My song is done, I must be gone,
No longer can I stay.
God bless you all, both great and small,
And send you a joyous May.

So I think that has to be the original source of that stanza - it's a case of what Harry Smith called a 'folk lyric' being moved from one song to another with the minimal change to make it fit.

I'm still confused about the mice, myself.

I can see Hell having mice, but are the mice using it as a really big nest or tormenting the inmates?

15. Oh I had I as many years to abide
As there are blades of grass,
Then there would be an end: but now
Hell's pains will never pass.

16. Oh! were I but alive again,
For the space of one half hour,
I would make my peace and so secure
That the Devil should have no power!

...or is there a reason we should discount this? Is this a later retrofit or something?

When you have to go to the "mice" word to rhyme with "Christ," you're REALLY stretching.

I prefer "hell is full of lice" in a perverse and unhelpful way.

All things bright and beautiful
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful
Except mice.

Eeew.

And now my carol's ended,
I cannot tarry here,
God bless you all, both great and small,
And God send you a Happy New Year.

I made it up. Works.

In regard to cats, though: while certainly it'd be like a cat to not mind if humans were being tortured all around it as long as it had food and sources of amusement, most of the cats I've known would be rather annoyed by the constant shrieks of agony. To say nothing of having to pad across a firey or ice-enshrouded landscape. I've always assumed that, like fairies, cats had Other Arrangements, and wouldn't deign to be involved in silly human eschatology.

Hm. Nine lives...the Tithe to Hell...hm.

Om.

But I suppose mice are a real curse if you happen to base your diet and livelihood on keeping grain in huge barns. It's weird enough that it might well be early. Don't the changes in these things tend to involve twisting them so they make sense, and never mind the rhyme?

That would be the principle behind 'pass' going to 'power'. Do you mean like 'compass', Clifton?

"My father, on the verges of the Styx,
His fur gone white with what he knoweth not,
Pape Silvestre, canst not slay a mouse?"

"I see I'm not gettin' through to you. Hey, you! Poetic tour-guide guy! Gimme thome help over here."

"Ehhhhh . . . what's up, Dante?"

I know this verse from the ballad "Christ Made a Trance", as well as the better rhyming:

Oh Hell is deep and Hell is dark
And Hell is full of moss
What shall we do for our Saviour
That he has done for us.

But mice seem more hellacious than moss.

Andrew beat me to the conflation of two verses explanation.

When I sing "Dives and Lazarus" I use a condensed version that ends with:

And it fell out upon one day,
Rich Dives sickened and died.
There came two serpents out of Hell
His soul therein to guide.
"Rise up, rise up, brother Diverus,
And come along with me,
There is a place prepared in Hell
For to sit upon a serpent's knee."

Pretty precarious seating indeed, seeing that serpents ain't got knees.

A good song to remind folks to remember the poor.

"I bought you a brand new mustang 'bout nineteen sixty five
Now you come around signifying a woman, you don't wanna let me ride."

Same sort of issues involved.

*Let's not get into horror movies with vast numbers of rodents, either. #shudder#

1. Hell is full of all the bad mice. So I guess you can expect mouse poop in your cornflakes for eternity.

2. Those Buddhists that believe in reincarnation are right, and you're going to be reborn as a rodent. On the bright side, it sounds like you'll have lots of company.

John the wine, he saw a sign, goodnight, goodnight
John said I've seen a number of signs, goodnight, goodnight

Hell is full of ice.

That's Dantesque, and for someone living in a cold climate, nasty all on its own.

A verse from a popular version of Tam Lin springs to mind:

And she will change me in your arms
Into a wolf or a snake
But hold me tight and fear not
I am your baby's father.

It's pretty obvious (to me anyway) that "snake" should be "adder," to rhyme with "fader" (= archaic form of "father"). Similarly one could find ways of reworking some or all of those verses to rhyme ("Oh Hell is full of mist" to rhyme with the older pronunciation of "Christ," for example) but I wouldn't know whether that would be more "authentic" or less so.

Oh Hell is deep and Hell is dark
And Hell is full of moss

A version I know has:

Oh Hell is deep and Hell is dark
And Hell is full of mist

Darkly evocative: but it's a poetry of metamorphosis, I think, a sort of cat's cradle between the singer and the listening ear.

There's a neat discussion of that carol in a review of Fragments and Meaning in Traditional Song from the Blues to the Baltic by Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter:

"If we look at Christ Made a Trance as a performance, rather than a piece of literature, even the most 'disrupted' form makes perfect sense in the context of its use. The point of such carols in performance is not to set theology to music but to get listeners to part with cash. Especially if sung at Christmas, a Travellers' text...contains a good enough selection of key words and phrases to be recognisably a carol and earn a penny."

Greer

e.g. "secure" and "power" rhyme properly in a traditional Scots accent.

However, in a few of them adopting a Scots accent (or in my case using the one I already have) makes the rhymes worse rather than better. e.g. mice would become meese ...

Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs has a discussion of a modern instance of this procedure wherein an undecipherable line becomes "gonna railroad high tonight." For that matter, he also suggests that the first line of the Beach Boys' "Help Me Rhonda" goes

Well since she put me down
There's been owls pukin' in my bed...

There ya go.

Do you have a reference for that? Or a century?

The OED distinguishes between "mouse" ("an animal of any of the smaller species of the genus Mus of rodents ... as a type of something small or insignificant") and "rat" ("a rodent of some of the larger species of the genus Rattus ... used as an opprobrious or familiar epithet").

Vermin tend to be listed as "rats and mice," as domestic creatures are "cats and dogs."

Mice tend to be seen as "wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous" little nuisances; rats as something burlier and menacing.

Now, "deer" could mean simply "beast." The word could include both rats and mice, and did proverbially. The 15th-century jingle, "Ratons & myse and soche smale dere" was remembered by Shakespeare, remembering poor Tom: "But Mice, and Rats, and such small Deare, Haue bin Toms food, for seuen long yeare."

If being dumped means owls puking, then as being dumped is hell, hell would necessarily be full of owl puke. Hence the mice. It all makes sense now.

Are there any other deep questions we can clear up for the world, Teresa?

"It's a world of pitchforks,
a world of mice.
It's a world of sulphur,
and dwarves on ice..."

I have tortured
the souls
that were in
the ice blocks

and which
you were probably
saving
for mouse food

Condemn me
they were hellacious
so wracked
and so cold

Disengage lotus.

Mo.

Clearly the Modern Major General would have to be Porky Pig, his daughter would have to be Petunia (sorry all you Linda Ronstad fans out there) and so on. The major problem was that I couldn't squeeze in Bugs--nobody in the film was smart enough--or the Roadrunner or Wile E. Coyote.

Now I have to lie down.

Daffy Duck also has to play Ko-Ko in The Mikado. Just turn your mental ear to him singing "Tit-Willow."

Speaking as one who is phobic about mice, I don't really have a problem with the lyric. Oddly enough, I had a cat who was also phobic about mice, and would come and complain to me in the middle of the night that the mice were eating her kibble. I don't know what she thought I was supposed to do about them.

The mice phobia is usually not a big problem, despite my occasional embarrassment about being the stereotypical woman standing on a chair. There was the time that a mouse in the dog food bin (kept in the garage) ran over my hand as I scooped out the chow. I screamed loudly for a while, and then went into the kitchen and inquired why Jack hadn't come to my rescue. Jack said: I figured it was either a mouse or a mountain lion, and I didn't think I could do anything in either case. (We live in Colorado, slap up against the Rocky Mountain National Forest. We have lots of wild life, that is much BIGGER than mice, but don't worry me nearly as much.)

His answer was, roughly, no, I had not heard it wrong, yes, it's mice in the RVW version, yes, it's almost certainly an oral transmissionism, and they couldn't either find a version with anything more sensible, nor think of anything more sensible and probable, so mice it was and they left it mice.

He added that June Tabor blew the first five takes due to cracking up spectacularly everytime she got to that line.

Hee! This is the version Steeleye Span sings, too, and it's always made me giggle.

I've been laughing myself sick at this thread since "Hell serves Diet Slice."

Daffy Duck also has to play Ko-Ko in The Mikado. Just turn your mental ear to him singing "Tit-Willow."

Or "The Criminal Cried" --

"Ath he thquirmed and thtruggled and gurgled and guggled
I drew my thnickerthneeeeeeeeeeeee!"

I haven't seen any of those movies, but I've looked at some cover art, and it did not impress me.

Rodents don't have canines. They have incisors and molars, but no canines.

That is exactly why I didn't rent the videos.

It's Child 56, only two versions which is not that many, and only minor differences (but the serpent's knee!). I suppose serpent could have been a mondegreen for servant at some point, but I never like to speculate on these because of the tendency for such speculations to be wholly wrong. Again, they don't include the coda section; which appears to be solely from Vaughan Williams' collection.

There may have been some corruption, or it may have been a conflation of two songs. Or it may of course be that they caught some genuine oral tradition that never appeared in the broadsides. But the fact that the final section lacks the rhyme structure of earlier versions might indicate it's a later addition.

I have relatively few versions of this song; the Oysterband one was the first I heard. The first time I saw the Oysters live was the Freedom and Rain tour, because I was a June Tabor fan (I did have a few Oysterband songs on compilations). So Dives and Lazarus is on my list of "extraordinary songs I first heard live". I did wonder, leaving the gig, whether I had heard 'mice' correctly.

I also have a version by Nic Jones, with text very close to this. I'm going to put in a plug here for the two collections of Nic Jones rarities -- unlike his original albums, Nic Jones makes money out of these. Available here. And they are fabulous; anyone who likes English folk music at all should listen to Nic Jones. (A cheap and easy way to start is that emusic has Penguin Eggs, in my opinion one of the finest folk albums ever).

In the list of things I wish people had told me when I was growing up is the fact that we don't know anything about the past; that we will never know how these songs were written, and how they spread, and what caused somebody somewhere to think of that very urban, English Hell.

Greer: Thank you for reminding me of "Christ Made a Trance"; I knew I had a song with 'hell is full of mist' but I couldn't track it.

Of course, now I have all my album art, iTunes introduces a lyrics tab. 15,825 songs, that's not too many. And surely someone will quickly design an automated lyrics grabber that will find the lyrics for at least a third of my music on the Internet?

Arrgh. Except that the iTunes search doesn't appear to search in 'lyrics'. Doesn't come up in Spotlight either. Excuse me, I just need to whine in Apple's support forums.

Eventually I will stop re-reading this and will get some work done this morning.

Eventually.

Virgil is laughing and shaking his head
Can you point out the way through the land of the dead?
‘Cause this all was commanded where what’s said is said
To the very last stop out of town
On the Northern Line train going down.

The guard with the pitchfork does not fear the sack
“You are still on the Circle Line, there is no way back;
You must change at Embankment, your colour is black,
The alternative’s once more around,”
To the Northern Line train going down

Satan is chewing on paisley and cress
Please keep Damnation tidy, let’s not have a mess
And there’s no absolution at St Pancras’s
Don’t the mice make a murdochy sound
On the Northern Line train going down

Hell might very well be full of mice.

Or ice. Which is more painful and traditional but not half as revolting.

Finally pulled Freedom and Rain off the shelf, where I'm sure it was getting very impatient, and the lyric there is:

Hell is dark, Hell is deep
Hell is full of mice
It's a pity that any poor soul in Hell
Should be barred from a second rise.

Now, this version also has "Dives" as "Di-ver-es" (long i, same scansion as "Lazarus") throughout, which As We All Know, Mr. Lomax, is a perfectly acceptable folk tactic, especially when the audience is blocking the exits. But it is also a Useful Reminder that anybody who speaks of the O-verbal-infix-riginal of Ane Folke Lyrick is talking through his liripipe.

It's not so much a mondegreen as prescience on the part of the songwriter.

Hell is full of mice must mean something like no edible food and total devastation of your livelihood.

Not much on topic, but still kind of interesting.

I think it was originally serpent, since serpents (or at least, The Serpent) appears to have once had legs:

And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life (Gen 3:14 KJV)

This sounds like an angel with a weird sense of humor. And speaking of weird, I really need to stop reading this thread for a while, since I haven't had any coffee yet for fear of snorting it out my nose.

Kieran, that's wonderful.

O my deir hert, young Jesus sweit,
Prepare thy creddil in my spreit,
And I sall rock thee in my hert
And never mair from thee depart.

But I sall praise thee evermore
With sangis sweit unto thy gloir;
The knees of my heart sall I bow,
And sing that richt Balulalow!

The knees of my heart sall I bow,
And sing that richt Balulalow!

I suppose that if you were going to rock Jesus in your hert, having knees there might be useful

If so, there's this little rhyme about plums in the refrigerator...

Lori Coulson

But I'm glad you noticed.

Like what's-his-name and the Harpies.

I have trapped
the mice
that were in
the underworld

and which
you were probably
anthropomorphizing
for tv.

Forgive me
they were bothersome
so squeaky
and so pestilent.

I think my brain just fried.

Still, imagine my befuddlement when a parody of one of my favorite poems pops up here.

Need to get another copy of that book. The one I bought from Scholastic long ago vanished into the mists.

Thanks for the pointers, Larry!

Some other info here:
http://www.thebookofdays.com/months/may/1.htm

I'll have to dig out my copy of _ROAGOWP_ and look through it again; it's been a long time. Thanks for the reminder.

That would be because "eye" was pronounced "ee." As in "daisy": "day's eye."

It all hangs together wonderfully well though.

I was reading and chortling, reading and giggling, reading and .... coffee out my nose! That comment condensed all the hilarity into one glorious mental picture, and I pretty much would have done coffee out my nose if I'd been drinking any.

Sadly, I did not mention any reinterpretations of the icebox poem. Dammit.

My ribs hurt.

Hell is small and the lighting's poor
Hell is awfully cold
The mice all gray are allowed to stay
For Hell is rent-controlled

Too urban.

Some dwell here for their mortal sin
Some for lying or rage
And hungry mice eat the gluttons thin
While Dives runs in his cage

Way too specific.

Hell is dark, Hell is deep,
Hell is full of mice,
And Nixon's underneath mousie dung

Uh-uh.

Young fantasy writer here. Recently read through most of your site(s) and found loads of useful publishing information. For that, thank you. Truly.

Sapere Aude!
~JM

Then Dives lifted up his eyes
And saw poor Lazarus blest:
“A drop of water, brother Lazarus,
For my heart burns in my vest.

“If I had as many years to live
As there are blades of grass
I would make it in my will secure
To ‘kick The Devil’s ass, Sea Bass!’

Oh, hell is dark, oh, hell is deep;
Oh, hell, it tries to seize us,
It is a pity that any poor sinful soul
Should depart from our homeboy, Jesus.

And now my carol’s ended,
No longer can I stay.
God bless you all, both great and small,
And God send you a happy New Year.

Edit notes:

Vests are timeless. Even more timeless than ones own “chest”, which could have been my choice, but was not. This is mostly because chests don’t come in paisley. (I have heard that paisley was in style before I was born. I’m going to need visual confirmation on that, people.)

If you know where I snagged Sea Bass, then you are clearly smart & smarter than most.

As for mice… Weak. Frankly, (and this note is for you, Mr. The Devil,) hell should upgrade to rats if it intends to be taken seriously.

“Christ” vs. “Jesus” was an obvious replacement. Kanye West chose “Jesus”, and that guy definitely Knows something. I can see it in his bling.

The final, non-rhyming line is too hilarious to be touched. Try it: You will fail.

The final, non-rhyming line is too hilarious to be touched. Try it: You will fail.

Not at all. Scots readers know all you have to do is move the date back one day and you have:

And now my carol's ended
No longer can I stay.
God bless you all, both great and small,
And God send you a happy Hogmany

(For non-Scots: Hogmany is New Year's Eve, and is pronounced hog-man-AY.)

If Hell is full of cannibalistic mice then there's nothing to worry about, since they'll only be eating each other.

Another shout out from here for _ROAGOWP_ which I own and love.

Re: Mikado, I highly recommend Elmer Fudd's voice for "Tit Willow". Try it. It's fun. You will get interesting looks from passers-by. The more soulfully you can sing it, the better.

Also: Katisha's song, "The Hour of Gladness is Dead and Gone" fits very nicely to the tune of "The Phantom of the Opera". I made the mistake of pointing this out backstage to the woman who was playing Katisha in a community theater production, and it messed her up badly.

Elaine says I How came ye here,
You never did look finer,
But you've been lying ten long years
In a grave in Carolina.

Melody directions: First line is a curve concave downward. Second line is generally sloping upward with a little zig zag toward the end. Third is generally sloping downward. Fourth is zig zaggy and generally level.

I don't know that the melodic directions fit, but it does work well to "Barbary Allen"

And now my carol's ended
No longer can I stay.
God bless you all, both great and small,
And God send you a happy Christmas Day.

 D     D    F G   A-G- F  D

Elaine says I How came ye here

*See also "If I Were Eldritch Man."

And now my carol’s ended,
No longer can I stay.
God bless you all, both great and small,
And God send you a happy - Fourth of July, We're Number One! America rules! Yay!

Also, while you're speaking of musical isomorphisms, for a truly mind-breaking experience did you know you can sing the words for any of:

• Clementine
  
• The Ode to Joy
  
• Deutschland Uber Alles
  
• "Life presents a dismal picture..."

Deck the Halls, to the tune of the Marines' Hymn (you will have a merry Christmas)?

My favourites are the single lines of melody that are identical one to the other. For instance,

"Sing us a sing, you're the piano man"

and the Arrogant Worms'

"I've heard the screams of the vegetables"

Are the same melody, though the rest of each song is different.

This leads to odd things coming out of my mouth when I mean to sing one or the other, like:

"Sing us a song, you're the vegetable"

and

"I've heard the Screams of the piano man"

We've booked Arlo and the Alice's Restaurant 40th Anniversary Tour for this season. (Oh, nooo! You mean it's been 40 years!?!)

In an inspired marketing moment, we put it on our "Showtime" series, usually the province of jazz, showtunes and otherwise difficult to categorize attractions. So we'll sell tickets to all the regular subscribers, about half of whom will exchange their Arlo tickets for something safe, and then we'll pack the hall with every left over hippie in Athens, Georgia (which is a lot), most of whom would otherwise never think of coming to one of our Showtime series concerts. Inspired.

If you haven't listened to the album recently, you should. Yes, it's on DVD.

'[of] Man's first / disobedience / and the fruit of that forbidden tree...'

For that matter, you can sing Jeremy's lyrics to "Greensleeves".

I suspect one can sing almost anything to "Greensleeves". Or "Yankee Doodle". Perhaps not simultaneously, though.

(Also, I would just like to say that it is positively wicked to point out how lyric X can be sung to the theme songs of Flintstones, the Jetsons, or Gilligan's Island. God will surely punish begetters of earworms.)

Hell is cold, Hell is deep
Hell is full of mice
'Tis a pity when any poor sinner
Disdains Our Lord's sacrifice

Amazing Grace in New Orleans
That saved the Rising Sun
It's been the ruin, but now I'm found
Was blind, I know I'm one

There is a house, beginning
They call a wretch like me
It's been the Spirit, Whispers,
And God, but now I see

My mother taught my heart to fear
Where Grace did not extend
My father was a gambling peer
Where Hours and matter end

'Twas Grace that was a tailor
And Grace, my new blue jeans
How precious was the gambling man
That hour in New Orleans

There is no end to matter
My race is almost run
There is no end to being
Beneath the Rising Sun

Great; now I have the Danites, the Methodists, and the folkies after me. Will lawyers, guns, and money be enough to deal with them, or will we have to break out the habaneros?

And so, to bed.

Now if they had done a version of Lazarus and Dives....

They climb up into my turret

O'er the arms and back of my chair;

If I try to escape, they surround me;

They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

If you check the story of Bishop Hatto, a hell filled with mice seems more than appropriate. [For those not up on the legend, Bishop Hatto, 12th century German miser, had a whole bunch of starving poor people hit him up for grain in the middle of a famine. Rather than siccing dogs and S&M partygoers on them like Dives {note that all the guests at Dives' party apparently brought their own whips, which makes one wonder exactly WHAT sort of party this was}, Bishop Hatto instead threw open the doors of his granary and invited everyone inside--then shut and barred the door and set fire to the whole thing. His cackling over his own wickedness/cleverness, however, was cut short when all the mice in the granary, who didn't mind a barred door, seethed out and chased him all the way to his toll house tower on the Rhine, where finally in the highest room, they caught up and ate him.]

There's long discussions of alternate version of this hymn at www.mudcat.org if you go there and run a search for the title.

As for the last four stanzas, they do rhyme, just not in the usual places. L2 of S1-S3 of the final four rhymes blest/grass/mice, which echoes thirst/christ. With S3/L3, the "soul" sets you up for the leonine rhyme in S4/L3 of "God bless you all, both great and small," plus the "secure/power" rhyme sets you up for the close with "year."

The last verse seems to be an adaptation of the song to Christmas time. The song is called a "carol" and the verse includes wishes for a happy new year. Best guess? I'd date the language of this version to the 1830s-60s and place it in the American South or far West.

Just for the sake of nibbling is correct. Rodents' front teeth grow constantly, and they need to wear them down or they can't eat. Completely awful if they're unwelcome rodents, of course.

Custard, the domestic rat down my shirt at present, is grinding his teeth contentedly as I type this, in the rat equivalent of a cat's purr. It's called bruxing, as with other species' teeth-grinding. I long for the opportunity to use that word in Scrabble one day.

By the way, Michael Turyn, Jeremy Osner, Larry Brennan, John M. Ford and Kevin Andrew Murphy (for that Longfellow quotation) have between them shut my brain down entirely.

Whatever would we do without fandom.

pk

I am hoping that's not a bad thing for us to have done. If it was, may I extend my apologies and fervent hopes for a rapid return of function. If not, well, party on!

And most of Emily Dickinson can be sung to "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

BTW, the tune to the version of "Dives & Lazarus" that Royston Wood sang on the first Young Tradition album belongs to the family of tunes known as "The Star of the COunty Down."

I can't do it. I don't know the names of the English poetic meters, but I can't imagine, with all those academics looking for thesis topics, that someone hasn't given them names.

I am vividly reminded of the term I studied medieval Latin poetry (heavy on the Carmina Burana, of course). We were taught the names of a number of meters, including Goliardic. The handy hint was that anything in Goliardic meter can be sung to the tune of "Good King Wencislaus". (Steeleye Span's Christmas carol, Gaudete, is a good example.) During the exam, we were asked to identify the meter of a given poem, and you could hear the faint strains of GKW in the classroom as everyone got to that question.

I believe this poem was in fact an act of prophecy foreseeing the existence of Walt Disney. That is all.

Oh, no it's not. Now I have a Disney remix mental image, of what happens when Cinderella's fairy godmother ends up down in hell. Suddenly hell is full of white horses with little pom-poms on top of their heads.

I suppose I really have myself to blame, having bought the sproglets the DVD.

The idea that English-language songs vary so little in meter flummoxes me a little - Latin meters are the product of long and short syllables rather than emphasis, and syllable length often conveys meaning. So you can't just merrily move a short syllable into a long position to fit the tune. I had pretty much always assumed that it was the same for English stress-syllables as well.

Learning this is another reason that this thread rocks.

I can't do it. I don't know the names of the English poetic meters, but I can't imagine, with all those academics looking for thesis topics, that someone hasn't given them names.

Whoops, sorry for being lax in my pedantry. Emily Dickinson made heavy use of the Hymnal Stanza (iambic 4/3/4/3, rimed ABAB) which is the same stanza used for Amazing Grace, The Yellow Rose of Texas, I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing (or Buy the World a Coke), and the Gilligan's Island theme song.

Gilligan's Island is actually just regular Ballad Stanza (4/3/4/3, rimed ABCB), but it can be easily swapped in and out with the stricter Hymnal Stanza. It's all part of Common Measure, and the short form can be extended to the long with the quatrains as tetrameter (4/4/4/4), which is why Jabberwocky is interchangeable with Greensleeves.

Stanzas are interchangeable that way. Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" can be sung to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway" from The Pajama Game, and as the formalist poet gossip goes, supposedly once was by the Yale glee club at a convocation in Frost's honor. (Frost was not well pleased, from what I heard.)

You can even mix and match the lyrics and have it all work:

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me:
"I'D LIKE TO BUY THE WORLD A COKE
AND KEEP IT COMPANY."

Yes! and "Creator, Christ and Holy Ghost" == "You're in, Hernando's Hideaway". Do you say "Olé" after?

-- The Magnetic Palgrave:
Now, You Too Can Move Rigorous Lines in an Unknown Power's Employ!

Pretty much all sonnets can be sung to the bridge from Stairway to Heaven. ("If there's a bustle in the hedgerow").

Sasha, who grew up believing that Clementine was always sung to the Ode to Joy, spent quite a long time trying to find a tune to which it's possible to sing the beginning of Coleridge's Kubla Khan. The eventual winner was "Come on Baby, Light my Fire", though it requires an additional "yeah" after "Down to a sunless sea".

Also, W.S. Gilbert's Etiquette goes beautifully to the verse tune of "Ghost Riders in the Sky".

Oh, and I should mention the highlight of the ISIHAC summer season one-song-to-the-tune-of-another, "I'm a Little Teapot" to the tune of "O Sole Mio".

Pete Seeger, my hero.

David: Works for Black Sabbath's Paranoid. Oddly, sung to Greensleeves it turns into a plaintive ballad, while Greensleeves sung to it turns into a typical metal whine about being dumped. There's more to tunes than you'd think.

ISIHAC once sung "My Old Man's a Dustman" to the tune of Scarborough Fair. (This one doesn't work the other way around.) Listening to it to that tune, I realized that being a dustman and living in a council flat wasn't in fact inherently amusing, and in fact had the same kind of folkish dignity of labour that such melodies give to older work situations like servants getting work at hiring fairs.

Alas my love you do me wrong
(I'm) finished wi-ith my wo-oman, cause she

to cast me out discourteously
Wouldn't he-elp my with, my mind

When I have lov-ed you so long
(beat) People sa-ay I'm cra-azy, because

Delighting in your company
I am frow-owning all, the time

But the chorus? Not so much:

Greensleeves, was my heart's desire
Greensleeves, was my lady fair
Greensleeves, was my heart of gold
And who, but my la-ady Greensleeves

and

Can you help me, help me with my mi-i-ind

Just don't fit into the same tune, nohow noway. Did the test only apply to the verse? The chorus of Greensleeves can actually be sung to the verse of Greensleeves, and I guess the chorus of Paranoid is more of a bridge than a chorus though I don't totally understand the distinction.

I'm having less luck with singing "Greensleeves" to "Paranoid" but that's probably just me.

Here's an odd one; you may have to be of a certain age (late 20s/early 30s, I'm thinking) to experience:
The Grease theme song consistently mutates into the 3-2-1 Contact theme in my head, like so:
Grease is the word
Is the moment
When everything happens
Contact!

Most people look at me funny when I mention this but I recently found another person who experiences the same phenomenon.

I can sing Amazing Grace to Giligan's Island and The Flintstones; I've heard it sung to both Ghost Riders in the Sky and the Hawaii 5-0 theme.

The Doxology to the tune of the Jeopardy theme

Amazing Grace to the tune of the '70s Coca-Cola song ("I'd like to teach the world to sing")--and vice versa.

The Beverly Hillbillies end theme ("And now it's time to say goodbye to Jed and all his kin...") to the tune of Ghost Riders in the Sky.

Peter Schickele pointed out recently on his radio show that Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" will go to the tune of "Hernando's Hideaway" from The Pajama Game.

For some reason while reading this just now, my mind mapped it onto the theme from My Three Sons. That one works, too.

for a link to the full lyrics.

Great thread. Here is what i know about the ballad and if i am repeating someone then i missed it and i am very sorry. This carol is drawn out of a biblical parable which some think is a true story and most think is just a story that jesus told. there does not appear to be any dispute that jesus told it. during the time this carol was developing they would have thought it was a true story and that lazarus was a real man. there were two lazarus in the bible, one was raised from the dead by jesus, but we are not told what his eternal destiny was ... the other is this one, the poor man. We know where he goes which makes him unique. we are told where he goes by jesus hmself. That is why his name is invoked at graveside after a requiem mass "et cum Lazaro quondam paupere aeternam habeas requiem" ("and with Lazarus, who was poor, may you have eternal rest").

Moreover, this parable, and likely along with this ballad, are the roots of halloween. Jesus states that even if someone comes back from the dead to warn the living, people will not listen. (The rich man wants to warn his family). There is only a small leap between that and the idea that souls would come back from the grave on the eve of "all saints" or "all souls" depending upon tradition... So the idea that the carol ends with reference to, or warning about, hell is most likely on target.

Mice. The weasel and mice (or rats) are unclean (see leviticus). That means they should not be eaten, to do so is an abomination under the levitical code. Now the mouse comes back in Isaiah 66 (the last chapter of Isaiah). The people who are righteous essentially will flourish like grass, but god's foes will see fury. Then in verse 17 the following is about those who follow pagan ritual:

"17."Those who consecrate and purify themselves to go into the gardens, following the one in the midst of those who eat the flesh of pigs and rats and other abominable things--they will meet their end together," declares the Lord." NIV

The words "rats" is still translated as the word "mice" in many translations incuding the King James. So it is likely that the eating of mice (or rats), or even just their presence, would have symbolized much to the mind of the middle ages. Remember Lazarus was asking for food and drink from the rich man. Well here now is the rich man's food and drink. Mice and their blood.

Also, cross refernece the pied piper who would have been a "type" of Jesus in legend. Leading sin away and making it no more .... Jesus commands his followers to feed the poor to pay him back (they are to treat the poor as if they were jesus himself), the rich man does not do this and their is a retribution. There is also retribution in the pied piper legend when the villagers refuse to pay him back. The villagers children are even taken when the villagers are in church. Mice and rats were a big deal in the middle ages.

A Serpent's knee (which obviously does not exist except when we realize the words serpent and satan would have been exactly equal in their minds) would be the antithesis of abraham's bosom where Lazarus is placed. "Rock-a my soul in the bosom of abraham..."