anonymous November 10th, 2005 04:20PM  
If you listen carefully to how they rewrote this song (properly named "Scarborough Fair/Canticle"), or look at the lyrics, you will see some anti-war messages. Especially "...blazing in scarlet battalions... generals order their soldiers to war... to fight for a cause, they've long ago forgotten..."

This is the climax of the song and therefore it's obviously very anti-war in tone. Also, earlier, there's a line about a soldier polishing his gun. The way these lines are sort of intermixed with the main melody, an old English folk song, makes the messages almost subliminal at parts and blazingly clear at others. This is a beautiful song no matter how you look at it.

anonymous January 10th, 2006 01:30AM  
I like that interpretation; looking at it from that light gives you a sort of ironic approach to the song. But for me, I just think the song is about longing, a mans longing towards a woman who he wants to possess but never will, maybe because it will upset his fantasy. Also, I read a bio on this song, that in medieval times, Scarborough fair was a major trading center for foreign and domestic merchants, and that it was considered a noble excercise to pine for a woman, for instance as a knight, and never attaining the objects of your desires, but simply staying away undetected. beautiful song.

kemman85 April 13th, 2006 01:47PM  
This piece is not the first time S&G used two interwoven lyrics with the aim of creating a jarring dislocation in the mind of the listener. On the face of it the melody and the main lyrics are a fine old folk-style traditional challenge issued to a female suitor:

Tell her to make me a cambric shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme;
Without no seams nor needle work,
Then she'll be a true love of mine.

and so on, the challenges being impossible to carry out. Thus, a rebuff framed as a set of challenges.

Then, interwoven between the main verses we have the fragments of the oft-stated-as-anti-war-lyrics:

On the side of a hill a sprinkling of leaves.
Washes the grave with silvery tears.
A soldier cleans and polishes a gun.
Sleeps unaware of the clarion call.

Followed by the other lines :

War bellows blazing in scarlet battalions.
Generals order their soldiers to kill.
And to fight for a cause they've long ago forgotten.

and so on...

My feeling is that these fragments were added as simple dramatic counterpoint to the main melody, yes - the sentiments they express are anti-war but I'm not convinced that this makes Scarborough Fair per se an anti-war song despite its temporal placement in geopolitical history. I think the message was simpler, and very similar to the message in 7 0'clock news/Silent night:

- the message that our world is full of dissonence ambiguity, good and evil and that these weave together to make up the rich tapestry that is life. If I were to take a further message from it, it could be the simple one that good shines through.

anonymous May 7th, 2007 12:24PM  
I see the Simon and Garfunkel version of Scarborough Fair as a canticle, a hymn of praise for a pursuit of an idealistic life and its joys (i.e. The man's pursuit of a love that will create it) that is graphically contrasted and overshadowed by a haunting spiritual reality of real death (i.e. man's ongoing failure to settle differences without warfare.) It was appropriate that it was in two sets of layered lyrics (i.e war and peace),as some men prepare for war and some men prepare for love at the very same moment in time. The song is not a joyful song, but comforting in the fact that it intones a most meaningful and transcendent theme - the need for peace. It was quite a change from the "olde" versions to be sure!

Sanamau

anonymous June 25th, 2009 01:24PM  
I believe this to be a ghostly song. This could be adressed to a traveler by a ghost, as an instruction to tell another ghost to make a shirt with no seam etc., as both were killed in the war refered to in the canticle.

anonymous July 12th, 2009 11:33AM  
The song is about a soldier dying on a distant battlefield. As he passes away, in his fading delusion he asks his fellow soldiers if they are going to the Scarborough fair... and if so to pass on a message to the lady that he once loved, but was rejected by. By this point he is mortally wounded, and is only thinking the message as the words can't escape him. The disturbing cannonade of war crashes about like an ethereal fog, fading in and out as he whispers his sad entreaty, while his fading gaze is fixed vainly upon that distant memory of that girl, the final passing vision before his candle is completely spent.