2. The Wife's Lament & "The Legionnaire's Lament Song"

About the poem:
The Wife's Lament or The Wife's Complaint is an Old English poem of 53 lines found in the Exeter Book and generally treated as an elegy in the manner of the German frauenlied, or woman's song. The poem has been relatively well-preserved and requires few if any emendations to enable an initial reading. Thematically, the poem is primarily concerned with the evocation of the grief of the female speaker and with the representation of her state of despair. The tribulations she suffers leading to her state of lamentation, however, are cryptically described and have been subject to a wide array of interpretations.

The Link with the Song:
This song narrates the story of a legionnaire stuck in a war in the desert, and the way he wishes to be with her wife – whom he has been apart from for 1 year. It can be related with the poem “The Wife’s Lament” as a response to the woman who wait for her husband to come back home.

Activity in Class:

The students can make their own letters as they are living far away from someone they love. It's important to show them the poetic style of the song and the poem and ask them to follow it.

“The Legionnaire’s Lament Song”, by The Decemberists

From the album Castaways and Cutous (2002)

Written by Colin Meloy

I'm a Legionnaire
Camel in disrepair
Hoping for a frigidaire
To come passing by

I am on reprieve
Lacking my joie de vivre
Missing my gay Paree
In this desert dry

And I wrote my girl
Told her I would not return
I've terribly taken a turn
For the worst now, I fear

It's been a year or more
Since they shipped me to this foreign shore
Fighting in a foreign war
So far away from my home

If only some rain would fall
On the houses and the boulevards
And the sidewalk bagatelles
It's like a dream
With the roar of cars 
And the lolling of the cafe bars
The sweetly sleeping, sweeping of the Seine
Lord I don't know if I'll ever be back again

Medicating in the sun
Pinch doses of laudanum
Longing for the old fecundity
Of my homeland

Curses to this mirage!
A bottle of ancient Shiraz
A smattering of distant applause
Is ringing in my poor ears

On the old left bank
My baby in a charabanc
Riding up the width and length
Of the Champs-Elysee

If only some rain would fall
On the houses and the boulevards
And the sidewalk bagatelles
It's like a dream
With the roar of cars 
And the lolling of the cafe bars
The sweetly sleeping, sweeping of the Seine
Lord I don't know if I'll ever be back again

If only some rain would fall
On the houses and the boulevards
And the sidewalk bagatelles
It's like a dream
With the roar of cars 
And the lolling of the café bars
The sweetly sleeping, sweeping of the Seine
Lord I don't know if I'll ever be back again