Ric wrote: > the responses to this question have been interesting, and, i > thought, unsatisfactory. that line has always bothered me too, > because, frankly, it makes no sense, and while the several > interpretations that have been presented are interesting, they > all seem to be stretches, in my opinion. there are three people > in that verse. there's the guy who went to california. there's > the singer who writes him a letter and there's the girl with the > blue eyes. he, you and her. that's it. one can't start switching > the pronouns around and still have coherency! the hard truth > about that otherwise lovely song is that that particular line - > "he sends you a poem and she's lost to you" is just plain sloppy.
I disagree, I think her use of pronouns is consistent throughout the song. She's talking about the mother with "you", ie. you write him a letter. "He" is the father, and "she" is the child, Little Green. The following line: So you write him a letter and say, "Her eyes are blue" He sends you a poem and she's lost to you make perfect sense to me. She writes him a letter describing the child, how beautiful she is, and why doesn't he come back so they can be a family, ie. she gets to keep the child. He writes back (as Bob said) with some weird irrelevant poem and she realises he's not interested in the child, or in returning to help raise her, so realises the child is "lost" to the mother - she can't raise her alone, so will have to give her up. As someone else said, it's great economy of words! Hell ___________________________________ "To have great poets, there must be great audiences too." - Walt Whitman Hell's Home Page - NEW & IMPROVED! http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~hell/index.html
