But What Does It Mean?
Mar. 8th, 2005 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mishalakMishalak tries to interpret "The Last Day of June 1934" by Al Stewart.
All are encouraged to add their own thoughts about the imagery in the song and agree or disagree with what I'm thinking. After all there is no one way to see anything.
The morning is humming, it's a quarter past nine
I should be working down in the vines
Is the morning humming because the bees are already out or is it that sense that something important is happening?
Yeh but I'm lying here with a good friend of mine
Watching the sun in her hair
I pick the grapes from the hills to the sea
The fields of France are a home to me
Ah But today lying here is such a good place to be
I can't go anywhe - re
And as we slip in and out of embrace
Like some old and familiar place
Reflecting all of my dreams in her face like befo - ore
The fields of France where the last war was fought and the new one would start with a monumental defeat for the allies. But for now there grow grapes and a nation deeply traumatized by losing a whole generation of young men tries to be what it was.
On the last day of June nine-teen ...
Thirty-Four.
This being the fateful "night of the long knives" when Hitler used the SS and Army to break the separate power of the SA Brownshirts who had brought him to power.
Just out of Cambridge in a narrow country lane
A bottle green Bentley in the driving rain
The bottle green Bentley is such a specific image that at first I thought it must refer to some specific personage who had one. But eventually I decided it was just one of those intersting things that is meant to evoke elegant wealth or something.
Slips and skids round a corner, then pulls straight again
Heads up the drive to the door
The lights of the party shine over the fields
Where lovers and dancers watch Catherine wheels
Seems to me to be one of those perfect decadent parties held in a great manor by the rich between the wars forgetting both depression and the war that had sapped so much of the British Empire's strength two decades before.
And argue realities digging their heels
In a world that's finished with war
And a lost wind of summer blows into the streets
Past the tramps in the alleyways, the rich in silk sheets
And Europe lies sleeping, you feel her heartbeats through the floo - or
On the last day of June Nineteen...
And the coming war will touch all from great to low no mater how much for now it seems it is not even coming.
On the night that Ernst Roehm died voices rang out
In the rolling Bavarian hills
And swept through the cities and danced in the gutters
Grown strong like the joining of wills
Ernst Roehm was the leader of the SA and agreed with him on almost every point, but none the less he was a separate power who did not depend upon Hitler. Therefore he was eliminated along with all of his close followers for being insufficiently willing to follow the leader blindly. The lyrics also refer to the fascist idea of all the wills of the people in the state being joined into one under the control of the supreme leader.
OOOooohHHH!
And echoed away, like a roar in the distance
In moonlight carved out of steel
Singing all the lonely so long, and so long
You don't know me I long, how I long
You can't hold me I'm strong, how I'm strong
Stronger than your law.
I think this refers again to Hitler, who now acted as if the law did not apply to him.
I sit here now by the banks of the Rhine
Dipping my feet in the cold stream of time
Nice image here and also a reference to how much European history has happened around the River Rhine and its valley.
And I know I'm a dreamer, I know I'm out of line
With the people I see everywhere
As an observer in retrospect he can see what nearly no one at the time would see, that the world was headed for war again.
The couples pass by me, they're looking so good
Their arms round each other, they head for the woods
They don't care who Ernst Roehm was, no reason they should
Just a shadow that hangs in the air
But I thought I saw him cross over the hill
With a whole ghostly army of men at his heel
And struck in the moment it seemed to be real like before
On the last day of June Nineteen ... Thirty-Four...
It calls to my mind the idea a army of ghosts of the past war, what was at the time called The Great War, that this sacrifice of Roehm will again cause German armies to march out against its neighbors.
All are encouraged to add their own thoughts about the imagery in the song and agree or disagree with what I'm thinking. After all there is no one way to see anything.
The morning is humming, it's a quarter past nine
I should be working down in the vines
Is the morning humming because the bees are already out or is it that sense that something important is happening?
Yeh but I'm lying here with a good friend of mine
Watching the sun in her hair
I pick the grapes from the hills to the sea
The fields of France are a home to me
Ah But today lying here is such a good place to be
I can't go anywhe - re
And as we slip in and out of embrace
Like some old and familiar place
Reflecting all of my dreams in her face like befo - ore
The fields of France where the last war was fought and the new one would start with a monumental defeat for the allies. But for now there grow grapes and a nation deeply traumatized by losing a whole generation of young men tries to be what it was.
On the last day of June nine-teen ...
Thirty-Four.
This being the fateful "night of the long knives" when Hitler used the SS and Army to break the separate power of the SA Brownshirts who had brought him to power.
Just out of Cambridge in a narrow country lane
A bottle green Bentley in the driving rain
The bottle green Bentley is such a specific image that at first I thought it must refer to some specific personage who had one. But eventually I decided it was just one of those intersting things that is meant to evoke elegant wealth or something.
Slips and skids round a corner, then pulls straight again
Heads up the drive to the door
The lights of the party shine over the fields
Where lovers and dancers watch Catherine wheels
Seems to me to be one of those perfect decadent parties held in a great manor by the rich between the wars forgetting both depression and the war that had sapped so much of the British Empire's strength two decades before.
And argue realities digging their heels
In a world that's finished with war
And a lost wind of summer blows into the streets
Past the tramps in the alleyways, the rich in silk sheets
And Europe lies sleeping, you feel her heartbeats through the floo - or
On the last day of June Nineteen...
And the coming war will touch all from great to low no mater how much for now it seems it is not even coming.
On the night that Ernst Roehm died voices rang out
In the rolling Bavarian hills
And swept through the cities and danced in the gutters
Grown strong like the joining of wills
Ernst Roehm was the leader of the SA and agreed with him on almost every point, but none the less he was a separate power who did not depend upon Hitler. Therefore he was eliminated along with all of his close followers for being insufficiently willing to follow the leader blindly. The lyrics also refer to the fascist idea of all the wills of the people in the state being joined into one under the control of the supreme leader.
OOOooohHHH!
And echoed away, like a roar in the distance
In moonlight carved out of steel
Singing all the lonely so long, and so long
You don't know me I long, how I long
You can't hold me I'm strong, how I'm strong
Stronger than your law.
I think this refers again to Hitler, who now acted as if the law did not apply to him.
I sit here now by the banks of the Rhine
Dipping my feet in the cold stream of time
Nice image here and also a reference to how much European history has happened around the River Rhine and its valley.
And I know I'm a dreamer, I know I'm out of line
With the people I see everywhere
As an observer in retrospect he can see what nearly no one at the time would see, that the world was headed for war again.
The couples pass by me, they're looking so good
Their arms round each other, they head for the woods
They don't care who Ernst Roehm was, no reason they should
Just a shadow that hangs in the air
But I thought I saw him cross over the hill
With a whole ghostly army of men at his heel
And struck in the moment it seemed to be real like before
On the last day of June Nineteen ... Thirty-Four...
It calls to my mind the idea a army of ghosts of the past war, what was at the time called The Great War, that this sacrifice of Roehm will again cause German armies to march out against its neighbors.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-09 01:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-09 07:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-09 02:56 am (UTC)As for the Bentley, while it may be a symbol as you said, there is also this specific
http://www.newstatesman.com/Arts/200310270046
I think Roehm may be fairly complicated; he recruited Hitler and was mainly responsible for the growth of the SA, some feel that the Nazis would not have come to power without Roehm. Also, he was more socialistic in his views and may have helped pull in people that held similar views, pulling them away from the communists and similar groups.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-09 07:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-09 09:04 am (UTC)As he was in the public eye at the time, having several travel books out before 1934, a green Bentley might have a good chance of being associated with him to someone in England.
He was certainly part of the generation that was ignoring developments in Germany and Italy, although he himself did not. Could this be an intentional choosing of a symbol with multiple meanings - the generic wealth person, and the rare person who did notice what was happening?
I'm finding myself in agreement with much of your interpretations. The early part of the song, with the "should be working ... lying here" seems to have several overtones to it. One ties with the later references to the wealthy generation, who were relaxing rather than working and preparing, the other goes with the "fields of France" and the number of that generation who lie buried in those fields.