As I’ve mentioned before, as much as I like The Decemberists’ singing, playing, and portland-local-band status, it’s easy for me to pick out my favorite track from each album, and Yankee Bayonet (also known as ‘I Will Be Home Then’) is the one I like the most from The Crane Wife.

This song tells a story – and while I hate to disregard the music, that story is so attractive to me that I almost don’t care what they’re playing behind it.

Heart-carved tree trunk, Yankee bayonet
A sweetheart left behind
Far from the hills of the sea-swelled Carolinas
That’s where my true love lies

So the stage has been set – civil-war era Carolina, a girl pining after her soldier love who has gone off to war after carving their names in a heart on a tree. The first two lines describe the scene of this screenplay, and the third and forth are lines of dialog from the sweetheart.

The next two lines begin a conversation between the dead soldier and the sweetheart – delineated by Colin Meloy and Laura Veirs

Look for me when the sun-bright swallow
Sings upon the birch bough high
But you are in the ground with the voles and the weevils
All a’chew upon your bones so dry

She’s remembering his promise to her – that he’ll be back when the birds are singing, in the spring time, when the sun comes out, but she’s lamenting that he’s dead, and rotting under the dirt.

But when the sun breaks
To no more bullets in Battle Creek
Then will you make a grave
For I will be home then

I want ‘battle creek’ to be ‘battlecry’, pronounced like ‘mimicry’, as in, the art or practice of battle. But apparently that’s not what the real words are.

When I was a girl how the hills of Oconee
Made a seam to hem me in
There at the fair when our eyes caught, careless
Got my heart right pierced by a pin

The story of how they met – she lived isolated in her community, and met a boy on the fairgrounds. Also, check out the consistency of metaphor in the second line – ‘seam’ and ‘hem’ are both sewing terms, it could’ve just as easily been to ‘keep’ her in, or a ‘fence’ instead of a ‘seam’, but since girls were expected to sew, that’s what’s used for this verse.

But oh, did you see all the dead of Manassas
All the bellies and the bones and the bile
No, I lingered here with the blankets barren
And my own belly big with child

Manassas, Virginia was where one of the first big battles of the civil war took place – and it was fought mostly by young unexperienced soldiers – the first two lines reflect the soldier’s horror of the situation. The girl reveals helplessly that while she wasn’t watching her friends die around her on the battlefield, she was at home, pregnant with the soldier’s child. The blankets are barren – they devote a whole line to that statement, and it emphasizes the physical component of her longing for him. Also, the first two lines deal with death amongst others, while the second two deal with life alone.

Stems and bones and stone walls too
Could keep me from you
Skein of skin is all too few
To keep me from you

Even though he’s dead, and she knows it, they can’t bear to apart…

But oh my love, though our bodies may be parted
Though our skin may not touch skin
Look for me with the sun-bright sparrow
I will come on the breath of the wind

So she can’t help feeling that his spirit returns to her in the spring, even though his body has died – and perhaps his body literally comes back, to be buried, as suggested by ‘then will you make a grave?’ in the chorus – although it could as easily be an empty grave, a hero’s grave, a nameless white cross in a field of identical monuments.

Basicly, this song is incredibly sad, lonely, and heartbreaking, but it’s also a song about love. This stuff always gets me.