the Abbey at Glastonbury -- an event Blake covertly lamented in his prologue to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In a specifically Christian context, the Lord who has passed on but whose sons still long for his return would be assimilated to Christ the King.
Sincerely,
Charles Upton
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sj
