Things Impossible

DESCRIPTION: "As I was walking in a grove All by myself as I supposed," the singer meets a pretty girl who asks "To tell her when I would marry." He sets conditions: "When saffron grows on every tree," "When Michaelmas falls in February," etc., then he will marry
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1869 (Logan-APedlarsPack)
KEYWORDS: love courting humorous rejection
FOUND IN: Britain(England) US(Ap,MW)
REFERENCES (9 citations):
Gardner/Chickering-BalladsAndSongsOfSouthernMichigan 158, "Things Impossible" (1 text)
Wyman/Brockway-LonesomeSongs-KentuckyMountains-Vol2, p. 106, "The Inquisitive Lover" (1 text, 1 tune)
Logan-APedlarsPack, pp. 360-362, "Improbability" (1 text)
Williams-FolkSongsOfTheUpperThames, p. 200, "Then My Love and I'll Be Married" (1 text) (also Williams-Wiltshire-WSRO Ox 221)
Huntington-TheGam-MoreSongsWhalemenSang, pp. 258-260, "A Lady's Answer" (1 text, 1 tune; the text seems to mix "Things Impossible" and "My Wife Went Away and Left Me," in that the speaker is male but asks the woman to marry, not to return to him; perhaps it is close to the original source)
JournalOfAmericanFolklore, G.L. Kittredge, editor, "Ballads and Songs," Vol. XXX, No. 117 (Jul-Sep 1917), pp. 352-353 "The Inquisitive Lover" (1 text, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: J Woodfall Ebsworth, The Roxburghe Ballads, (Hertford, 1891 ("Digitized by Microsoft")), Vol. VII Part 2 [Part 21], pp. 294-298, "O Then My Love and I Will Marry" (2 texts: "The Young Man's Resolution it the Maiden's Request", "The Maiden's Reply to the Young Man's Resolution")
Joseph Woodfall Ebsworth, editor, The Bagford Ballads: Illustrating the Last Years of the Stuarts (Hertford, 1878 ("Digitized by Google")), Second Division, pp. 534-538, "The Maiden's Answer to the Young Man's Request" (1 text).
John Ashton, A Century of Ballads (London, 1887 ("Digitized by Google")) pp. 315-318, "The Young Man's Resolutionto the Maiden's Request" (1 text) [redundant; included here because Gardner/Chickering-BalladsAndSongsOfSouthernMichigan includes it as an example]
ST GC158 (Partial)
Roud #3686
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Johnson Ballads 366 [many illegible words], "Improbability" or "The Batchelor's Dislike to a Married Life" ("As I was walking in the grove") , J. Evans (London), 1780-1812; also Harding B 17(137b), "Improbability" or "The Batchelor's Dislike to a Married Life"; Harding B 28(283), Harding B 25(895), "Improbability" or "An Answer to the Question"
EngBdsdBA 21225, Pepys 3.212, "The Young Man's Resolution to the Maiden's Request" ("As I was walking under a Grove, within myself as I supposed"), Josiah Blare (London), no date, accessed 08 Dec 2013.
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "My Wife Went Away and Left Me" (lyrics)
cf. "Of Late I've Been Driven Near Crazy" (list of improbabilities)
NOTES [2758 words]: This song has lyrics in common with the one indexed as "My Wife Went Away and Left Me"; both involve lists of impossible conditions. But this is a song in which the girl seeks the young man's hand; that is a song in which the man begs her to return after she abandons him. The conditions set are similar, the plots are not.
In addition, although there is a report of this song from Michigan and Kentucky and somewhere in New England, it seems to exist mostly in Britain, whereas "My Wife Went Away and Left Me" seems to be mostly from the southern United States. On this basis, I split them; Roud of course lumps them. Best to check both, though, the Huntington-TheGam-MoreSongsWhalemenSang version, for instance, seems to live between the other two.
Rorrer-RamblingBlues-LifeAndSongsOfCharliePoole's notes on "My Wife Went Away and Left Me" mention a song by Charles D. Vann called "Then My Darling I'll Come Back to Thee." I have not seen it, but it strikes me as possible that Vann took the English piece and rewrote it, resulting in the American version.
The idea of impossible requests is, of course, familiar from pieces such as "The Elfin Knight" [Child 2]. Indeed, according to Arthur K. Moore, The Secular Lyric in Middle English, University of Kentucky Press, 1951, "Another autochthonous type widespread in Europe during the Middle Ages and afterward was the so-called 'lying-song,' the Lügenlied of German popular tradition." But this song is based on things that will not happen, not things that cannot be done. These sorts of conditions are quite familiar in folklore -- e.g. the fourteenth century "Prophecy of Thomas of Erceldoune," found in British Library MS. Harley 2253, has lines such as
When Londyon ys forest, and forest ys felde....
When Kokesburth nys no burgh and market is at Forwyleye....
(Susanna Fein, editor, Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, TEAMS/Western Michigan University, 2000 , p. 177).
Or consider Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #3999 (DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #6384), which Rossell Hope Robbins dubs "When to Trust Women":
When nettles in wynter bere Rosis red [When nettles in winter bear roses red]
& thornys bere figges naturally [And thorns bear figs naturally]
& bromes bere appylles in euery mede [And brooms bear apples in every meadow]
& lorelles bere cheris in þe croppis so hie [And laurels bear cherries in the crops so high]
& okes bere dates so plentvosly [And oaks bear dates so plenteously]
and lekes geve hony in þere superfluens [And leeks give honey in their superfluity]
Than put in a woman your trust & confidens [Then put in a woman your trust and confidence].
There are three more stanzas in a similar vein.
This is from the Richard Hill manuscript, Oxford, Balliol College MS. 354 (c. 1500) There is a second copy in the almost-equally-important Bodleian MS. Eng. Poet. e.1 (Bodleian 29734), for which see the notes to "The Golden Carol (The Three Kings)." A third copy appears in a flyleaf of a printed copy of Trevisa's "Bartholomeus Angelicus" in British Library IB 55242. The first two of these manuscripts are so important, and their combination so significant, that I was almost tempted to index the piece independently -- I would have had it not been possible to mention it here.
For editions of the Balliol 354 text, see Roman Dyboski, Songs Carols, and Other Miscellaneous Poems from the Balliol Ms. 354, Richard Hill's Commonplace Book, 1908 (I use a [crummy] Forgotten Books print-on-demand copy made in 2016), pp. 114-115; Rossell Hope Robbins, Secular Lyrics of the XIVth and XVth Century, Oxford University Press, 1952, p. 103; Maxwell S. Luria & Richard Hoffman, Middle English Lyrics, a Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1974 p. 65, #63 (no title) (1 text); R. T. Davies, editor, Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology, 1963, #125, pp. 223-224, "Impossible to trust women" (1 text); Thomas G. Duncan, editor, Late Medieval English Lyrics and Carols 1400-1530, Penguin Books, 2000, #136, p. 165, "WHen netilles in wynter bere roses rede" (1 text).
I note that the last line of this sounds rather more modern than the rest, hinting that the list of Impossible Things is rather older than the warning against women.
Yet another example of impossible contrasts is Brown/Robbins-IndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse, #3943/DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse #6299, which the DIMEV says is found in 28 different witnesses. Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric, Princeton University Press, 1986, p. 194, prints as a typical text,
Whenne lordis wol lose hare olde laws [When lords will lose their old laws]
And prestis buth varyynr in hare sawys [And priests too vary in their saws=wayings],
And lecherye is hold solas [And lechery is held (to be) consolation],
And oppressyoun for purchas [And oppression to (be) (legal) purchase],
Þanne schal þe lond of Labyon [Then shall the land of Albion]
Be nyx to his confusyoun [Be turned to its confusion].
Rather than list all the various printings of this (there are a lot of them), I'll just refer you to the DigitalIndexOfMiddleEnglishVerse entry.
This was apparently known in some circles as "Merlin's Prophecy" (Wenzel, p. 194 n. 67), and by others falsely attributed to Chaucer (According to Walter W. Skeat, The Chaucer Canon: With a Discussion of the Works Associated with the Name of Geoffrey Chaucer, 1900? (I use the 1965 Haskell House reprint), p. 116, Caxton's 1477(?) edition of Chaucer's "Anelida and Arcite" and other poems included the verse to fill out a page, and so later writers took it to be Chaucerian even though it seems to precede him). Wenzel, p. 195 thinks -- and I agree -- that Shakespeare knew this rhyme, since the fool's poem at the end of "King Lear," Act III, scene ii, seems to be based upon it, and the fool quips "This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time."
Wenzel, pp. 195-197, lists several more examples of verses of this sort, though several seem to be more prophesies about what is wrong with England than anything else. IMEV numbers include #2356, #3133 (closely related to #3943 above), and #4006.
It is unlikely that all these things are directly related, but that just makes it more certain that there was a substantial genre of impossible contradictions that goes back to the Middle Ages. RBW
This comparison looks at the six texts I have seen for "Things Impossible." In chronological sequence:
-- "Young Man's Resolution"(c.1659): (Ebsworth-Roxburghe, Broadside EngBdsdBA, Pepys 3.212, and Ashton). Ebsworth cites a reference to a 1658 event relating to Cromwell and estimates the date c.1659-1660
-- "Maiden's Reply"(c.1676): (Ebsworth-Roxburghe). Ebsworth believes this must be later than "Young Man's Resolution" and earlier than his Bagford "Maiden's Answer".
-- Bagford(c.1684): (Ebsworth-Bagford). Ebsworth makes the date "about 1684, perhaps earlier, but after 1677."
-- Logan (c.1809): (Logan and Bodleian broadsides Johnson Ballads 366, Harding B 17(137b, Harding B 28(283) and Harding B 25(895)). With minor exceptions [must "swans" or "swarms" breed [probably should be "swim"] "upon dry banks] and a few omitted lines these are essentially the same. Logan found his text in "a broadside, printed in Scotland about 1809; the earliest of the Bodleian broadsides is dated before 1813.
-- Gardner(c.1865): (Gardner/Chickering-BalladsAndSongsOfSouthernMichigan) Gardner/Chickering-BalladsAndSongsOfSouthernMichigan cites "the Gernsey manuscript" as the source. The date of the manuscript was "written from 1841, or perhaps before, until the time of the Civil War at least" (p. 489).
-- Kittredge(1916): (Kittredge) "... taken down in 1916 ... [in] Kentucky."
-- Williams(c.1923): (Williams-FolkSongsOfTheUpperThames) before 1923
The ballads may have an introduction and a conclusion. The body of each ballad is a set of one or more verses. Each verse has seven "improbabilities" and a final phrase close to "O then my love and I'll be married."
All of the versions beginning with the Logan (c.1809) set are derived from the three Ebsworth texts printed between c.1659 and c.1684: "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659), "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676), and Bagford (c.1684). Of those, by far the most influential is "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) and the least influential is Bagford (c.1684). The influences are in the introduction and each of the "improbabilities." None of the later texts has a conclusion.
Description of "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659): The singer, walking in a grove, meets his sweetheart, who asked him "to tell her when I meant to marry." She promises not to interrupt him. Improbabilities. She wishes him well and hopes he might find a wife. She says if all young men were of his mind "it would be when the Devil is blind, that we and our Lovers should be marryed."
Description of "Maiden's Reply" ( c.1676): The singer tells "a young man" not to "think that I do wait your leisure." She "can have sweet-hearts at my pleasure" and will tell him "when I mean with you to marry." Improbabilities. No conclusion.
Description of Bagford (c.1684): "A Damsel fair ... In a silent Grove stood musing, She seem'd to Marriage to incline, And yet she often was refusing. A young man then by chance came by And aske'd her why so long she tarried." Improbabilities. She has seen many married women wish they had remained single. She herself will remain single until "all these things shall come to pass."
Logan (c.1809), Gardner (c.1865) and Kittredge (1916) have introductions. Logan (c.1809) and Gardner (c.1865) introductions include most of the first verse of "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659); specifically, the singer, walking in a grove, meets his sweetheart, who asked him "to tell her when I meant to marry." Kittredge (1916) includes almost the entire introduction of "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659). The question, to be asked again, is what versions after Pepys carried the words to Kentucky 1916?
Williams(c.1923) has no introduction.
The "improbabilities" of the three Ebsworth texts are different. "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) has 49 improbabilities (a multiple of seven, as expected). "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676) has 63, of which only one is shared with "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) [a variant of "when saffron groes on every tree"]. Bagford(c.1684) has 56 improbabilities, of which one is shared with both earlier texts, two others with "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) and one other with "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676).
Of the later texts, allowing for variations discussed below, Gardner (c.1865) has one improbability and Williams (c.1923) has two that cannot be traced back to "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) or "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676). All of the Logan (c.1809) 35 improbabilities can be found in "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659). Of the Gardner (c.1865) 20 improbabilities [the oral texts no longer keep the structure of seven unique improbabilities to the verse], 17 can be found in "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) and two others in "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676). All 13 of the Kittredge (1916) improbabilities can be found in "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659). Of the Williams (c.1923) nine improbabilities three can be found in "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) and four others in "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676).
"Can be found in" is fine for trying to find ultimate sources of improbabilities but hides the intermediate texts. For that aspect we have to look at shared improbabilities. For example, while Logan (c.1809) cannot be an ultimate source for an improbability [since all of its improbabilities are found in "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) it is a likely intermediate text. Looking backwards:
-- "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676) [63 improbabilities] shares one improbability with "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659).
-- Bagford (c.1684) [56 improbabilities] shares three improbabilities with "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) and two with "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676).
-- Logan(c.1809) [35 improbabilities] shares 35 improbabilities with "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659), one with "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676), and two with Bagford(c.1684).
-- Gardner (c.1865) [20 improbabilities] shares 17 improbabilities with "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659), three with "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676), two with Bagford(c.1684) and 13 with Logan(c.1809).
-- Kittredge (1916) [13 improbabilities] shares all 13 improbabilities with "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659), 11 with Logan (c.1809), and 8 with Gardner (c.1865).
-- Williams (c.1923) [9 improbabilities] shares three with "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659), four with "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676), and two with Logan (c.1809).
I mentioned "variations" in improbabilities. "Shared" improbabilities are not always identical but seem to me to be closely related. Here are some examples:
-- What improbably grows on trees? "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) and Logan (c.1809): "when Saffron grows on every Tree"; "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676): "[when] Peasecods grow on every tree"; Bagford (c.1684): "when Guinnies grow on every tree"; Gardner (c.1865): "When sugar grows on cherry trees."
-- What about judges and February? "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659): "When Countrymen for judges sit, and Lambmass falls in February"; Logan (c.1809): "When country men for judges sit, And Michaelmass falls in February"; Gardne r(c.1865): When country girls for judges set, And leaves don't fall till February"; Kittredge(1916): "When countrymen for judges sit, And lemons fall in February."
-- What do swans -- or in some Logan (c.1809) broadsides, "swarms" -- do, and is it improbable at all? "Young Men's Resolution" (c.1659): "[When] Swans upon dry rocks are breeding"; Logan(c.1923): "[When] swans upon dry banks are breeding"; Gardner (c.1865): "[When] swans around dry rocks are swimming"; Kittredge(1916): "[When] swans upon dry rocks are swimming." And -- since I see mute swans breeding on dry banks -- why do we wait until Kittredge(1916) to get this "right"?
-- Notice that, in this case, Logan (c.1809) is skipped as a carrier. "Young Men's Resolution" (c.1659) and Gardner (c.1865): "[When] England into France is carried"; Kittredge (1916): "[When] Old English into France is carried."
How, if at all, does "My Wife Went Away and Left Me" fit? It doesn't. I have looked at the Poole and Harrell texts and Ray B Browne's 1953 text of "My Wife's Gone Off and Left Me" (The Alabama Folk Lyric (Bowling Green, 1979), #85A pp. 216-217). The introduction follows none of the Ebsworth introductions and, instead, has the deserted husband write a letter to his deserting wife. She replies with a list of improbabilities, none of which are shared with "Things Impossible" improbabilities. Sharing among "My Wife Went Away" improbabilities is similar to sharing among "Things Impossible" improbabilities (for example: Poole and Harrell: "When the groc'ry man puts sand in the sugar"; Browne: "When the grocer don't put sand in sugar"), but with more unshared lines (Harrell: "After the ballgame is over"; Browne: "When Texas goes for Prohibition"). The plots vary -- Poole has the husband write two letters; Harrell has the husband visit the wife and get beaten; Browne has no plot beyond the introduction - but the texts are still recognizable as the same song, though not at all "Things Impossible."
An entirely different song following the same idea is "Of Late I've Been Driven Near Crazy" (see Harry B. Peters, editor, Folk Songs Out of Wisconsin (Madison, 1977), pp. 176-177). The deserted husband -- "She ran away with a Chinee" -- writes her "a million of letters" and she replies with lists of improbabilities ("Wait 'til the bank robbers in Canada Bring back all the money they stole. When Jay Gould and the great Knights of Labor And all the trade unions agree."). Once again, no direct connection with "Things Impossible." It was sung in 1946 by a man 75 who heard it at a circus "as a small boy."
EngBdsdBA notes to Pepys 3.212 have J.S. [John Shirley] as the author. Ebsworth notes that the initials are variously reported as J.S and S.P., and suspects "the initials form another disguise for J[ohn] P[hillips], S[atyrist of Hypocrites]" and claims J.S "cannot be James Shirley."
EngBdsdBA have the tune of "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659) as "In summer time." Ebsworth assigns "the Robin Hood tune, 'In summer time when leaves grow green,' to "Young Man's Resolution" (c.1659), "Maiden's Reply" (c.1676) and the Bagford "Maiden's Reply." - BS
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File: GC158

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