One summer evening drunk to hellFor the longest time (30 years!) the lyrics confused me. First, I didn't understand that two different men were having a dialog about the same thing. In this sense, it's a bit like Neil Young's "Old Man." Second, I didn't understand that the older man had not only been through a horrific wartime experience but that he too had lost a woman. The older man says:
I sat there nearly lifeless
An old man in the corner sang
"Where the water lilies grow"
And on the jukebox Johnny sang
About a thing called love
And it's "how are you kid and what's your name?"
And "how would you bloody know?"
In blood and death 'neath a screaming skyI looked at him he looked at me
I lay down on the ground
And the arms and legs of other men
Were scattered all around
Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed
Then prayed then bled some more
And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labeled parts 1, 2, 3
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes
All I could do was hate him
While Ray and Philomena sang
Of my elusive dreams
I saw the streams, the rolling hills
Where his brown eyes were waiting
And I thought about a pair of brown eyes
That waited once for me
So drunk to hell I left the place
Sometimes crawling sometimes walking
A hungry sound came across the breeze
So I gave the walls a talkin'
And I heard the sounds of long ago
From the old canal
And the birds were whistling in the trees
Where the wind was gently laughing
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
A rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes
And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labeled parts 1, 2, 3
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me
I used to think that he was talking about literally finding a pair of disembodied brown eyes, or maybe a survivor with brown eyes who then vanished when he came back to "label (body) parts one to three." Rubbish. The soldier's memory of a woman with brown eyes back home got him through the horror. But when he returned from the war, she had left. This triggers the younger man who too had once had a woman with brown eyes. The younger man leaves the pub, hating the older man.
I wanted to subtitle this post "When the artist betrays his own meaning." Just look at the video released by The Pogues to promote the single:
Utter rubbish. It's all Thatcher Derangement Syndrome and Big Bad Government. Why couldn't they have been truer to the meaning of the song?
It’s just about a guy getting pissed at a bar 'round here. He’s getting pissed because he’s broken up with this bird and… you know how it is when you just go into a pub on your own to drink and it’s really quiet and you get this old nutter who comes over and starts rambling on you. So this old guy starts on about how he came back from the war, the First World War. Or the Second. One of them anyway. And he tells him about the ship he had out there and how he got out and came back and this girl had fucked off with someone else, a girl with a pair of brown eyes. Which is the same situation as the young guy sitting there listening to all this rubbish and the juke box playing Johnny Cash and Ray Lyman and Philomena Begley, classic London juke box tracks. And in the end he gets to the stage where he says fuck it, and he goes stumbling out of the pub and he walks along the canal and starts feeling really bad, on the verge of tears, and he starts realising that the old guy has had a whole fucking lifetime of that feeling, going through the war and everything, but his original reaction is to hate him and despise him. I’m not saying he goes back and starts talking to him but you know… ~ Shane MacGowan link
