CW31

Rhyme is a faded injunction, partaken of, moderately, for pleasure alone—the obligation has vanished.

Today’s lyrics are to a personal favorite of mine, a song called “Governess.” It’s from 2021, an album called Wet Casements. (The album takes its name from a poem in John Ashbery’s 1977 book Houseboat Days.)

“Governess” was written lyrics-first, and I was able to find it, it being relatively recent, in the notebook it was written in. There are some cool spellings.

The song came from hearing someone on a podcast (that’s all I remember) talking, just in passing, about a new perspective she had on Jane Austen’s Emma. I haven’t read the book, but the idea was basically that there’s a hidden-in-plain-sight trauma that begins it—the protagonist’s governess leaving to get married—and that that rupture has more to do with what follows than the podcast guest had twigged to before. That was where I began my song.