Boy Stood on the Burning Deck, The

DESCRIPTION: "The boy stood on the burning deck." Various jokes follow, e.g. "...deck, His feet ere full of blisters. He burnt a hole in the seat of his pants And had to wear his sister's." Or "His father was in the public house And the beer ran down his whiskers"
AUTHOR: unknown (based on the work of Felicia Hemans (1794-1835))
EARLIEST DATE: 1975 (Brady-AllInAllIn)
KEYWORDS: fire injury humorous derivative
FOUND IN: Ireland
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Brady-AllInAllIn, p. 79, "(A boy stood on a burning deck)," "(The boy stood on the burning deck)" (3 short texts)
Peirce-KeepTheKettleBoiling, p. 41, "(The boy stood on the burning deck)" (1 text)
Roud #16232
NOTES [314 words]: This is of course derived from "Casabianca" by Felicia Hemans (1794-1835):
The boy stood on the burning deck,
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck,
Shone round him o'er the dead.
Benet, p. 184, explains that the poem "celebrat[es] the heroic death of Giacomo Jocante Casabianca, the little son of a French naval captain. The boy was set by his father on watch. The ship caught fire, and his father was burnt to death. As the flames spread, the boy called to his father, but stood by his post until the ship blew up."
That's the official story, anyway, but it's debatable. Uden/Cooper, p. 339, says, "There is much conflict of evidence about what actually happened to Casabianca and his son. One story has it that both left the ship but drowned before they could be picked up." The fight was the Battle of the Nile (Aboukir Bay), Nelson's famous victory over the French fleet in Egypt in 1798. Uden/Cooper note the irony that the most famous English poem about the Battle of the Nile involved French navy men!
Harvey, p. 379, gives a capsule biography of Hemans, "née Browne, married Captain Alfred Hemans in 1812, but separated from him in 1818. Her writings were highly popular in America, and she was the 'Egeria' of Maria Jane Jewsbury's 'Three Histories.' Her collected works (issued in 1939) include 'Translations from Camoens and other Poets,' 'Lays of Many Lands, 'The Forest Sanctuary,' and 'Songs of the Affections.' She is perhaps chiefly remembered as the author of 'Casabianca' ('The boy stood on the burning deck'), 'The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers,' 'England's Dead,' and 'The Better Land.'"
Although obviously inspired by the Hemans poem, I don't think this is directly derived from it; note that the Hemans poem is in standard ballad stanzas, with 4-3-4-3 feet, whereas this seems closer to 4-4-4-4 although the lines often drag a bit. - RBW
Bibliography

Benet: William Rose Benet, editor, The Reader's Encyclopdedia, first edition, 1948 (I use the four-volume Crowell edition but usually check it against the single volume fourth or fifth edition -- but this particular entry was cut
Harvey: Sir Paul Harvey, The Oxford Companion to English Literature, fourth edition, Oxford University Press, 1932, 1937, 1946, 1967 (I use the 1969 American edition)
Uden/Cooper: Grant Uden and Richard Cooper, A Dictionary of British Ships and Seamen, 1980 (I use the 1981 St. Martin's Press edition)

Last updated in version 6.6
File: BAAI079B

Go to the Ballad Search form
Go to the Ballad Index Song List

Go to the Ballad Index Instructions
Go to the Ballad Index Bibliography or Discography