MARTIN CARTHY
ELEANOR & SWEET WILLIAM # 1
In January I began work on a poem based on Martin Carthy’s version of an old folk ballad called The Famous Flower of Serving Men. As is the case with all of the ballads & folk songs that have survived the depredation of centuries of illiteracy & then literacy (the first confining the song to oral tradition, the second submitting it to moralistic or ‘scholarly’ bowdlerisation), the song is a masterpiece of imagistic compression. The story is stripped back to the basics, perfect metaphors & similes shortcutting the narrative so that both absolute clarity & maximum drama are enabled. I’ll quote from the sleeve notes to Shearwater, the album on which Carthy debuted the song:
‘By common consent, the finest piece on the album is Famous Flower of Serving Men. The plot (brace yourself!): a mother sends violent thugs to her daughter's house to kill her husband and baby. The young woman digs their graves, buries them, dries her tears, cuts off her hair and dresses herself as a man. She goes to work at the King's court, where the King falls in love with her although he thinks she is a man, so he makes her his chamberlain. The King goes hunting one day and is led deep into the forest, to the site of the graves, by a magical white hind. He is visited by a white dove who is the spirit of the murdered husband and tells him the whole story, whereupon the King rides home, swearing vengeance on the mother, and sweeps the Famous Flower of Serving Men into his arms, and has the mother taken prisoner and burned at the stake. No mention of happy ever afters. The song is utterly compelling, with its complex but hypnotic rhythm and the vivid images it inspires: “They left me nought to dig his grave / but the bloody sword that slew my babe” - it could easily be the substance of a full length opera, a film, a classical ballet, and Shakespeare could have made a major play out of it. Carthy manages to convey all this immense drama and emotion in under ten minutes. A. L. “Bert” Lloyd (one of the doyens of English folk music) apparently once said something about this: one shouldn't be surprised at such a song being so many verses long, but that it should be so many verses short’.
I bought the Martin Carthy box set recently & listened to all four CDs one after the other. They contain much of Carthy’s very best work, covering some 40 years of pretty consistent recording. But Famous Flower stands out as a track that manages to combine within its ten minute span the near-perfect synthesis of lyric, melodic inventiveness, vocal delivery & instrumental prowess. And - the triumphant sum of these impeccable parts - the song conjures up effortlessly & beguilingly that sense of a mythic past in which our British roots are buried so deep.
The poem was intended to follow one that I had just completed, based on a folk song called The Dark-Eyed Sailor. The notion behind that one was to take the basic, classically economical narrative & extrapolate from it a fuller, more naturalistic storyline. Working on the presumption that most of the documentary-style folk songs were presumably inspired by specific events, the plan was to produce a personalised account by one or more of the protagonists.
I was quite pleased with the poem rather crudely entitled Folk Song # 1 & I embarked upon the Famous Flower follow-up with great enthusiasm. But within a few lines it became apparent that, where the original song was a tour de force of conciseness, my literal re-telling would involve a degree of depth & detail that would necessarily create something of an epic. And so, with work pressures building & cold days & nights piling up, it stalled & got forgotten.
Then, the other day, I had occasion to play Famous Flower in a school assembly & I was seduced all over again by the song’s uncanny power. I flicked back through the pages of the notebook that I keep with me all the time & re-located my first rough, much amended draft of the piece. Recognising now that the poem tentatively entitled Eleanor & Sweet William (after the protagonist’s name-change) could, with perseverance & much en route revision, turn into something of almost novel length, I set to work.
Tomorrow I’ll post the lyrics to Carthy’s version of Famous Flower & below it I’ll put up what I have so far of Eleanor & Sweet William.
11:46:30 PM 
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